1984 Ethics Paper

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I N T R O D U C T I O N :

T H E M I S M E A S U R E O F C R I M E

This book tells an unsettling coming- of- age story. It is a biography of the idea of black criminality in the making of modern urban America. The link between race and crime is as enduring and infl uential in the twenty- fi rst century as it has been in the past. Violent crime rates in the nation’s biggest cities are generally understood as a refl ection of the presence and behavior of the black men, women, and children who live there. The U.S. prison population is larger than at any time in the history of the peniten- tiary anywhere in the world. Nearly half of the more than two million Americans behind bars are African Americans, and an unpre ce dented number of black men will likely go to prison during the course of their lives. These grim statistics are well known and frequently cited by white and black Americans; indeed for many they defi ne black humanity.1 In all manner of conversations about race— from debates about parenting to education to urban life—black crime statistics are ubiquitous.2 By the same token, white crime statistics are virtually invisible, except when used to dramatize the excessive criminality of African Americans. Although the statistical language of black criminality often means different things to different people, it is the glue that binds race to crime today as in the past.3

How was the statistical link between blackness and criminality ini- tially forged?4 Who were the central actors?5 By what means did black and white social scientists, social reformers, journalists, antiracist activ- ists, law enforcement offi cials, and politicians construct, contest, and corroborate their claims regarding black criminality? How did they use crime among blacks to articulate their vision of race relations in mod- ern urban America: what it was, what it is, and what it should be?6 How did they incorporate others’ ideas about race into their own sug- gestions about and solutions to the “Negro Problem”? How did they

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness : Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Harvard University Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=3301129. Created from ucsd on 2017-12-04 13:37:03.

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produce, translate, and disseminate racial knowledge about crime to others? To put it another way, between 1890 and 1940, how and why did racial crime statistics become what Ted Porter calls a “strategy of communication”— a subject of dialogue and debate— about blacks’ fi t- ness for modern life?7 Why did black criminality outpace, at times, many competitors—such as body odor, brain size, disease, and intelligence— in the national marketplace of ideas about, and “scientifi c” proofs of, black inferiority?8

In 1928 Thorsten Sellin, one of the nation’s most respected white so- ciologists, argued that African Americans were unfairly stigmatized by their criminality. His article, “The Negro Criminal: A Statistical Note,” captured the moment when nearly four de cades of statistical research on black criminality began to be called into question.9 In the aftermath of wide- scale racial violence during the Great Migration of black southern- ers to the urban North, African American researchers in the 1920s pub- lished a fl urry of new statistical reports of racism among police offi cers, prosecutors, and court and prison offi cials. Convinced by the weight of evidence presented by these “New Negro” crime experts and crime fi ghters— the second generation of academically trained black sociologists and social workers— Sellin brought their work to the attention of his white academic peers.10 Speaking as a representative of the white majority in a Jim Crow nation, he exposed the “unreliability” of racial crime statistics and the deeply troubling ways in which blackness and criminality shaped racial identity and racial oppression in modern America:

We are prone to judge ourselves by our best traits and strangers by their worst. In the case of the Negro, stranger in our midst, all beliefs prejudicial to him aid in intensifying the feeling of racial antipathy engendered by his color and his social status. The colored criminal does not as a rule enjoy the racial anonymity which cloaks the offenses of individuals of the white race. The press is almost certain to brand him, and the more revolting his crime proves to be the more likely it is that his race will be advertised. In setting the hall- mark of his color upon him, his individuality is in a sense submerged, and instead of a mere thief, robber, or murderer, he becomes a representative of his race, which in its turn is made to suffer for his sins.11

Sellin’s “we,” linked to the notion of the Negro as a “stranger in our midst,” marked not only his whiteness but also and more importantly, his

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position within a dominant racialized community with the power to de- fi ne those outside it. That same power, Sellin implied, could be used to break with the past— to change the future of race relations— because crime itself was not the core issue. Rather, the problem was racial crimi- nalization: the stigmatization of crime as “black” and the masking of crime among whites as individual failure. The practice of linking crime to blacks, as a racial group, but not whites, he concluded, reinforced and reproduced racial in e qual ity.

The issue here was not whether crime was real. Instead, what struck Sellin as the key variable to expose and contextualize was the ideological currency of black criminality. Since the 1890s infl uential black crime ex- perts such as W. E. B. Du Bois, a pioneering social scientist, and Ida B. Wells, an internationally-known antilynching activist, labored tirelessly to dera- cialize black criminality. Although their early efforts to convince white academic and activist peers failed repeatedly, Sellin owed a great debt to their struggle, and ultimately their vision of racial justice. Their vision of fairness and equality included a society in which innocent law- abiding blacks would not suffer the sins of individual black failures. They imag- ined African Americans within what sociologist Orlando Patterson calls the “broader moral community” of the United States.12 Black scholars and activists pursued something akin to color- blind criminal justice by argu- ing that equal treatment, was the fi rst step toward disentangling race and crime, destroying a pillar of racism, and creating a society in which blacks, like their white immigrant counterparts, were included within, as Du Bois wrote, the “pale of nineteenth- century Humanity.”13 They may not have set the terms of the initial discourse, but they most certainly altered it over time in unanticipated ways. Thus for Sellin and for the many black experts marginalized within the academy (but cited in his notes), black criminality had become the most signifi cant and durable signifi er of black inferiority in white people’s minds since the dawn of Jim Crow. During the 1930s Sellin would leverage his infl uence alongside the per sis- tent efforts of black scholars and activists to break the legacy of racial criminalization, to disentangle race from crime.14

The Condemnation of Blackness reconstructs the key moments, be- ginning one generation after slavery, when new sources of statistical data were joined to ongoing debates about the future place of African Ameri- cans in modern urban America. With the publication of the 1890 census, prison statistics for the fi rst time became the basis of a national discus- sion about blacks as a distinct and dangerous criminal population. In the

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wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction, when the culture and politics of white supremacy in the South and across the nation were being recon- stituted, African American freedom fueled far- reaching anxieties among many white Americans.15 The census marked twenty- fi ve years of free- dom and was, consequently, a much- anticipated data source for assessing blacks’ status in a post- slavery era.

New statistical and racial identities forged out of raw census data showed that African Americans, as 12 percent of the population, made up 30 percent of the nation’s prison population. Although specially de- signed race- conscious laws, discriminatory punishments, and new forms of everyday racial surveillance had been institutionalized by the 1890s as a way to suppress black freedom, white social scientists presented the new crime data as objective, color- blind, and incontrovertible. Neither the dark color of southern chain gangs nor the pale hue of northern po- lice mattered to the truth of black crime statistics.

From this moment forward, notions about blacks as criminals mate- rialized in national debates about the fundamental racial and cultural differences between African Americans and native- born whites and Eu- ro pe an immigrants. These debates also informed questions about appro- priate levels of African American access to the social and economic infra- structure of the nation. Calls for greater African American access to public education, for example, were challenged by statistical arguments that education turned black people into criminals.16 Still, to friend and foe alike, black criminality offered both a discursive and a practical solu- tion to healing the deep sectional divisions of a war- torn nation. For white Americans of every ideological stripe— from radical southern rac- ists to northern progressives— African American criminality became one of the most widely accepted bases for justifying prejudicial thinking, dis- criminatory treatment, and/or ac cep tance of racial violence as an instru- ment of public safety.

Tracing the emergence and evolution of the statistical discourse on black criminality sheds new light on the urban North as a crucial site for the production of modern ideas about race, crime, and punishment. On the one hand, the dominant historical narratives about black criminality before the 1960s have been told through southern criminal justice prac- tices and framed as premodern. Racist southern politicians, vigilante criminal justice offi cials, and body-parts- collecting lynch mobs during the long Jim Crow era have formed the core subject matter of these backward- looking studies.17 On the other hand, the prevailing history of

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the northern criminal justice system, starting in the nineteenth century, has been a modernizing narrative, one in which the development of ev- erything from prisons to policing to juvenile justice to probation and parole has turned almost exclusively on the experiences of native- born whites and Eu ro pe an immigrants.18 In this literature, it is as if black criminality had not been shaped by modern ideas or modern agencies, or that very little happening in the urban North pertained to black experi- ences until the post- World War II era.19 Much historical and so cio log i cal scholarship proceeds from this vantage point, giving the impression that the history of racial criminalization began and ended in the Jim Crow South. Then in the late 1960s, according to most accounts, a latent sub- culture of violence erupted and spread across the nation’s northern inner- cities.20 But the statistical discourse on black criminality from the 1890s forward was a modern invention that encapsulated northern and south- ern ideas about race and crime. Many postbellum race- relations writers innovatively pointed out that the highest rates of black criminality could be found in the cosmopolitan, freedom- loving urban North. Since then, such “indisputable” statistical evidence from places like Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia has been at the heart of modern ideas about race and crime.21

At the dawn of the twentieth century, in a rapidly industrializing, ur- banizing, and demographically shifting America, blackness was refash- ioned through crime statistics. It became a more stable racial category in opposition to whiteness through racial criminalization. Consequently, white criminality gradually lost its fearsomeness. This book asks, how did Eu ro pe an immigrants— the Irish and the Italians and the Polish, for example— gradually shed their criminal identities while blacks did not? In other words, how did criminality go from plural to singular?

By examining both immigrant and black crime discourses in the ur- ban North as they were mutually constituted by new statistical data and made meaningful to a Jim Crow nation, we can more easily discern dis- tinct (and novel) patterns of talking about race and crime. Rather than following the lead of social historians of working- class immigrant and black communities who link ethnic culture to distinct patterns of crimi- nal behavior, this book explores the genealogy of distinct patterns of ra- cial crime discourses. In the period under investigation, crime, despite its variability in form and expression across groups, was a ubiquitous prob- lem across the nation— so much a problem in the urban North that it was not clear that blackness would eventually become its sole signifi er.

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Even the wellsprings of violent crime, as historian and criminologist Jeffrey S. Adler found in his recent defi nitive study of hom i cide in Pro- gressive era Chicago, fl owed from the same broader cultural, social, eco- nomic, and demographic shifts and tensions affecting all non- elite urban people. “Contrary to the impressions of most observers,” he writes, “African American violence was similar to white violence. It resembled white hom i cide in the form it took; and African- American violence par- alleled white violence in how that form changed.”22 From the 1890s through the 1930s, from the Progressive era through Prohibition, Afri- can Americans had no monopoly on social banditry, crimes of re sis- tance, or underground entrepreneurship; the “weapons of the weak” and “lower- class oppositional culture” extended far and wide and in many directions.23 The Condemnation of Blackness demonstrates and explains how ideas of racial inferiority and crime became fastened to African Americans by contrast to ideas of class and crime that shaped views of Eu ro pe an immigrants and working- class whites.24

Whiteness scholars have shown how crucial the attributes of skin color, Eu ro pe an ancestry, and the gradual adoption of anti- black racism were to immigrant assimilation “into the singular ‘white race.’ ”25 Such benefi ts, Thomas Guglielmo found recently, even secured the whiteness of Chicago’s “Sicilian Gunmen” because their criminality “never positioned them as non- white in any sustained or systematic way.”26 Building on whiteness and critical race scholarship, I explore how postbellum south- ern black out- migration to the urban North— to Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York in particular— fueled an invidious black migration narra- tive framed by crime statistics and reshaped broader racial discourses on immigration and urbanization during Progressive era. Evoking the specter of black rapists and murderers moving north one step ahead of lynch mobs, innovative racial demographers such as Frederick L. Hoffman ex- plicitly sanitized and normalized the criminality of northern white work- ing and immigrant classes. Consequently, the black southern migrant— the “Negro, stranger in our midst”— was marked as an exceptionally danger- ous newcomer.

