Black Manhood and Community Building in North Carolina, 1900–1930

2. Solving the Boy Problem: Fashioning Boys into Respectable Race Men

2 Solving the Boy Problem Fashioning Boys into Respectable Race Men We must save our boys. The glory of any race is the manhood of that race. —John C. Dancy The boys are the only beings out of which we can make men. —Nicholas F. Roberts, North Carolina Baptist Sunday School Convention The meeting of the Y.M.I. Sunday afternoon will be for men only. The women will hold their mass meeting at St. James A.M.E. church. —Asheville Citizen, 10 March 1904 “Bad Atmosphere” In a 1909 address before the North Carolina Baptist Sunday School Convention , President Nicholas Frank Roberts discussed the boy problem. “Is he bad?” he asked.“Is he worse now than he was forty years ago? Has the boy changed?” Roberts responded emphatically that the environment, not the boy, had been adversely altered.“Bad atmosphere makes bad boys,” he concluded.1 He defined atmosphere as the place where the boy lived, moved,and situated his being.Parents’indecisiveness as to how to raise the boy produced a home environment where “everything is harsh and snappish and crabbed,” he said. As a result, boys sought more congenial surroundings ; they frequented“low places”such as pool and gambling rooms, barrooms, and dime theaters. While Roberts conceded that much attention had been given to the question of girls’ environment and how that shaped their moral, physical, and spiritual well-being, the plight of boys’ welfare had, lamentably, not received similar attention.“I am of the opinion that many parents have made a great mistake in bestowing all their care upon the girls and none upon the boys,” he said.2 Confronted with the “bad atmosphere” of race prejudice in the earlytwentieth -century South, several of North Carolina’s race men changed 53 Fashioning Boys into Respectable Race Men their strategies and turned their attention to preparing the next generation of race leaders. Religious, educational, and social movements aimed at relieving the“Boy Problem” took place at the same time as the white supremacy campaigns that produced disfranchisement and race riots in such southern cities as Wilmington (1898), New Orleans (1900), and Atlanta (1906). North Carolina’s middle-class black men sought to rectify what they perceived as their generation’s compromised public ambitions by instilling community-based lessons of self-pride, etiquette, and industry among boys and young men. If there was to be a solution to the“Race Problem,” the black men of tomorrow needed to help fashion it. As John C. Dancy said,“We need to teach the boys that the future destiny of the race is in their hands, and on their shoulders.”3 Boys, he felt, needed to be infused with self-pride and respect for law and order; they should exhibit“rugged” honesty,avoid criminal conduct,restrain unsavory appetites,and grasp the importance of work and responsibility. With the proper training, Dancy advised,“like Moses, [the boy] will be singled out by omnipotence to lead his people out of darkness, another form of slavery, into the glorious light of liberty and manhood.”4 Proscriptive literature within the race identified clear causes and offered solutions to many social ills affecting the race’s youth. Boys were unshaped clay and could be turned into men if they were properly handled.Rejection of feminine behaviors was key to boys’ development into men and for the uplift of the race. To replicate girlish behavior equated to unmanliness. It was unnatural and bolstered contentions that black male identity had been emasculated due to slavery and the racial oppression that followed. The stress within the prescriptive literature on heteronormativity is also indicative of the class bias inherent in such tutorials. Floyd’s Flowers, a manual to uplift the race as much to groom boys and girls into adulthood, captures in its rhetoric the sentiments of African Americans who sought individual and collective progress through the sexual patrolling of the race.5 Floyd offered 325 pages of anecdotes and sketches to convey moral instruction to black children. He endeavored to produce boys and girls who “shall turn out to be good men and good women.”6 As part of that objective, he identified general and specific behavioral traits for boys and girls. He observed that girls had the potential to be “almost as bad as some boys.” Girls’ penchant for“fast” behavior, relishing Black Manhood and Community Building in North Carolina, 1900–1930 54 of “trash” literature...