On Oct. 16, 1901, Booker T. Washington became the first African American to be invited to the White House, where he dined with President Theodore Roosevelt and his family.
Many whites reacted with fury. Particularly upset was South Carolina’s populist Sen. Benjamin R. Tillman, “Pitchfork Ben” to his friends. “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that [N-word] will necessitate our killing of a thousand [N-word] in the South before they will learn their place again,” the Democrat proclaimed.
On Monday, 107 years after Booker T. Washington’s controversial dinner, Barack Obama entered the White House as president-elect. All I could think was what an incredible turning point we were witnessing.
The previous turning point was the Civil War. It began conditioning reactions to race. After the collapse of Reconstruction, the old Confederacy retaliated by resorting to poll taxes, literacy tests and whites-only primaries to prevent blacks from voting or getting elected. Racial segregation spread to a dozen Northern states.
In Maryland, “Whites Only” and “Colored” signs appeared at shops, toilets, drinking fountains, restaurants, hospitals and amusement parks. Neighborhoods were segregated, so were cemeteries.
The emerging popular culture created stereotypes. In 1896, the same year that the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson established “separate but equal” as the law of the land, inventor Thomas Edison released “The Watermelon Eating Contest,” in which four blacks wolfed watermelons and spat seeds. Characters including Sambo and Aunt Jemima established lasting stereotypes.
Overall, the position of blacks eroded so seriously that historian Rayford W. Logan coined a name to describe the last decades of the 19th century and first decades of the 21st. He called the period “the nadir of the Negro’s status in American society.”
A social philosophy known as eugenics gave scientific respectability to racism.
Eugenics research aimed at improving human traits through selective breeding of the best and brightest. Birth control, abortion and, in some cases, euthanasia were recommended as tools for weeding out the demented and deformed. Johns Hopkins University was a hotbed of eugenics.
Eugenicists constructed an elaborate pyramid of various races and nationalities. Anglo-Saxons and Northern Europeans were at the top, destined to rule the world; blacks and Mexicans were at the bottom. This mind-set affected U.S. government policy. The 1924 immigration law favored Northern Europeans but practically stopped the influx of Eastern and Southern Europeans – often Jewish or Catholic – whom eugenicists regarded as undesirable. No Africans were to be admitted.
During the Great Depression, the federal government extended the eugenicists’ construct to housing policies. Some 240 American cities were redlined. Mortgage lending was encouraged in areas populated by Anglo-Saxons and Americanized Northern Europeans; black, Jewish and immigrant neighborhoods were redlined as too risky. These practices lasted until the 1960s.
Even after the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, Americans’ instinctive reactions to race persisted. I recall a poignant example during a 1982 visit to Ghana.
In talking to U.S. Embassy officials, who were nearly all white, I learned that the tempest of the day concerned an expected visitor named Washington. The consensus was that anyone with that name had to be black, but the State Department had provided scant information about him. So a reservation was made for him at a modest hotel. At the last minute, someone raised the possibility that Washington might be white and offended. A backup reservation was made at a better hotel. (He turned out to be white.)
This kind of instinctive reaction to race is still widespread. By electing Barack Obama, voters declared their colorblindness. In doing so, they demonstrated how half-hearted politicians, courts and religious institutions have been in bringing the American ideal closer to realization.
Antero Pietila is writing a book about how bigotry shaped Baltimore between 1910 and 1975. His e-mail address is [email protected].