One of the strongest claims this book makes is that statistical com- parisons between the Foreign- born and the Negro were foundational to the emergence of distinctive modern discourses on race and crime. For all the ways in which poor Irish immigrants of the mid- nineteenth century were labeled members of the dangerous classes, criminalized by Anglo- Saxon police, and over- incarcerated in the nation’s failing prisons, Progres-

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sive era social scientists used statistics and sociology to create a pathway for their redemption and rehabilitation.27 A generation before the Chi- cago School of Sociology systematically destroyed the immigrant house of pathology built by social Darwinists and eugenicists, Progressive era so- cial scientists were innovating environmental theories of crime and delin- quency while using crime statistics to demonstrate the assimilability of the Irish, the Italian, and the Jew by explicit contrast to the Negro.28 White progressives often discounted crime statistics or disregarded them altogether in favor of humanizing Eu ro pe an immigrants, as in much of Jane Addams’s writings.29 In one of the fi rst academic textbooks on crime, Charles R. Henderson, a pioneering University of Chicago social scientist, declared that “the evil [of immigrant crime] is not so great as statistics carelessly interpreted might prove.” He explained that age and sex ratios— too many young males— skewed the data. But where the “Negro factor” is concerned, Henderson continued, “racial inheritance, physical and mental inferiority, barbarian and slave ancestry and cul- ture,” were among the “most serious factors in crime statistics.”30

Similar comparisons would echo for the rest of the twentieth century. The Progressive era was indeed the founding moment for the emergence of an enduring statistical discourse of black dysfunctionality rather than the 1960s, as is commonly believed. The post- Moynihan social- scientifi c and public policy view of black pathology that scholars such as Robin D. G. Kelley criticize as “ghetto ethnography” began, statistically speak- ing, in the 1890s. The racial project of making blacks the “thing against which normality, whiteness, and functionality have been defi ned,” was foundational to the making of modern urban America.31 Shaped by ra- cial ideology and racism, the statistical ghetto emerged, study by study, in the Progressive era as the northern Black Belt formed block by block.32 Inextricably linked at birth, they grew up together.

Northern black crime statistics and migration trends in the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s were woven together into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern society. In the Windy City, in the City of Brotherly Love, and in the nation’s Capital of Com- merce this tale was told, infused with symbolic references to American civi- lization, to American modernity, and to the fi ctive promised land of unend- ing opportunity for all who, regardless of race or class or nationality, sought their fortunes. In these imagined communities of a post- slavery, post- Reconstruction civil rights America, “color- blind universalism” added an additional thread of contempt to the narrative. In a moment when

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most white Americans believed in the declining signifi cance of racism, statistical evidence of excessive rates of black arrests and the overrepre- sentation of black prisoners in the urban North was seen by many whites as indisputable proof of black inferiority.33

What else but black pathology could explain black failure in these modern meccas of opportunity? Unlike subsequent commentators in the 1920s and 1930s, Progressive era white race- relations writers frequently asserted that racism had nothing to do with black criminality. They self- consciously critiqued black criminality in what they perceived to be race- neutral language. The numbers “speak for themselves” was one frequent refrain, followed by “I am not a racist.”34 A variant attached to both rhetorical strategies accused black race- relations writers of being bi- ased and sentimental toward their own. They were accused of “cod- dling” their own criminals and excusing their behavior. When black ex- perts dug in, when they made forceful counterarguments of epidemic racism in the heyday of “separate but equal”— even in the North— they were often charged with playing the race card (a concept then still in its infancy). The familiar resonance of these statements and exchanges is a testament to their longevity in American culture and society.35

One explanation for the staying power of black crime rhetoric is that it had far more proponents than opponents compared to other racial concepts.36 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the statistical rheto- ric of the “Negro criminal” became a proxy for a national discourse on black inferiority. As an “objective” mea sure, it also became a tool to shield white Americans from the charge of racism when they used black crime statistics to support discriminatory public policies and social welfare practices. Evidence throughout the fi rst half of this book shows that the gap in the racial crime rhetoric between avowedly white supremacist writers and white progressives narrowed signifi cantly when it came to discussing black crime, vice, and immorality. Progressive era white social scientists and reformers often reifi ed the racial criminalization pro cess by framing white criminals sympathetically as victims of industrialization. They described a “great army of unfortunates” juxtaposed against an army of self- destructive and pathological blacks who were their “own worst enem[ies].”37 Race and crime linkages fueled an early antiliberal resentment that pushed African Americans to the margins of an expanding public and private collaboration of social, civic, and po liti cal reform.38 Northern white settlement house workers, for example, drew on these ideas when they

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limited their crime prevention efforts “for whites only.”39 Local YMCA offi cials, playground managers, and recreation center supervisors drew on these ideas when they locked black youngsters out of constructive sites of leisure and supervised play. Trans- ethnic gangs of white men— backed by consenting police offi cers— drew on these ideas as they attacked black pedestrians and homeowners in an increasingly violent and enduring contest over racialized space in the urban North.

To be sure, racial liberals— a subset of white progressives— pushed back against the rising tide of northern segregation, discrimination, and violence during the Progressive era.40 Such leaders as Jane Addams and Mary White Ovington distinguished themselves in their NAACP commitments to civil and po liti cal rights. Drawing on the pioneering work of cultural anthropologist Franz Boas, racial liberals also promoted new cultural explanations of black criminality and rejected the biological determinism of the racial Darwinists who had dominated scientifi c discourse on race since the mid- nineteenth century. But there were limits to Boas’s culture concept.41 The statistical evidence of black criminality remained rooted in the concept of black inferiority or black pathology despite a shift in the social scientifi c discourse on the origins of race and crime. The shift from a racial biological frame to a racial cultural frame kept race at the heart of the discourse. Although racist notions of (permanent) biological inferiority gave way to liberal notions of (temporary) cultural inferior- ity, racial liberals continued to distinguish black criminality from white and ethnic criminality. In effect, they incriminated black culture. At- tempts to deemphasize blackness and provide social welfare for African Americans never matched the scale or intensity of the Americanization project among immigrants. The racial- cultural content of white ethnic criminality gradually began to lose its currency during the Progressive era, while black criminality became more visible (and more contested by blacks).42

Black crime researchers and reformers in fact contributed to and drew inspiration from the cultural discourse on crime. Many black elites had embraced Victorian ideals of morality and respectability in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often trumping their white elite counterparts in sophistication and refi nement. Seeing themselves as walk- ing billboards for the race’s capacity for equal citizenship, and distin- guishing themselves from “uncouth” and “criminally inclined” poor blacks, black elites often employed the language of racial uplift and the

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“politics of respectability” to describe black criminality in terms of class and culture. Their race- relations writings and their social welfare efforts were often shot through with class bias and victim- blaming. At times, black northern elites were especially contemptuous of southern migrants. In rhet- oric alone, when speaking to all- black audiences or when seeking credi- bility and fi nancial support from white benefactors, their talk about black criminality seemed indistinguishable from that of their white counterparts. In the fi rst post- civil rights era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries— Jim Crow’s early years— ideology often trumped race for Afri- can Americans vying for po liti cal, economic, and social resources among whites. Conservative black opinion makers and race reformers who dwelt on the self- destructive behavior of poor blacks were more likely than an- tiracist activists to be heralded as clear- eyed and unbiased by their infl uen- tial white peers.43

For some African American writers and reformers, black criminality was a passport to relevancy in a wider white world in which black voices were actively suppressed.44 Others, such as James Stemons, a Philadelphia race- relations reformer and local crime fi ghter, used black criminality to engage in a kind of double- speak: they used the rhetoric of black criminality to draw attention to themselves for the purposes of critiqu- ing racism. Often out of genuine concern for public safety, Stemons, Du Bois, Wells, and many others did not ignore crime in their own commu- nities. But neither did they ignore the racial double standards in the urban crime discourse, the mistreatment of black suspects and crimi- nals, and the poor quality of police protection offered to black commu- nities. Despite their elitism, many black reformers tended to offer “root- cause solutions” alongside their class- infused cultural critiques of black criminality.45

Progressive era black social scientists and reformers also exposed and challenged the limits of racial liberalism long before the post- World War II failures of residential and workplace integration in the urban North fueled a national civil rights movement and set the stage for a national po liti cal backlash against liberalism.46 White social workers and white philanthropists failed to invest suffi cient material resources into the up- lift of African American urbanites, advising these communities to “work out their own salvation” before others could help them. But black pro- gressives cried foul, and they pressed for the same responses to their needs that were being offered to white working- class and immigrant urbanites.

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As much as they embraced the self- help ethos of the era, and as willing as they were to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and build churches, settlement houses, schools, businesses, labor organizations, and enter- tainment venues in their own communities, they recognized that, dollar for dollar, African Americans stood most in need of community invest- ment and economic resources but were least likely to be helped.47 In the segregated black communities of the urban North, members of the work- ing class and the elite recognized that thoughtful, constructive crime prevention cost money, lots of it. White philanthropy was the dominant fi nancial source for all crime- prevention efforts, but native- born poor whites and new immigrants received the lion’s share of attention and aid. The hidden cost to black residents was not simply victimization by bad guys, but also brutality by bad police offi cers and the loss of faith in American society by the young and old, who saw the police as a repre- sen ta tion of the government’s malign neglect of black people in general.48 As black sociologist Kelly Miller noted, thoughtful, caring policing was an important solution to inspiring blacks to invest in their own citizen- ship. Better policing would lead to better citizens in a feedback loop.49 The empathy police offi cers brought to black communities would be one pathway, he argued, through which African Americans would come to know they were valued in modern urban America.50

Beyond their own need to distinguish themselves from social and cul- tural inferiors, black reformers noted time and time again that the stigma of criminality fell most heavily on the most disadvantaged, isolated, and neglected people of the urban North. As they saw it, the Progressive era discourse of black criminality was at its best a self- serving justifi cation for segregation and black self- help even as its proponents— white elites— helped Eu rope’s huddled masses by advocating for social welfare agen- cies, recreation facilities, better policing, economic fairness, and an end to po liti cal corruption. At its worst, the stigma of criminality was an in- tellectual defense of lynching, colonial- style criminal justice practices, and genocide.

The worst fears of black race- relations writers, crime experts, and social workers came true when widespread mob violence and race riots erupted across the urban North during the Great Migration years and beyond. Out of the bloodshed, black researchers and reformers rewrote black criminality in terms of racism in the criminal justice system. They tied testimonies of white police offi cers’ complicity in anti- black violence

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to evidence that Progressive era white vice had been deliberately relocated by police (and politicians) from immigrant communities into segregated black communities. Police misconduct, corruption, and brutality, they argued, helped to produce disproportionately high black arrest rates, the starting point for high juvenile delinquency commitments and adult prison rates. In this new formulation, New Negro researchers and civil rights activists such as Charles S. Johnson, Anna Thompson, and Walter White used statistical evidence of racial disparities in the northern criminal jus- tice system as evidence that racial crime statistics were an unreliable index of black behavior. National Urban League and NAACP– affi liated black social scientists and reformers effectively appropriated the mainstream environmental discourse of white progressives and later Chicago School sociologists, breaking, for a time, the double standard that had long pre- cluded such logic from working on behalf of African Americans. Sellin’s 1928 article captured the ascendance of this formulation and its legiti- macy among some of the most infl uential white sociologists and crimi- nologists in the country.

Yet even as National Urban League reports and NAACP press re- leases brought unpre ce dented attention to new evidence of police bru- tality and called into question racial disparities in northern prisons in the 1920s and 1930s, black criminality remained a racial problem. Cer- tainly, civil rights workers signifi cantly transformed black criminality discourse among many white social scientists and white liberal social re- formers. Their activism also contributed greatly to one of the most per- sis tent themes within civil rights discourse— the fi ght for due pro cess and equal protection within the criminal justice system. But an emergent civil rights critique of racial criminalization did not dissolve the link be- tween race and crime.

