The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home: African American Literature and the Era of Overseas Expansion

Introduction: Empire at Home and Abroad

1 • Introduction Empire at Home and Abroad When the United States learns that justice should be blind as to race and color, then may it undertake to, with some show of propriety, expand. Now its expansion means extension of race hate and cruelty, barbarous lynchings and gross injustice to dark people. —Lewis H. Douglass, “Black Opposition to McKinley” The older idea was that the whites would eventually displace the native races and inherit their lands, but this idea has been rudely shaken in the increase of American Negroes, the experience of the English in Africa, India and the West Indies, and the development of South America. The policy of expansion, then, simply means world problems of the Color Line. The color question enters into European politics and floods our continent from Alaska to Patagonia. —W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Color Line Belts the World” Best known for the role it plays in the “Forethought” to The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous declaration “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” (100) originally appeared three years earlier in “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind.” In this speech he delivered at the third annual meeting of the American Negro Academy in Washington, D.C., in March 1900, Du Bois makes the statement in the context of the “new imperial policy” (53) the United States was implementing in the wake of its victory over Spain and amid the ongoing Philippine-American War: “Indeed a survey of the civilized world at the end of the 19th century but confirms the proposition with which I started—the world problem of the 20th century is the Problem of the Color line—the question of the relation of the advanced races of men who happen to be white to the great majority of underdeveloped or half developed nations of mankind who happen to be yellow, brown, or black” (54). Du Bois goes on to link the empire abroad and the em- 2 Introduction pire at home explicitly: “We must remember that the twentieth century will find nearly twenty millions of brown and black people under the protection of the American flag, a third of the nation, and that on the success and efficiency of the nine millions of our own number depends the ultimate destiny of Filipinos, Porto [sic] Ricans, Indians, Hawaiians, and that on us too depends in large degree the attitude of Europe toward the teeming millions of Asia and Africa” (53). Beyond asserting that the actions of U.S. blacks (“nine millions of our own number”) will determine the future not only for peoples in the nation’s newly acquired territories but for colonized peoples everywhere, this passage indicates how profoundly African American public intellectuals such as Du Bois engaged with U.S. expansion at the turn of the twentieth century. Like Du Bois in “The Present Outlook,” his contemporary Pauline E. Hopkins connects the fate of inhabitants of the nation’s new overseas empire with that of U.S. blacks in “Some Literary Workers,” published in the Boston-based Colored American Magazine in 1902. However, whereas Du Bois emphasizes the impact the latter will have upon the former, Hopkins stresses the opposite. In this essay, the fourth of her eleven-installment Famous Women of the Negro Race biographical series, she contends, The observant eye can trace the impress of Divinity on sea and shore as He, in mighty majesty, protects the weak in the great battle that is now on between the Anglo-Saxon and the dark-skinned races of the earth. . . . The increasing gravity of our situation in relation to the body politic, and the introduction of new peoples who must live under the same ban of color that we are forced to endure, may operate to our advantage by bringing about desirable changes in the future of our race. . . . The subjugation of Cuba, Porto [sic] Rico and the Philippines . . .—all is but the death knell of prejudice, for the natural outcome of the close association that must follow the reception of these peoples within our Union, will be the downfall of cruel discrimination solely because of color. In this way malice defeats itself. (140) Hopkins by no means endorses what she terms the “subjugation” of the “new peoples who must live under the same ban of color that we are forced to endure ,” associating it with “malice.” However, she believes that U.S. blacks (“our...