Charles Chesnutt and the Epistemology of Racial Violence

In November 1898 a corrupt election transformed the city of Wilmington, North Carolina. Ballot boxes were stuffed, and black voters were kept away from the polls by patrols of armed white men. As a result, the city’s racially integrated government was replaced by a new white supremacist regime. Two days later, the city erupted in violence. Apparently unsatisfied with their overwhelming victory, a white mob stormed the offices of a local black-owned newspaper and set them on fire. After the newspaper building burned to the ground, organized patrols of armed white men took over the public spaces of the city. They stopped any African Americans they found, searched them for weapons, and ordered them off the streets. Although some tried to resist, they were massively outgunned by a white horde armed with “nearly two thousand Winchester rifles” and a new rapid-fire machine gun mounted on a cart to patrol the “negro quarters of the city.”¹ As the violence intensified, many black families fled to the surrounding swamps, where they hid for several days before returning to a radically altered city many of them soon left for good.

Two years later, Charles Chesnutt traveled to Wilmington to investigate the scene of the crime. Outraged by the biased portrayal of the Wilmington “revolution” in the national press and by the shocking stories he heard from friends and relatives who lived through the chaos, Chesnutt decided to set the record straight. He began writing The Marrow of Tradition, a work he conceived as “both a novel and a political and sociological tract.” In this work, Chesnutt promised to tell the story of the Wilmington riot in a manner that would expose the collective hysteria behind this “outbreak of pure, malignant and altogether indefensible race prejudice.”²

Chesnutt’s novel, I will argue, presents the Wilmington riot as a response to the rising African American middle class, which had reconfigured the visual field of Wilmington by initiating changes in local architecture, neighborhood demographics, and sidewalk etiquette. Throughout The Marrow of Tradition, white characters experience these changes as visible threats to their identity. Anxious and disoriented, they denounce the signs of “Negro Domination” they see everywhere in their city, signs that range from newly built African American public institutions to individual pedestrians whose appearance of middle-class prosperity belies their supposed inferiority. In these moments of deep racial anxiety, the sight of African Americans in places of economic power disrupts the racial truths that orient Southern whites in space and time. The African American middle class, in other words, provokes an epistemological crisis that is simultaneously a crisis of white identity. At the novel’s close, local whites respond to this crisis by taking to the streets, rifles in hand, in a hysterical attempt to make the African American middle class disappear. In recovering this aspect of Chesnutt’s social analysis, this essay charts the reciprocal relationship between disturbed white perception and racial violence. Ultimately, I argue that racial violence in the South can be understood as an attempt to repair the damaged epistemology of white supremacy.³

Chesnutt advances his critique of racial violence by highlighting the elaborate interface of race, class, and urban visibility. In the novel, white characters try to structure this interface so as to reinforce the feeling of racial superiority that constitutes their deepest sense of identity. As the plot progresses, these characters turn increasingly violent, seeking to secure their racial superiority by putting on display the class inferiority of their black neighbors. In other words, they try to buttress the supposedly self-evident truths of white supremacy by enforcing protocols of racial visibility that designate African Americans as their city’s permanent underclass. In the economic realm, this means restoring African Americans to their place in the lowest rank of the city’s labor force. In the political realm, it means evicting all black officials from the city government and blocking all meaningful African American participation in...