By 1940, on the eve of the Second World War and a northward migra- tion three times larger than the Progressive era migration, black criminal- ity had not become a universal signifi er of poverty and social marginal- ization; it had not become a universal social problem in the same way that Americanization helped to unbind nationality and criminality in the Progressive era. New knowledge of racial criminalization and a new awareness of the limits of black crime statistics had not guaranteed a New Deal for blacks or a fundamental shift in the scale or intensity of social, economic, or po liti cal reform directed toward black communities. New Negro antiracism and crime prevention gained a foothold in the

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broader ideological debate about the origins of black in e qual ity just when America’s inner- city landscapes were undergoing dramatic changes. The harvest of white ethnic succession— economic mobility, suburban home own ership, union membership, and whites- only schools, play- grounds, and recreation centers— sown in the seeds of Progressive era reforms and crime prevention fueled a growing antiliberal sentiment that northern blacks were still their own worst enemies because immigrants by dint of hard work escaped slums in spite of poverty, nativism, and police misconduct.51

But contrary to pop u lar belief, the gradual quieting of the statistical discourse on white ethnic criminality was as much the consequence of racial ideology linking whiteness with class oppression as it was the re- sult of new social and economic interventions at the state and federal levels.52 Liberalism fueled immigrant success even as racial liberalism found ered on the shoals of black criminality. From the New Deal through the post- World War II period and for de cades beyond, “the federal gov- ernment, though seemingly race- neutral, functioned as a commanding instrument of white privilege.” It was a period “when affi rmative action was white,” according to historian Ira Katznelson. “[A]t the very mo- ment when a wide array of public polices was providing most white Americans with valuable tools to advance their social welfare— insure their old age, get good jobs, acquire economic security, build assets, and gain middle- class status— most black Americans were left behind or left out.”53

African Americans were also left behind in the federal government’s new Uniform Crime Reports, a breakthrough achievement in crime re- porting developed in the 1930s. The new annual federal crime reports became the most authoritative statistical mea sure of race and crime in New Deal America, superseding decennial census data. Not only did these reports breathe new life into racial crime statistics, reversing gains made by black crime experts since the 1890s. The authors gradually re- moved the “Foreign Born” category from the crime tables, and by the early 1940s, “Black” stood as the unmitigated signifi er of deviation (and deviance) from the normative category of “White.”54

The preceding half- century of increasing statistical segregation and expanding residential segregation naturalized black inferiority, justifi ed black in e qual ity, and tended to mask black counter- discourses and re- sis tance, shaping race relations into the second half of the twentieth

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century. Although by the 1930s the statistical discourse on black crim- inality in the urban North was far more contested than it had been in the 1890s, it remained largely rooted in segregationist thought and practice and in competing visions of blacks’ place in modern urban America.55

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With the 1896 publication of Frederick L. Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, a tour de force in the annals of post- emancipation writing on the Negro Problem, statistical data on black criminality secured a permanent place in modern race- relations discourse in the United States for the fi rst time. Race Traits was the fi rst book- length study to include a nationwide analysis of black crime statistics, making it arguably the most infl uential race and crime study of the fi rst half of the twentieth century. In his tone and in his fi ndings, Hoffman, an actuary and statistician for Prudential, the insurance giant based in Newark, New Jersey, presented his work as innovative and essential. “Crime, pau- perism, and sexual immorality are without question,” he proclaimed, “the greatest hindrances to social and economic progress, and the tendencies of the colored race in respect to these phases of life will deserve a more careful investigation than has thus far been accorded to them.”1 Hoff- man’s rise to prominence, and the making of Race Traits and its intrigu- ing aftermath reveals how racial criminalization linked to crime statistics helped usher in the age of Jim Crow.

Picking up where others had left off, Hoffman’s pioneering statistical analysis of black criminality was embedded within a broader analysis and explanation of increasing black mortality rates as previously observed by former census superintendent Francis A. Walker.2 In Hoffman’s path- breaking formulation, crime was a major factor in the high mortality rate and was presented as a key fi nding in the black disappearance literature. Hoffman’s emphasis on the innate self- destructive tendencies of black people, now a quarter- century removed from slavery, fueled his unequiv- ocal argument that blacks’ social and economic conditions, still largely attributed to white control, had absolutely nothing to do with black criminality. To drive this point home further, Hoffman touted his status

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as a northern- based race- relations expert. He highlighted data from the urban North, specifi cally Philadelphia and Chicago, to demonstrate that black criminality was as high in the racially liberal North as it was in the emerging Jim Crow South. The timing of the publication of Race Traits— the year the U.S. Supreme Court affi rmed white superiority and signed off on segregation as the law of the land in Plessy v. Ferguson— coupled with the book’s novel use of the statistical method and its cogent writing made the book the “most infl uential discussion on the race problem to appear in the late nineteenth century.”3 As it happened, Walker contrib- uted to the im mense success of Hoffman’s study as an offi cer of the American Economic Association, the most prestigious social science or- ga ni za tion in the nation, which published the book in its journal.4

The success of Race Traits also resulted from the way Hoffman mar- keted himself as a foreigner. His credibility was doubly secured by his un- familiarity with American race relations and his reliance on data rather than words, as Harvard scientist Nathaniel S. Shaler had so presciently advised. “Being of foreign birth, a German, I was fortunately free from a personal bias which might have made an impartial treatment of the sub- ject diffi cult,” Hoffman wrote, emphasizing that he had limited his analysis to the “exclusive use of the statistical method” and had “in every instance” simply given the facts. “In the fi eld of statistical research, sentiment, preju- dice, or the infl uence of pre- conceived ideas have no place. The data which have been brought together in a con ve nient form speak for themselves. From the standpoint of the impartial investigator, no difference of inter- pretation of their meaning seems possible.”5 Given that nearly all race- relations writers of the late nineteenth century—self- identifi ed experts on the Negro Problem— were tied to or associated with ideological posi- tions rooted in the sectional confl icts of the Civil War and Reconstruc- tion periods, Hoffman claimed that as a new arrival he had no blood on his hands.

Hoffman was indeed a German immigrant to the United States, land- ing at Castle Garden in New York City in 1884 as a jobless, penniless nineteen- year- old unable to speak En glish. Although he may have appeared to be one of Eu rope’s huddled masses, he was in fact from an upper- middle- class family with Anglo- Saxon blood coursing through his veins. He would have received a university education in his homeland but for the untimely death of his father and his mother’s insistence that he im- mediately begin working at the age of fi fteen. Shortly thereafter, Hoff- man made his way to the United States in hope of making a mark on the

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world. He arrived just as the Atlantic Monthly was publishing Shaler’s fi rst article on “The Negro Problem.”6 Although it would take roughly eight years for Hoffman to publish his own seminal article on the subject and another four to position himself as its foremost authority, by 1896 he was far from being the “impartial investigator . . . free from personal bias” he then claimed to be.

Hoffman traveled extensively throughout the United States during the fi rst ten years after his arrival, trying to fi nd his stride in the business world. Numerous dead- end and temporary jobs sent him to several cities and states in the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Deep South. As an avid reader of U.S. history and travel literature and a frequent visitor to muse- ums, historical societies, and monuments, Hoffman became engrossed, biographer F. J. Sypher notes, in the “landscape, the people, and the cul- ture around him.” On his fi rst trip south in 1887, traveling from St. Louis down the Mississippi River aboard the City of New Orleans, he was captivated by the Southland’s beauty, noting in his diary that he had passed through a “veritable gateway to Paradise” upon reaching Natchez, Mississippi. He instantly fell in love with “the oleanders and magnolias, and especially the orange trees, which reminded him of holiday times in Germany, when his parents would receive oranges from southern Italy.” But as any American well knew and Hoffman was quick to learn, when it came to race relations the postbellum South could be as brutal as it was beautiful. On the riverboat Hoffman witnessed, in his own words, the “truly horrible brutality practiced upon the negro deck hands.”7 Per- haps struck by the blatant contrast between his experience as a white immigrant who had never been the victim of racial violence while work- ing in or freely traveling across the nation, he was no longer free of the taint of American racism. What was he to make of it?8

Hoffman would spend most of the next eight years, from 1887 through much of 1894, living in no fewer than six southern towns and cities in Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia, experiencing southern culture, planting southern roots, and learning southern race relations. During a period of unemployment in 1888, he made a monthlong visit to the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah, where he was fi rst introduced to black mortality research conducted by a local physician.9 Eugene R. Corson’s study, “The Future of the Colored Race in the United States from an Ethnic and Medical Standpoint,” fi rst given as a lecture at the society then revised and published in 1893, after the 1890 census data were pub- lished, noted higher rates of deaths from disease among southern blacks

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than among whites. This was a crucial fi nding, Corson maintained, given that the whites in his study lived under the same environmental conditions as the blacks. The difference, he argued, was the physical inferiority of blacks. Hoffman’s reading of Corson’s lecture was a life- altering experi- ence. “This discussion laid the foundation of a lifelong interest in the mortality aspects of the so- called negro problem,” he later recalled.10

More watershed moments in Hoffman’s coming- of- age- in- the- South story soon followed. In the summer of 1891, in Atlanta, Georgia, Freder- ick Ludwig Hoffman married Ella George Hay. Reared in a “thoroughly Southern family,” Ella was the daughter of a Confederate soldier and the granddaughter of a plantation slave own er.11 The newlyweds quickly settled down in Hampton, Virginia, where Hoffman became familiar with Hampton Institute’s program of black industrial education and ra- cial accommodationism. By 1892 Hoffman had fully immersed himself in the “Negro question,” expressing his private thoughts on the “worth- lessness of certain negroes” and imbibing the racially conservative views of Frances Morgan Armstrong, a Hampton administrator and the daughter- in- law of Hampton’s found er, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong.12 Unlike her father- in- law and southern white progressives in general, Arm- strong seriously questioned whether industrial education by itself was enough to correct blacks’ racial defects. After the general died in 1893 she continued his work, “but without believing in its merits,” according to Sypher.13 Armstrong’s private repudiation of industrial education for blacks, which she expressed to Hoffman, suggests that her beliefs were more in line with racial Darwinists. Hoffman, ever the quick student, learned much from Armstrong, who became his close adviser and confi - dant and a major infl uence on his writing of Race Traits.14

His residence in Hampton and his relationship with Armstrong marked the beginning of the end of Hoffman’s neophyte years as a southerner and as a stranger to American race relations. A series of professional and intel- lectual developments during his last years in the South inspired Hoffman to combine his budding talent as a statistician in the insurance industry with his budding passion for shaping future race relations. In 1890 Hoffman wrote to Ella that he had come to realize his professional pur- pose in life. He saw in government statistics an effective means by which to expose problems in society and to help guide reform.15 Although he was concerned at that time with industrial conditions among the white work- ing class in northern mill towns, his interest shifted to the Negro Prob- lem during his residence in Hampton. In 1892 he began corresponding

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with government offi cials, including Carroll D. Wright, a highly esteemed economist, census offi cial, and commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of La- bor, in order to collect statistical data on blacks’ economic, social, and health conditions. His fi rst published article, “Vital Statistics of the Ne- gro,” appeared in the April 1892 edition of The Arena, a Boston- based progressive journal. Hoffman’s article was the fourth entry on the Ne- gro Problem published by the journal subsequent to Shaler’s three 1890 articles.16

In “Vital Statistics,” Hoffman expanded on Walker’s thesis that previ- ous investigators had overestimated the “future colored population.” Rather than analyze unreliable birthrate data as others had— the rec ords were spotty and poorly kept— Hoffman turned to mortuary reports for eight southern cities.17 He found that on average blacks died at nearly twice the rate as whites. Although environmental conditions were a fac- tor for all groups living in poverty, the “two main causes” of high mor- tality among blacks were consumption and venereal diseases, which he linked to their “inferior constitution” and “gross immorality [Hoffman’s italics].” The data, including statistics from the U.S. Army during the Civil War, clearly showed that more blacks than whites died of tubercu- losis. In all these cases blacks and whites faced the same external condi- tions, according to the U.S. surgeon- general from whom Hoffman quoted directly in an 1889 report, demonstrating that the difference was the re- sult of “a race proclivity to disease and death.”18

In the expert opinion of the nation’s foremost medical authority and Hoffman, health care discrimination plus the physical, emotional, and psychological toll of racial oppression apparently had nothing to do with black health and mortality disparities.19 Although Hoffman liked to de- clare otherwise, it seems the data did not speak for themselves since there was more than one way to interpret them. As for venereal disease mortal- ity, Hoffman had no actual data. Instead, he asserted that “any physician who practiced among the colored people” would attest that as many as 75 percent of them were “cursed” with a sexually transmitted disease. He followed up the anecdotal evidence with more death tables, showing that, across the board, black babies and black women died at higher rates than their white peers. From his perspective, every statistic or ex- pert testimony was scientifi c proof of inferiority and degeneration. “Thus we reach the conclusion that the colored race is showing every sign of an undermined constitution, a diseased manhood and womanhood; in short, all the indications of a race on the road to extinction.”20 In his fi rst article,

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Hoffman was on his way to shaping racial statistics into a powerful, full- blown narrative of black self- destruction, racial decay, and the futil- ity of reform. He asked rhetorically, why waste the nation’s resources on a “vanishing race”?

With the forces of logic, reason, and statistics on his side, Hoffman appeared to foreclose the possibility of seeing blacks’ situation any other way. Yet within the following year, in 1893, he presented a completely opposite interpretation of a high mortality problem among whites. In their case he blamed society and called for economic intervention. Sui- cide, the most literal act of self- destruction any individual can commit, was on the rise in the United States, and Hoffman collected mortality statistics to prove it. “Suicide and Modern Civilization,” also published in The Arena, was, according to Hoffman, “the fi rst time . . . the [suicide] statistics for American states and cities” had ever been presented.21 Across the country, especially in the urban North where state and county agencies kept the best rec ords, suicides had risen dramatically since the 1860s.22 Massachusetts, the epitome of America’s Puritan past and in- dustrial future, recorded over 900 suicides in the last half of the 1880s, compared to 394 “self- killings” in the fi rst half of the 1860s, a 130 per- cent increase. Connecticut’s rising suicide rate, Hoffman found, was even more startling, growing 216 percent over a similar period. Always strik- ing in its grandeur, New York City held the dubious honor of being the suicide capital of America in the late 1880s, recording 1,188 suicides that represented a 52 percent increase over the 1870s. Philadelphia and Balti- more had far fewer suicides but saw the rate of “voluntary destruction” increase by roughly 70 percent over the same period. If every suicide and attempted suicide were actually recorded, Hoffman wrote in a dire tone, “the army of those who seek in suicide a relief from earthly troubles would assume alarming proportions.” The “plain but impressive language of statistics” had given “a picture of the darkest side of modern life.” The stresses and strains of modern civilization were to blame, Hoffman wrote, and had contributed to increasing rates of insanity and brain dis- eases. According to an expert Hoffman cited, these individuals were vic- tims not of “their own vices,” but “of the state of society into which the individual is thrown.” Hoffman agreed, insisting that the “total amount of misery and vice prevailing in a given community” was a manifestation of something fundamentally wrong in society. “The study of statistics of suicide, madness, and crime is one of the utmost importance to any soci- ety when such abnormal conditions are on the increase,” he wrote in a

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plea for reform. “When such an increase has been proved to exist, it is the duty of society to leave nothing undone until the evil has been checked or been brought under control.” The “health of the people” must come before the “wealth of the people.” Hoffman concluded that “We must be far from truly civilized as long as we permit to exist, or accept as inevitable, conditions which year after year drive an increasing army of unfortunates to madness, crime, or suicide. . . . It is the diseased notion of modern life— almost equal to being a religious conviction— that mate- rial advancement and prosperity are the end, the aim, and general pur- pose of human life. . . . It is the struggle of the masses against the classes.”23

Hoffman interpreted whites’ self- destructive behavior as a conse- quence of a diseased society, not of a “diseased manhood and woman- hood.” White criminality was a response to economic in e qual ity rather than a response to a “race proclivity.” On the white side of the color line, it would take nothing short of “emergency mea sures” to save modern civi- lization from itself.24

Hoffman’s emergent advocacy was bidirectional. On the one hand, he interpreted the data on black mortality as a race problem, a call to do nothing. On the other hand, he interpreted the data on white mortality as a social problem, a call to do everything possible— to “leave nothing un- done.” Taking one extreme position, then the other, Hoffman was be- coming an outspoken partisan in debates about America’s future well before he began writing Race Traits. Historian Lundy Braun writes that “he shared with other Progressive- era reformers . . . a faith in the exper- tise of middle- class professionals” to infl uence “the culture of knowledge production in the United States,” and to “shape policies of the state and civil society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”25 His tremendous infl uence in these areas was defi ned in part by his choice, and the decisions of many others, to see blacks’ problems as uniquely their own, just as he chose to see whites’ “struggle for mastery” as society’s problem. In a society where the ideology of white supremacy was ascen- dant, Hoffman saw no inconsistency in his thinking. In his earliest writ- ings he was not a social Darwinist in the sense that he thought helping the weak was antithetical to social progress and nature’s plan; the prob- lem was helping a race of people outside the pale of civilization who had, according to his interpretation of the latest data, proven themselves to be permanently inferior to all whites, including Eu ro pe an immigrants like himself. “The city negro brought into direct competition with the white race has usually but one avenue out of his dilemma— the road to prison

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or to an early grave,” he wrote in an article following the suicide re- port.26 In this racial Darwinist formulation, permanent racial in e qual ity and premature death among blacks was a scientifi cally sound solution to the Negro Problem, and a progressive means to economic equality among whites through a more effective use of social resources.

In relation to the recurrent economic depressions of the late nineteenth century and related immigration and labor problems among whites, Hoff- man’s career was propelled by his attempt to outfl ank late- nineteenth- century racial liberals with novel racial statistics. Nondiscrimination laws in the 1880s forced insurance companies to offer blacks the same benefi ts for the same premiums that were guaranteed to whites. Pruden- tial balked at the new laws and hired Hoffman in 1894 because of his expertise in the fi eld of black mortality. The company wanted him to prove on actuarial grounds that discriminating against blacks was justifi - able. “Prudential and Hoffman aimed to turn the racial fantasy of the extinction hypothesis into hard scientifi c numbers that could be deployed” for the purposes of profi t and prejudice.27 It was in this context that Hoffman made his most original contribution to the analysis of new ra- cial demographic data by zeroing in on black criminality. Two years later he would elevate it to the national stage of race- relations discourse in an effort to silence northern racial liberals who had not yet been swayed into accepting black inferiority through biological evidence, such as small brains and diseased bodies.

Hoffman’s decision to focus explicitly on black criminality was likely infl uenced by his encounter with a debate between two prison doctors on why black convicts died in prison at much higher rates than white con- victs.28 In the February 3, 1894, edition of The Medical News, R. M. Cunningham, a former Alabama prison physician, reported that “the negro mortality was three times greater than white,” based on exami- nation of “some 2,500 convicts” over several years ending in 1890.29 Although, according to Cunningham, the site of investigation was a fi rst, since no comparative racial study and explanation of mortality differ- ences among prisoners had hitherto been attempted, the results con- fi rmed previous research. The “well- known facts” of blacks’ physical de- fi ciency and asymmetrical development— their small thoracic regions versus their large stomachs and penises— predisposed them to diseases such as tuberculosis. “All one has to do is to see 300 or 400 negroes naked in a large bath- house, and then step through a door and see 75 or 100 white men in the same condition, to convince him of the correctness of

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this view.” The statistical fact of black men dying in prison was written into the observed evidence of inferiority found in the body. Like life in the army, prison life was supposedly free of racism, eliminating it as a factor in the mortality differences. “This is certainly true at the place whence the foregoing statistics were obtained.” That 85 percent of the prisoners were black, when before emancipation 99 percent of Alabama’s prisoners were white, and that more than fi ve times “as many negroes as whites [ were] committed for crime” had nothing to do with discrimi- nation. According to Cunningham, Alabama’s laws were “impartially administered so far as race is concerned.”30 These disparities were also observable in northern prisons, where racial equality was a given, he ex- plained as yet another proof that blacks were at the root of their own demise.

In rebuttal, M. V. Ball, a prison doctor at Eastern State Penitentiary, which housed Philadelphia’s convicted felons, wrote that Cunningham’s data were accurate but his interpretation was all wrong. Black prisoners were indeed far more likely than whites to die of tuberculosis in a Penn- sylvania prison, as in other northern prisons, but the causes were related to childhood poverty, unsanitary living conditions, and poor hygiene. “In the early years are sown the seeds of tuberculosis,” Ball wrote, “which require but the confi nement of prison to mature and develop.” He added that mortality statistics did not generally “take into account social dis- tinctions,” therefore masking the effects of poverty on populations that disproportionately suffered from it. Ball cited as an example data from the New York Board of Health “for various tenement districts” that re- vealed that childhood mortality rates among struggling Italian immi- grants were similar to those of struggling blacks, and were much higher than for the city in general. “Make the conditions favorable for the negro from childhood up, and then fi rst can we say that” blacks are more disease- prone. “The criminal nature of the negro must be viewed in the same light,” Ball continued. Before ascribing the overrepre sen ta tion of blacks in Pennsylvania’s prisons or in Georgia’s or in Mississippi’s to their inferiority, racial prejudice must be taken into account. “In the South, where lynch- law is most commonly dealt out to the negro, we might attempt to ascribe this greater criminality to lack of fair treatment, and prejudice on the part of the white man; but in the North we are sup- posed to be exempt from this accusation.” Although Ball hesitated to say that northern racism was potentially as important to assessing black criminality as southern racism, he was certain that the current state of

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statistical analysis left much to be desired. “In criminal statistics, as in medical statistics, we do not compare classes.” Until we do, he concluded, “I would refer the differences” to environmental conditions rather than to “physical distinctions.” “Until the so cio log i cal factor is studied and taken into account, the so- called hereditary and racial characteristics as witnessed in the adult are liable to lead to wrong conclusions.”31

If there was one moment when Hoffman, the young, ambitious, German- born statistical maven, had to step back and either reconsider his interpretation of racial statistics or charge ahead, fortifying his ideas with more forceful language and emphasis, this was the moment. This debate did not begin as his fi ght, but it most certainly ended that way when he published a rejoinder to Ball’s article in the September 22, 1894, issue of The Medical News. Hoffman attacked Ball’s every point with no fewer than twelve proofs of counter- data and counter- testimony. Most of the data and expert opinions he cited were recycled from his 1892 arti- cle, but this time his language was far more pointed and expressive, re- vealing a strong desire to eliminate any possible reason for interpreting the data in social terms or in a manner similar to his own position on white suicide and criminality. His strongest and most consistent argu- ment against Ball was to unequivocally assert the total absence of racism and discrimination as determinative of the health and welfare of blacks in American society. Because “the negro is placed under exactly the same conditions, social and economic, as the white race,” there was no way to explain the mortality and criminality differences other than their “race proclivity to disease and death.” “Any city in the South will show that year after year, for the past twenty years,” blacks died at rates 25 percent to 100 percent higher than whites. Rec ords from the army presented similar data as “proof so convincing that it will be hardly necessary to add anything further in support of the theory of distinct race characteris- tics.” Moreover, the surgeon- general, “a recognized authority,” Hoffman continued, had come to the same conclusion “in such an emphatic manner.”32 Even the British troops in the West Indies outlived blacks in an environment where blacks had an advantage, “as life in the West In- dian Islands is to the negro a paradise on earth, being an out- door rural life, with little manual labor,” he wrote, echoing Shaler’s words about Haiti and Jamaica.33 Back in the United States, actuarial data “by all the life- insurance companies” confi rmed that blacks on average died ten to twelve years younger (in their early twenties) than whites. With their economic incentive to seek healthy clients regardless of race and to per-

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form routine “medical examination[s],” Prudential Insurance company’s 50 percent higher payout to the benefi ciaries of black policyholders was yet “another proof of the permanency” of racial difference. Hoffman continued, writing in an arrogant tone to show that Ball had missed or had refused to acknowledge what was plain for all to see: “Need more proof be brought forward to maintain the assertion that the negro and the white man differ fundamentally. . . . I could quote authority after authority to prove that such is really a fact.”34

That Hoffman felt compelled to go to such lengths to refute Ball, given that it was not his research that had been directly challenged, dem- onstrates how passionately he believed that demographic evidence was the smoking gun for which so many racial scientists and race- relations writers, such as Shaler, had been looking.35 But this was not just about one individual’s pursuit of scientifi c certainty in solving the Negro Prob- lem. Hoffman’s was not the only voice of white absolution for the sins of America’s founding fathers and mothers, nor was his the only voice speaking of black degeneracy, black savagery, and black extinction in the 1890s. He kept extremely good company in this regard, from scientists to academics to journalists to religious leaders to American states- men.36 Rather, this was about how one individual could make a differ- ence in redefi ning a “scientifi c” problem and in pushing the boundaries of conventional knowledge and understanding into new research areas. At this time social scientists were attempting to raise their academic profi le by becoming professionalized, by founding academic journals, and by adopting empirical methods to give their fi ndings the veneer of scientifi c certainty like those of their se nior colleagues in the natural sciences.37 With a real knack for spotting emerging statistical trends in the United States and with a little help from his Eu ro pe an counterparts, Hoffman identifi ed key areas of demographic research, sometimes based on entirely new data that others had not yet noted or had only casually considered.

With black crime, like white suicide, Hoffman took Cunningham’s and Ball’s lead into the realm of black prison and arrest statistics and put himself on the cusp of yet another original contribution. Left with one fi nal proof in order to dismiss all of Ball’s interpretations, Hoffman cited a French physician’s 1889 study that tied the physical differences between West Indians and “the white man” to “distinct social aptitudes,” noting that “a similar study of the negro criminal in this country would lead to similar conclusions.”38 This was Hoffman’s fi rst published comment on

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“the negro criminal,” demonstrating his dedication to searching for the data and to fi lling what was an obvious void in debates about the scientifi c origins of black disease, death, and self- destruction. A far more robust and pioneering crime analysis was to follow in the book. In the meantime, Hoffman haphazardly noted, without citing dates or using tables, wide racial disparities in Chicago arrest rates and Pennsylvania prison rates.39 Unlike work on black mortality, the large- scale study of black criminality from the statistical standpoint was mostly uncharted territory.40

Anecdotal, anthropological, and journalistic assessments of black criminality had informed nineteenth- century pop u lar opinion and social practices.41 Colonial laws targeted unsupervised gatherings of enslaved men and women and conspiring free blacks to ensure against black up- risings. Antebellum blacks were often subject to discriminatory policing even as they suffered violence periodically at the hands of native- born white and immigrant mobs in northern cities.42 Since nine out of ten blacks were enslaved until the late nineteenth century, the scientifi c mea- sure of black criminality fi rst awaited freedom, then reliable data. As late as 1893, as indicated by the absence of any mention of blacks in one of the fi rst textbooks on what would later be considered American crimi- nology, An Introduction to the Study of the Dependent, Defective and Delinquent Classes by University of Chicago social scientist Charles R. Henderson, quantitative research on black criminality had not yet begun.43 Given how much Hoffman seemed to delight in pioneering the compila- tion and pre sen ta tion of vital statistics on a national scale, he probably consulted Henderson’s book before proceeding with his own study. The likelihood is further demonstrated by noting just how tightly drawn was the intellectual circle that encompassed Hoffman, Henderson, and oth- ers. In the second edition of The Dependent, Defective and Delinquent Classes, Henderson wrote on “the Negro factor” for the fi rst time and cited Hoffman’s Race Traits, which had been published in 1896, three years after the fi rst edition.44

Another important report on the national crime situation that lacked statistical data on black criminality appeared the same year as Hender- son’s fi rst edition, and Hoffman likely read it. The report was written by his colleague at the U.S. Bureau of Labor, Carroll D. Wright, from whom Hoffman had obtained data before writing his fi rst race article.45 Wright linked crime to unemployment and the exploitation of unskilled and un- educated workers. His only reference to African Americans was a slim mention in a discussion of general trends in industrial nations in the

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nineteenth century where, he argued, crime rose as a natural consequence of the transition from feudalism to wage labor and from slavery to free- dom.46 It seems likely that Hoffman noted the absence of vital statistics on black crime in Wright’s article, then studied Wright’s argument that preventing white crime required better protection of the white working- class against the ravages of economic depressions in the industrial mar- ketplace. “The shutting down of the mines of Pennsylvania, or the reduc- tion of work therein,” Wright wrote, “throws large bodies of men out of employment. . . . Crime is the result, and the criminal statistics swell into columns that make us believe that our social fabric is on the verge of ruin.” Wright’s evocative language refl ects the growing compassion of many American social scientists who, in the wake of a national recession in the 1890s, began to argue against social Darwinism. They were also arguing against the emerging biological determinism of Eu ro pe an crimi- nal anthropology, which was gaining popularity due to the efforts of its foremost promoter, Cesare Lombroso, an Italian prison inspector.47 On the origins and solution to white criminality, Wright may have infl uenced Hoffman directly, given the tone and tenor of his suicide article.

Wright and Hoffman shared the same school of thought.48 Society and the government had a responsibility, both argued, to protect the health and welfare of the white citizenry; otherwise crime, disease, and death were inevitable results. As Wright put it, “The health of the work- ers of a community is essential to their material prosperity, and the health of a community has much to do with the volume of crime.” Within the general population, among Anglo- Americans and new Eu ro pe an im- migrants, the problems of disease, death, and self- destruction were rooted in industrialization and modern civilization. Harry Vrooman expressed similar views and was also a contributor to The Arena. A socialist writer and or ga niz er of the Progressive Labor party, Vrooman argued that “the whole problem of crime, as to- day expressed in society, is summed up in the problem of poverty; we have churches enough, schools enough, moral sentiment enough, to regenerate the world in a de cade, were it not for the awful pressure brought to bear on nine tenths of the human race, which all but forces them to be vicious.” Moreover society owed the “the great army of unfortunates” not just economic security, but “goodwill” that encouraged “respect [for the ethical code]” and an obligation “to sus- tain . . . the social order.” In other words, sympathy and compassion for working- class white Americans were as important as living wages and humane working conditions. Vrooman took his analysis one step further

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by attributing part of the blame for “Bowery crimes,” a reference to a New York City immigrant slum, and “wage slave[ry]” to “Northern greed” during the Reconstruction period. Under “negro domination,” he wrote, a “black horde of practical savages” controlled by “Yankee pluto- crats” plundered the South.49 Notwithstanding the challenge to universal white economic mobility posed by free black labor, Hoffman, Wright, and other progressives believed that at the nexus of crime and whiteness there was only a class problem. There was no race problem.

Ball agreed entirely with the conclusion that race was not the determi- nant factor in white mortality and white criminality, but he believed the same held true for blacks. In response to Hoffman’s latest entry in what had turned into a nearly yearlong debate in the pages of The Medical News, Ball insisted for the second time, though much more forcefully, that mortality and crime statistics in and of themselves could not be trusted. “Figures in themselves mean nothing; they must be carefully ana- lyzed and studied in connection with social conditions.” Without taking into account a host of known “sociologic factors,” statistics were an in- suffi cient basis upon which to “draw conclusions” and could easily be- come misrepre sen ta tions of reality. Repeating a cliché, Ball wrote, “There are three kinds of lies, someone has said, ‘white lies, black lies, and statistics.’ ”50

From Ball’s perspective, the statistical lies told by Hoffman, Cunning- ham, and others had little to do with the actual mortality and prison data, which he admitted were not in “dispute.” There was no doubt that more blacks than whites died of tuberculosis and went to prison, but explaining why was the essential problem. Ball rejected the racial mean- ing Hoffman obsessively gave to the statistics. He balked at Hoffman’s omission of other kinds of demographic data that showed rates of mor- tality among the Irish and Italians living in impoverished neighborhoods of the urban North as similar to rates among blacks. According to Ball, even the 1890 census data, when read with a different interpretive lens, showed that “foreign- born whites and the children born of foreigners have the same death- rate as the colored, because they often dwell in the same surroundings and are under the same economic conditions.”51 Even when mortality differences seemed to point to racial differences, Ball found not biology, but more subtle environmental infl uences related to hous- ing and hygiene. The extreme housing differences between whites of the “wealthy classes” and blacks “who live in the alleys back of their man- sions” accounted for huge disparities in mortality.52

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In regard to crime statistics, environmental factors, such as the mis- conduct and biases of criminal justice offi cials, were similarly as determi- native, Ball continued. “All law- breakers are not sent to prison, and the more infl uential the criminal, the less likelihood of conviction. The police- court investigation in New York City shows us that morals cannot be determined by the number of arrests, and that the most disorderly ele- ment in New York City was most exempt from police interference.”53 Ball was citing the fi ndings of the Lexow Commission of 1894, the fi rst blue- ribbon investigation of police corruption and violence in American history, which made headlines at the same time his article appeared. According to historian Marilynn Johnson, the New York State Legisla- ture launched an investigation of the New York Police Department after a series of high- profi le corruption scandals. The investigation “produced more than ten thousand pages of testimony that detailed multiple cases of police graft, vice protection, racketeering, and election fraud.” The in- vestigation was nicknamed the “Clubbers Brigade” to highlight the con- nection between corruption and brutality by police offi cers, a hundred of whom appeared before the commission to explain their equal number of assault convictions. Like Ball, a lawyer for the commission noted the discriminatory effects of police misconduct. “Those in the humbler walks of life were subjected to appalling outrages. . . . They were abused, clubbed and imprisoned, and even convicted of crime on false testimony by police and their accomplices. . . . The poor, ignorant foreigner residing on the great East Side of the city has been especially subjected to a brutal and infamous rule by the police.”54 For Ball, then, the circumstances affecting disease and criminality among the “poor, ignorant foreigner” were likely to be as “active in the negro.” Moreover, the tendency to compare blacks to the “whole white race with its four or fi ve social divisions” exagger- ated the racial distinctiveness of blacks, rendering invisible the common- ality of “poverty and ignorance” among various subgroups. Such a method is “not scientifi c,” he unequivocally asserted to Hoffman. “Thus, before we can call characteristics racial and dependent upon distinct organic differences, we must eliminate the sociologic factor.”55

But Hoffman hardly looked back as he wrote Race Traits and Tenden- cies of the American Negro. In this full- length treatise on the racial dete- rioration of black people in America published two years later, he never explicitly acknowledged Ball’s warnings. While he made a few veiled ref- erences to the environmental argument of “some authors,” he insisted that the evidence of race deterioration was “indisputable” and that “no

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difference of interpretation . . . seems possible.” With the notable addi- tion of more mortality data, which he claimed had never been published or had “never been duly considered by those who believe so fi rmly in the all powerful effect of the ‘milieux,’ ” much of the book was an expanded version of his previous articles.56

What was new in the book, however, was of no minor consequence. His major innovation was in presenting for the fi rst time a statistical “study of the negro criminal.” Whereas in slavery it was a “well- known fact that neither crime [nor] pauperism” existed, he began, in freedom the latest data positively proved otherwise. The 1890 census, according to Hoffman, showed 24,277 “negro criminals” out of the nation’s 82,329 total prisoners, about 30 percent, and nearly three times the number of black men and women in the general population (12 percent). Although black men constituted more than 90 percent of all “colored prisoners” ( just over 22,000), both sexes were most likely to be incarcerated for vio- lence, “the most serious of all crimes.” Out of nearly 7,000 men impris- oned for hom i cide, just over a third, 2,512, were black men. Black women made up nearly six in ten female prisoners convicted of murder, represent- ing 227 women prisoners out of 393.57 For rape, “the most atrocious of all crimes,” black men composed 41 percent of convicts. For property offenses, arson ranked at the top among black men and women as a proportion of the total, at 46 percent and 61 percent respectively. Hoffman thus praised the “wisdom” of insurers in “restricting the amount of fi re insurance ob- tainable by colored persons.”58 If the information in the book spoke for itself, as Hoffman frequently claimed, it seemed at times to have been too soft- spoken. The message apparently was worth repeating: black crimi- nality justifi ed black proscription.

Regarding lynching, for example, Hoffman interpreted press accounts of rape as justifying mob violence even as he admitted that there was no statistical evidence to link the two. “The evidence on this point is not such as would recommend itself to an investigation of this kind, in which offi cial data are the main reliance,” he wrote.59 Instead he supplemented “newspaper evidence” with “the opinion of those most competent to judge,” including the Virginian historian Philip Alexander Bruce, whose infl uential 1889 book The Plantation Negro as a Freeman was one of the most heavily cited postbellum race studies. Bruce, quoted by Hoffman, described the rape of white women by black men as “indescribably beastly and loathsome,” without peer in the “whole extent of the natural history of the most beastial [sic] and ferocious animals.”60 Although

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Bruce claimed to be impartial, dispassionate, and free of a personal con- nection to slavery, his book in general and his chapter on black criminal- ity in par tic u lar represented the standard repackaging of proslavery be- liefs for a postbellum audience.61

By relying on such experts, Hoffman combined crime statistics with a well- crafted white supremacist narrative to shape the reading of black criminality while trying to minimize the appearance of doing so. Thus the innovative and enduring signifi cance of Hoffman’s crime analysis was not only in presenting the data for the fi rst time, but also in setting the terms and shaping the frame of analysis. Table after table of arrest and prison statistics from cities across the nation, such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Louisville, and Charleston (SC), and from states including New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Hoffman proclaimed, all “confi rm the census data, and show without exception that the criminality of the negro exceeds that of any other race of any numerical importance in this country.” When “the ne- gro learns to respect life, property, and chastity, until he learns to believe in the value of a personal morality operating in his daily life, the criminal tendencies . . . will increase.”62

Although anecdotally black criminality had already become a pop u- lar mea sure of black progress and potential among postbellum writers, in Hoffman’s seminal statistical formulation it secured a more fundamen- tal and permanent role in future race- relations discourse. It was now nearly impossible to read black crime statistics as symptomatic of the failed promises of racial equality in the wake of the Civil War and Recon- struction or, as Ball had suggested, to see crime beyond race as a so cio- log i cal consequence of economic and social in e qual ity in the industrial age. The construction of an avenue along which such thinking might have traveled was postponed indefi nitely. Even suicide among blacks, according to Hoffman and in contrast to suicide among whites, was strictly viewed as pathological: “in most cases, to escape the consequences of his crimes.”63 Ultimately, by framing black criminality as a key mea- sure of black inferiority in the same way that his peers and pre de ces sors had done through anatomical mea sure ments and mortality data, Hoff- man wrote crime into race and centered it at the heart of the Negro Problem.

In Race Traits Hoffman brilliantly tied black criminality to a repudia- tion of abolitionists’ and neo- abolitionists’ claims that with freedom, edu- cation, and moral training blacks would gradually achieve equality with whites.64 He framed black behavior as impervious to civilizing infl uences

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by wedding increasing crime trends to the dramatic increase in black schools and churches over the three de cades after slavery:

I have given the statistics of the general progress of the race in re- ligion and education for the country at large, and have shown that in church and school the number of attending members or pupils is constantly increasing; but in the statistics of crime and the data of illegitimacy the proof is furnished that neither religion nor edu- cation has infl uenced to an appreciable degree the moral prog- ress of the race. What ever benefi t the individual colored man may have gained from the extension of religious worship and educa- tional pro cesses, the race as a whole has gone backwards rather than forwards.65

This was a powerful indictment of nascent liberal efforts for racial equal- ity at the dawn of the Jim Crow era. Not only did Hoffman state that education and religion were a waste of time and money, but he also im- plied that they were harmful to the goals of racial uplift. The charge that black education by itself was a stimulus to crime would follow in the wake of Race Traits.66

It is entirely possible that, given the time Hoffman had spent at Hamp- ton Institute, he owed some credit to Frances Morgan Armstrong for emphasizing the futility of black education.67 “Unfortunately, for the negro,” she stated, “the course of the race is infl uenced by those who have fi lled his mind with false ideals, who commencing with ‘forty acres and a mule,’ have ended with the prospect of an education in colleges or industrial schools.” General Armstrong, with whom she disagreed, fi t this description perfectly. The black crime problem, as diagnosed statistically by Hoffman and subsequent writers, undoubtedly struck a blow at the optimism of the liberal northerners who were major supporters of in- dustrial education in the South and challenged their faith that education was the key to solving the Negro Problem.68 From this point forward, white philanthropic and reform efforts on behalf of racial advancement would be evaluated to varying degrees by black crime statistics.

Hoffman’s book was exceedingly infl uential across the nation, espe- cially among leading students of American demography.69 “The national white consensus emerging at the turn of the century,” notes historian David Levering Lewis, “was that African Americans were inferior human beings whose predicament was three parts their own making and two parts the consequence of misguided philanthropy.”70 Hoffman played no

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minor part in building this consensus. Historian George Fredrickson writes that Race Traits “became a prized source of information and con- clusions for anti- Negro writers for many years to come,” in part because of its practical value.71 Despite the few articles he had written as a newly minted southerner, Hoffman was a relative unknown to the vast world of race punditry prior to Race Traits. By 1896, however, he had remade himself in print as a foreign- born resident of New Jersey with no obvi- ous past or association with the South. He worked as a statistician for one of the largest insurance companies in the country— an ostensibly polemics- free line of work. In the tradition of an Alexis de Tocqueville, he marketed himself as a clear- eyed, plainspoken, unbiased foreign ob- server of American race relations and demographic trends. Unlike Shaler, Hoffman had no obvious baggage to disclaim, but like him, Hoffman sought to transcend sectional strife by winning northerners to southern- ers’ points of view. He reminded his readers that “racial inferiority was the keynote of the pro- slavery argument,” which had been falsely “ex- plained away” by the abolitionists.72 With data and reason rather than passion and emotion, Hoffman tried to remove the stain of southern depictions of “black beasts,” dressing up black criminality for the North. His citing of northern crime statistics and his use of Chicago Tribune lynching statistics were subtle ways of drawing northerners’ attention to their own color- blind evidence that revealed the growing specter of black migrants “for whom,” he wrote, “vice and crime are the rule and honesty the exception.”73

In 1896 Hoffman sounded a national call to action. “Today, more than ever, the colored race of this country forms a distinct element and pres- ents more than at any time in the past the most complicated and seem- ingly hopeless problem among those confronting the American people.” The migration of blacks to “all sections of the country” was resulting in their increased population in “all the large cities,” a fact heretofore un- recognized, Hoffman wrote, since “these tables, I believe, are the fi rst to present with a considerable degree of accuracy the massing of the col- ored population of northern and western cities.” The danger awaiting these cities due to this migration was cumulative. First, the rate of black population growth in large cities was faster than the rate for whites. Sec- ond, blacks “crowded into a very few wards,” thereby creating segregated neighborhoods resulting in an “Africa” in the city. Finally, the black neigh- borhoods in northern cities were “as a rule . . . the most undesirable sec- tions of the cities.” In Philadelphia’s “Africa” or Chicago’s, New York’s,

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Boston’s, or Cincinnati’s, wrote Hoffman, “the colored population is found to be living in the worst section of the city” where “vice and crime are the only formative infl uences.” The time was now for “individual states” and the “nation at large” to take heed of this “most serious aspect” of the Negro Problem— its northern population growth. This increasing pres- ence of “undesirable characters” with their “evil effect” on northern cit- ies was “a serious hindrance to the economic progress of the white race.” “In the plain language of the facts brought together,” Hoffman warned, “the colored race is shown to be on the downward grade, tending to- ward a condition in which matters will be worse than they are now.”74

The fact that northern city leaders already blamed much of their crime on the slum communities of the foreign- born meant that warn- ings about the criminal tendencies of impoverished black migrants would have sounded more familiar than alarmist. Even the muckraking housing reformer Jacob Riis, author of an 1890 classic study of New York tene- ments and slum life, emphasized the common criminality of impoverished immigrants and blacks. According to Riis, “As the Chinaman hides his knife in his sleeve and the Italian his stiletto in the bosom, so the negro goes to the ball with a razor in his bootleg.”75 When Hoffman announced that Chicago’s “Italians, Polanders and Rus sians” lived under conditions “without question more severe” than blacks, and blacks still showed the “most decided tendency towards crime in the large cities,” he unequivo- cally marked the black urban migrant as a criminal of exceptional mea- sure. On this one crucial point, Hoffman seemed to directly answer Ball’s earlier criticism that poverty trumped race because the Irish and Italians showed similar death rates when compared to blacks in similar condi- tions. “Of the various nationalities enumerated,” Hoffman wrote, “the Irish and Italians show a percentage of arrests decidedly above the aver- age, yet small when compared with that of the colored element.”76

In a milieu where environmental or so cio log i cal explanations of the criminality of native- born and foreign- born whites were ascending along- side the gradual segregation of northern blacks, Hoffman helped to le- gitimate the further isolation of blacks as a dangerous race with excep- tional problems.77 Historian and criminologist Jeffrey Adler observes that, as black migration to Chicago gradually increased in the next de- cade, “Chicagoans of Eu ro pe an extraction, including both recent mi- grants and old- stock native- born Americans, often felt a powerful bond of racial solidarity,” including a shared fear of blacks as criminals. Most “white city dwellers” in Chicago and “other northern cities,” Adler

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writes, “believed that African Americans were violent and deviant,” and the whites sought various public policy mea sures to seal themselves off from them.78 The fi rst modern race- relations expert to evince the statisti- cal connections between black migration to the North, urbanization, and criminality, Hoffman helped to certify the nationalization of the Negro Problem. He smartly anticipated that these three factors taken together would shape, to varying degrees, race- relations discourse into the next century and beyond.

The impact of Hoffman’s ideas was detectable immediately following the book’s publication. Among white reviewers, the reception ranged from

Figure 2- 1 “A Downtown ‘Morgue’ ” appeared in Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives to draw attention to the evil of New York’s saloons that fueled crime and death rates. The large number of working- class white men of sordid appearance and likely immigrant origin pose a sharp contrast to Hoffman’s marking of the black man as an exceptional threat. Photo by Richard Hoe Lawrence, c. 1890, Museum of the City of New York, The Jacob Riis Collection (Riis 162)

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adulation and critical acclaim to mixed praise.79 All agreed on Hoffman’s exceptional talents as a statistician, and all noted the signifi cance of blacks moving to the urban North, spreading vice, crime, and disease in their wake.80 In one of social science’s premier northern journals, a white reviewer acclaimed that Race Traits was a pioneering achievement. It was a “most thorough and painstaking compilation” by a “competent” statisti- cian to “deal with the vital and social statistics of the negro race in the United States,” exclaimed Miles Menander Dawson, a New York actuary and a frequent reviewer of insurance- related publications. Thoroughly con- vinced by Hoffman’s fi ndings, Dawson summarized every section of the book without a single critical comment. No other race committed as much crime as blacks, wrote Dawson, despite the facts that about the same per- centage of black children attended school as whites and almost the same percentage of blacks and whites were active Christians. “Even in northern cities, where abundant opportunities are given,” Dawson noted, blacks are so ineffi cient that “comparatively few engage at skilled labor.”81 Hoffman’s per sis tent efforts to render racism invisible were paying off.

Before launching into his own inspired denunciation of blacks, Fred- erick Starr, a white anthropologist at the University of Chicago and a proponent of Lombrosian criminology, praised Hoffman for being an “unbiased foreigner” instead of a “prejudiced observer”— a recognition of the stakes of post- racialism at the dawn of Jim Crow.82 Starr’s review, “The Degeneracy of the American Negro,” was caustic, exhibiting the passion that Hoffman had perhaps intended to ignite. Starr’s own sum- mary of the “astonishing results” of “criminality in the two races” proved that Hoffman had unambiguously made his point to some of his white peers. “Conditions of life and bad social opportunities cannot be urged in excuse,” Starr wrote, because immigrants’ conditions “are fully as bad as for the blacks but their criminality is much less. The difference is racial [Starr’s italics].” Starr reiterated Hoffman’s conclusions in his own un- equivocal terms: “What can be done? Not much. . . . Less petting and more disciplining is needed; fewer academies and more work- benches. Recognition of white men and black men is fundamental. The desire to turn bright black boys into ineffi cient white men should cease. It is im- perative that we demand honesty toward the negro and decency from him. But we may expect the race here to die and disappear; the sooner perhaps the better.”83 Interestingly, the linking of crime to the folly of aca- demic training reinforced an idea that Shaler had joked about in his 1884 article: A “little colored girl” had once said that “you can’t get clean corners

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and algebra into the same nigger.” She was right, Shaler added, noting that it was even “diffi cultly effected in our own blood. The world needs clean corners, it is not so par tic u lar about the algebra [Shaler’s italics].”84 In the near future, new evidence of black criminality would help to shape de- bates about the state of black education in America.

Not all white readers or critics of Hoffman’s work, like Ball, uncondi- tionally embraced his racialism even as they agreed that his data were sound. A notable exception was biologist Gary L. Calkins of Columbia University. This was somewhat ironic, given how much the fi rst genera- tion of American social scientists modeled natural scientists, and how much ideological support they drew from biologists in asserting the constitutional inferiority of African Americans.85 Calkins described the book as an “admirable work,” noting that Hoffman’s logic was “con- vincing” and that his data clearly pointed to the “downward” trajectory of the race. But he was far from convinced by Hoffman’s all- encompassing racial analysis, arguing that “racial difference” might account for some of the disparities between whites and blacks but “that it accounts for all . . . is hardly proved by the facts produced.” The health- related dis- ruptions of migration and urbanization make no racial distinctions, he argued. “Nor must it be forgotten that a race suddenly thrown upon their own resources under entirely new conditions, as were the negroes after their emancipation, must necessarily suffer change of circum- stances, regardless of race tendencies.” Likewise, their immorality, “which is constantly increasing,” he added, “could” be viewed from the same perspective.86

Such initial cautions by white researchers such as Calkins and Ball gradually found greater currency among northern progressives when they began, somewhat half- heartedly, to apply their immigrant environmen- talism to African Americans as the Great Migration era approached. For the moment, however, dissent was small by comparison to the atti- tudes of many whites who were already animated by thoughts of south- ern “black beasts” and who fully embraced Hoffman’s empirically based, race- neutral depiction of a nationwide black crime problem.87 For the moment, the bulk of the questioning of the new crime data and its racial interpretations was left to a new cohort of black scholars, reformers, and journalists.

These middle- class and elite black women and men were young; many had never been enslaved, and some had received fi rst- rate educations at the most elite institutions in the nation.88 Ironically, they were members

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of the generation captured by the 1890 census, the census that many sci- entifi c racists had eagerly anticipated would prove the race’s inferiority once and for all.89 Historian Glenda Gilmore calls them the race’s “best men” and “best women” because they used their pedigrees and talents as personal testimonies to the race’s infi nite capacity for citizenship and excellence.90 They considered themselves “their own best argument,” writes historian Deborah Gray White, against the charge of racial inferi- ority.91 Not all of them actively desired to be antiracist leaders, but those who did included Mary Church Terrell and the women who founded the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, and W. E. B. Du Bois and the men who launched the American Negro Academy in 1897.92 Al- though they were hardly of one perspective or position on the Negro Problem— 1895, for example, marked the rise of Booker T. Washington, the white- appointed accommodationist leader of the race— they tended to explain their circumstances quite differently than whites did, if for no other reason than that they overwhelmingly asserted their hopefulness, their humanity, and their inalienable rights to freedom and fairness.93 “The present seems dark to the negro and that there is an increasing dis- content, is perfectly evident, still I am far from despairing of his success in the future,” wrote William Saunders Scarborough, a professor of classi- cal languages at Wilberforce University, the fi rst black author of a Greek college textbook, the fi rst black member of the Modern Language Asso- ciation, and a found er of the American Negro Academy. “If the South and North, white and black, will unite on lines of justice and humanity to man, the race question will work out its own solution with the least fric- tion and best results.”94 Notwithstanding much intra- racial class and gender friction, many elite black men and women, in the words of histo- rian Kevin Gaines, “sought to refute the view that African Americans were biologically inferior and unassimilable by incorporating ‘the race’ into ostensibly universal but deeply racialized ideological categories of Western progress and civilization.”95

Ida B. Wells was the fi rst of this generation of black scholars and re- formers to link the language of civilization with statistics to defend the race against charges of criminality. She published her fi rst two pam- phlets, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892) and A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892– 1893–1894 (1894), at the same time that Hoffman authored his fi rst articles. Although neither cited the other’s work, Hoff- man must have been aware of Wells’s work and her British antilynching

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campaigns of 1893 and 1894 by the time he published Race Traits in 1896.96 In 1892 Wells was a primary school teacher, a journalist, and an antiracist activist in Memphis who lost three close friends in a triple lynching after they defended their grocery store against a mob of white men intent on burning it to the ground.97 This was not an uncommon occurrence. Professional and entrepreneurial blacks were frequent tar- gets of mob violence in the South, especially when their commercial ac- tivities weakened the grip of white business own ers who systematically exploited blacks. For Wells, the tragedy and personal loss were extremely diffi cult to accept, especially when the local white press applauded the violence. That she had long borne witness to white journalists’ usual jus- tifi cations for lynching as the only way to handle black criminals and “Negro rapists” left her no option but to speak truth to power. In the preface to Southern Horrors, she wrote, “Somebody must show that the Afro- American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so. The Afro- American is not a bestial race. If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a ser vice.”98

Historians of Wells’s life and times credit her for inventing “forceful new arguments” and for being a “point of origin” in “American critical thought on lynching and racism.”99 Gail Bederman writes that Wells turned the Anglo- Saxon “discourse on whiteness, civilization, and manli- ness” on its head by redefi ning lynching as an act of barbarity by white men who “burned innocent black men alive for the ‘crime’ of sleeping with willing white women, while they themselves brutally and boldly raped black women.”100 In 1892 Wells’s printing press was destroyed by arson- ists; threatened with mortal harm, she left the South forever. She became a statistic, one of the soon- to- be- counted and much- discussed black mi- grants, fi rst landing in New York, frequently visiting Philadelphia to draw support from the city’s resourceful black religious and education leaders, and eventually settling in Chicago for the remainder of her life. There, after the turn of the century, she led a call for progressive- style crime prevention and outreach among young black men who suffered the triple burdens of labor- market discrimination, the stigma of criminality, and segregation from white- and immigrant- only social welfare agencies.101

Like almost everyone else in the twentieth century, Wells later witnessed and responded to the ubiquitous referencing of black crime statistics in all

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manner of race talk, which she had less to do with in the 1890s than did later black social scientists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Kelly Miller, Monroe N. Work, Richard R. Wright, Jr., Sadie T. Mossell, and Anna Thompson.102 In comparison to Hoffman, Wells neither identifi ed herself as a statisti- cian nor focused on the 1890 census. Still, her method for compiling lynching statistics was the same as Hoffman’s. In preceding him by two years, she was doubtless one of the fi rst race- relations writers, black or white, to analyze the Tribune’s lynching data. Though an overwhelm- ingly white- on- white American tradition of vigilante “justice” from the colonial period to the nineteenth- century Old West, lynching had only become a racist blood sport in the 1880s and 1890s.103 On average in these two de cades, “one person was lynched every other day, and two out of three were black.” At the start of the twentieth century, lynchings fell to one every four days, but 90 percent of the victims were African Ameri- cans.104 Like Hoffman, Wells was keenly aware of how her personal identity mattered to the reception of her study, proclaiming that her re- search had come strictly from white newspaper sources. “Out of their mouths,” she boasted defi antly in the opening pages of A Red Record, “shall murderers be condemned.” The heart of her condemnation was her meticulous reading, one by one, of press accounts of just over eleven hundred black men, women, and children who were “hanged, shot and roasted alive from January 1st, 1882 to January 1st, 1894,” of whom 31 percent were actually “charged with rape.”105

Her research fi ndings defi ed most whites’ understanding of lynching (and even, to a lesser extent, the way some elite blacks viewed the matter). Before Wells, few white people questioned the claim that the “majority” of lynchings in the country were, as Hoffman put it, “undoubtedly” the results of rape committed by black men.106 Wells’s aim was to debunk the myth that nearly every lynching of a black man represented a statistic of a ravaged white woman. She also wanted to challenge the emerging idea that any evidence of black criminality in the North was obvious proof of black inferiority, since many whites claimed that northern racism did not exist. In her retelling of northern press accounts, she highlighted how northerners contributed to the lynching craze and the scapegoating of black suspects by fabricating their own stories of black predators in their midst. In Philadelphia, for example, she told of an attractive and “well educated” white girl from a “good family” who had been stealing from her parents for some time. When a shadow of suspicion fell on the girl, she lied to the “daily papers” that a “colored man” had “gagged” and

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“bound” her and had stolen the money. In Cleveland, a mother and grand- mother conspired to have a black handyman disposed of by accusing him of “outrag[ing]” their four- year- old child. A preliminary hearing produced no evidence, but revealed that the women had concocted the scheme to avoid paying him a season’s worth of wages.107

Wells’s most provocative fi ndings involved the rape or attempted rape of black women by white men. Of the dozen or so cases she cited, most took place in the South, but a few were from the Midwest and the North- east. Typically a white man or a “gang” of whites sexually attacked a young black woman. If the men were arrested, they were either acquitted or served minor sentences (far less than the many years similarly convicted black men received if they were lucky enough to make it to prison). None of them fell prey to a lynch mob. In Nashville, for example, Pat Hanifan “outraged a little colored girl,” received a six- month jail sentence, and then became a city detective. In Baltimore “a gang of white ruffi ans as- saulted a respectable colored girl” who was out with her escort. Her date was held down while she was raped. All were acquitted. “Colored women,” Wells wrote bitterly, “have always had far more reason to complain of white men in this respect than ever white women have had of Negroes.”108 In A Red Record, Wells exposed the enduring sexual violence perpetrated against black women, begun in slavery, and the unacknowledged hypoc- risy of the lynching hysteria.109 She exposed the double bind of racial and sexual exploitation manifested in the fi gurative and literal dehumaniza- tion and destruction of black bodies.110

Given Wells’s total repudiation of white supremacists’ explanations for lynching and black criminality, it is easy to imagine Hoffman’s incre- dulity when he came upon her work. It is not easy to imagine that he never knew of her work. He was extremely well read, curious, and thor- ough in his attempts to draw upon experts on topics of interest to him. That Hoffman probably ignored Wells’s work is suggested by the fact that Robert Porter, one of his peers and the superintendent of the 1890 census whose signature appeared on the title page of the report on crime in the nation, publicly commented on the success of Wells’s British cam- paign.111 Although Wells’s efforts created a storm of national controversy and an international scandal, for the most part she was not taken seri- ously by mainstream white race- relations writers like Hoffman, who from the beginning dominated the social scientifi c discourse on black criminality. Race and gender explain much of the “deafening silence,” according to her biographer. Wells fi t into no neat categories. She was a “kind of po liti cal

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exile.” She was too bold as a female public fi gure, too outspoken in criti- cizing white women reformers for accepting lynching as a “necessary evil,” too proud of her race to condone the conservative accommodation- ism of Washington- type black male leaders, and ultimately too unladylike and provocative in her sex talk for black club women. Her unequivocal antiracism may have marginalized her the most.112

Other black men and women of Wells’s intellectual acumen and per- sonal commitment to race work were slightly less marginal by compari- son to Wells because they either believed that some blacks had racial tendencies toward criminal acts or because some, as racial uplifters, were more willing to traffi c rhetorically in the high- value currency of black criminality so as to be taken seriously by whites.113 But regardless of their gender or their class elitism or their rhetorical strategies, the fi rst generation of professionally trained black social scientists, the vast ma- jority of them men, were generally ignored by their white counterparts.114 They were also few in number.115 As one historian notes, in the early years of mass freedom “scholarly speculation among African- Americans was a luxury as rare as Mississippi snow.”116 From the 1890s until the 1920s, except when their words conceded, corroborated, or confi rmed that blacks committed too many crimes— no matter their typically nu- anced framing of the problem as primarily a symptom of industrial capi- talism plus racism—“most white practitioners of racial science were able to silence the opposition of black thinkers.”117 Historian Davarian Bald- win explains that “the innovative Black scholarship on race relations was different enough from most ideas within the traditional or gan i za tion al structure of” the fi eld of sociology “that the work was systematically il- legible, illogical and hence invisible.”118

Nevertheless, black scholars responded to Hoffman’s book with a mixture of ambivalence, sharp criticism, and restrained outrage. Neither W. E. B. Du Bois, the fi rst black Harvard- trained social scientist and the fi rst black academic to gain national attention as a race- relations expert, nor Kelly Miller, a pioneering black mathematician whose quantitative training and interest in the Negro Problem led him to launch a sociology department at Howard University, accepted Hoffman’s prediction or Starr’s endorsement of their race’s impending disappearance.119 In his review, Du Bois called it an “absurd conclusion” based on the “unscien- tifi c use of the statistical method.”120 Although Miller fi rst conceded that the book was the “most thorough and comprehensive treatment of the Negro Problem, from a statistical standpoint,” rivaling in its ability to

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“awaken” scientifi c interest in blacks what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done to arouse “sentiment and generous feelings” for the race, he then agreed with Du Bois that Hoffman’s conclusion was re- ally a smokescreen for “a priori considerations.”121

Miller’s 1897 review, the fi rst published paper of the American Negro Academy and itself a bestseller among African Americans, dissected the book chapter by chapter, allowing none of Hoffman’s arguments to es- cape scrutiny. For example, he discounted Hoffman’s entire treatment of the North as proof positive of blacks’ hereditary shortcomings, arguing that social “captivity” and “isolation” were far more characteristic of the conditions facing the “Northern Negro.” Blacks in the North were “com- pletely submerged,” he wrote. Their crime was primarily determined by their “social degradation.” Not questioning the data but reversing Hoff- man’s statistical logic, Miller said that the census “nowhere” proved “any connection between crime and race but between crime and condition.”122 Northern black crime rates, from Pennsylvania’s prisoners to Chicago’s arrestees, were “six to eight times greater” per capita than whites because of racial discrimination.123 “The criminal outbreak under the circum- stances is only natural.” If whites were to “exchange places” with blacks, then “the same story would be narrated of” them.

To be sure, Miller did not discount “this high criminal record” as sim- ply a myth or a product of statistical sophistry. On a very basic level, he accepted Hoffman’s charge of excessive criminality as partly the respon- sibility of blacks to fi x. This was one of the earliest indications of the powerful rhetorical and ideological currency of black crime statistics even among African Americans. It is important, however, to note— for this was a point frequently ignored by Miller’s white peers— that to ad- mit that blacks played a role in the crime problem was not to concede racial inferiority but to insist that everyone had a part to play in the solu- tion. Ultimately, Miller saw the problem in universal terms, both histori- cal and so cio log i cal, that he believed held true for all groups: “The Jews in Egypt labored under circumstances remarkably similar to those of the American Negro” as they struggled to survive amid their own moral and physical “degeneracy” in the wilderness of freedom for forty years after emancipation. “Luckily for the Hebrews, there were no statisticians in those days. Think of the future which an Egyptian phi los o pher would have predicted for this people! And yet out of the loins of this race have Sprung the moral and spiritual law- givers of mankind. We should not be discouraged because the Negro does not make a bee- line from Egyptian

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bondage to the Promised Land beyond Jordan. . . . If all the misdeeds of any people or individual were brought to light, the best of the race would be injured and the rest would be ruined.”124

Along similar lines, Du Bois found much of Hoffman’s data “interest- ing and valuable,” but considered his interpretations highly suspect. There was no inherent reason why Hoffman had to emphasize “the bad as typifying the general tendency” of the race. Clearly the statistics showed mixed results: “increasing intelligence and increasing crime” as well as more wealth and more poverty. “Such contradictory facts are not facts pertaining to ‘the race’ but to its various classes, which development since emancipation has differentiated.” Like Miller, Du Bois suggested an alternative reading of the data in both universal and antiracist terms. It was “natural” among “all races,” he wrote, to experience in a “single generation” more material progress than moral progress. After all, the “dazed freedman” could comprehend the urgency of work “much easier” than how to rebuild the family life and moral foundation destroyed by slavery. The “younger generation” only turned to crime in the face of “dogged Anglo- Saxon prejudice” by which they were “subjected to dif- ferent standards of justice” than “white malefactors.” “To comprehend this peculiar and complicated evolution, and to pronounce fi nal judg- ment upon it, will take far greater power of analysis, niceness of inquiry, and delicacy of mea sure ment than Mr. Hoffman brings to his task.”125

Du Bois’s superior education, including a Harvard Ph.D. plus three semesters at the University of Berlin— the crème de la crème of aca- demic training in the social sciences— prepared him to see the irony in Hoffman’s German background and his “unscientifi c use of the statistical method.” Turning the tables on Hoffman, the former student of Max Weber pointed out that in Hoffman’s “own German fatherland” high death rates matched or exceeded those of blacks in the United States.126 Were residents of Munich also headed for race extinction? What of Mon- treal, Naples, Belfast, Budapest, Breslau, and Madrid, which “all have shown within a few years, death rates equal” to or in excess of “Ameri- can Negroes in cities”? Was illegitimacy among the inhabitants of Rome, Munich, Stockholm, Paris, and Brussels the beginning of the end of mo- rality among Eu rope’s elite races, given that their rates of out- of- wedlock childbirths were higher than the “Negroes of Washington [D.C.]”? The bottom line, argued Du Bois, was that the study of black life needed much more investigation at the local level and “from par tic u lar points of view.”127

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This was precisely Du Bois’s point in “The Study of the Negro Prob- lem,” an address delivered at a meeting of the American Academy of Po- liti cal and Social Science in the fall of 1897, several months after his re- view appeared.128 By this time Du Bois was an assistant instructor at the University of Pennsylvania and was conducting the fi rst- ever book- length so cio log i cal investigation of an American city. The study was “a break- through achievement,” the seminal text on urban sociology, not soon to be matched by the research of the nation’s inaugural sociology depart- ment at the University of Chicago, founded in 1892.129 It seems an un- likely coincidence that his groundbreaking study, The Philadelphia Ne- gro, was launched about the same time Hoffman’s book was making headlines since, as Du Bois recalled many years later, he was brought to Philadelphia to conduct research to investigate the “theory” that the city “was going to the dogs because of the crime and venality of its Negro citizens.”130 Having already completed the fi eldwork at the time of the annual meeting— 835 hours of interviewing in 2,500 house holds, the life histories of 10,000 men, women, and children— Du Bois told his white peers that the “manifest and far- reaching bias” of race- relations writers should no longer substitute for the pursuit of a “reliable body of truth,” that “deep, fi erce convictions” must no longer guide the “uncritical study of the Negro.” Systematic investigation of facts must supplant widely held opinions based on “faith [rather] than of knowledge.”131 “Intensive stud- ies” should be conducted in “limited localities” by “competent and respon- sible agents.” The use of “any general census,” he warned fi nally, was likely to lead to “dangerously misleading” conclusions.132

Without naming names, Du Bois paused to highlight Hoffman’s work as a case in point. The “foreigner’s views, if he be not exceptionally as- tute, will depend largely on his letters of introduction”; like American pseudo- experts whose credibility is secured only by “birthplace and par- entage,” he will “fail” to capture the complexity of the Negro Problem and will “succumb to the vulgar temptation” to turn any “little contribu- tion” into “general conclusions as to the origin and destiny of the Negro people in time and eternity . . . Thus we possess endless fi nal judgments as to the American Negro emanating from men of infl uence and learning, in the very face of the fact known to every accurate student, that there exists to- day no suffi cient material of proven reliability, upon which any scientist can base defi nite and fi nal conclusions as to the present condi- tion and tendencies of the eight million American Negroes; and that any person or publication purporting to give such conclusions simply makes

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statements which go beyond the reasonably proven evidence.”133 Unsur- prisingly, given its dramatic rise as a national topic of discussion and de- bate, Du Bois singled out black criminality as a research area that was thoroughly awash in myth, ste reo type, and ignorance. “It is extremely doubtful,” he complained, “if any satisfactory study of Negro crime and lynching can be made for a generation or more, in the present condition of the public mind, which renders it almost impossible to get at the facts and real conditions.”134

On that cool November day in Philadelphia, as Du Bois instructed a mostly white audience of social scientists and reformers on how to study the Negro, he may have found himself uncertain about how his own ongoing intensive study of Philadelphia’s black criminals would be re- ceived by the public. By suggesting that no real knowledge could be as- certained for several years to come, he appeared to be hedging against his own contribution to reifying in white people’s minds that too many blacks had “criminal tendencies.” Even as he critiqued the “fi nal judg- ments” of his white supremacist peers, he knew that eight months earlier he himself had verged perilously close to being guilty as charged.

Du Bois’s March 5, 1897, speech “Conservation of the Races,” deliv- ered at the inaugural meeting of the American Negro Academy, put crime at the forefront of the Negro Problem.135 Before the racial gifts of the American Negro—“our physical powers, our intellectual endowments, our spiritual ideals”— could be realized in that “broader humanity which freely recognizes differences in men” without in e qual ity, we must seek unity and purifi cation, Du Bois told an august gathering of Talented Ten- thers, the upper crust of the educated black elite. “Weighted with a heri- tage of moral iniquity from our past history, hard pressed in the eco- nomic world by foreign immigrants and native prejudice, hated here, despised there and pitied everywhere; our one haven of refuge is our- selves.” But eight million people can rise to greatness only by fi rst being “honest, fearlessly criticizing their own faults, zealously correcting them.” We must put an end, he continued, to po liti cal corruption, materialism, crime, and immorality. We must be “united to keep black boys from loaf- ing, gambling and crime; united to guard the purity of black women and to reduce the vast army of black prostitutes that is today marching to hell.” Members of the black vanguard must “bravely face the truth, not with apologies, but with solemn earnestness.” Wagging a proverbial fi n- ger at poor southern blacks, his words nearing a crescendo, Du Bois stated that “a note of warning” should echo “in every black cabin in the

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land” that “unless we conquer our present vices they will conquer us; we are diseased, we are developing criminal tendencies, and an alarmingly large percentage of our men and women are sexually impure.”136

Many historians see “Conservation” as a remarkable demonstration of Du Bois’s youthful embrace of racial essentialism, a view that all blacks were endowed with the same special gifts only needing to be unlocked from the inside, part antidote to Hoffman’s charge of self- destructive race traits. Lewis observes that Du Bois later looked back on this per- spective as “something of an embarrassment.”137 What has not received the same attention in this speech, however, are Du Bois’s earliest thoughts on black criminality. These profoundly signifi cant ideas occupied a cen- tral place in his initial engagement with the race- relations discourse. The crime problem was so important to him at the outset of his scholarly and activist career that in his coming- out speech before his black mentors and esteemed peers, he recommended making crime fi ghting their top prior- ity: “We believe that the fi rst and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between the races— commonly called the Negro problem— lies in the correction of the immorality, crime and laziness among Negroes themselves, which still remains as a heritage from slav- ery. We believe that only earnest and long continued efforts on our own part can cure these social ills.”138

The fact that Du Bois was still writing The Philadelphia Negro is cru- cial to capturing the complexity and tensions in his early crime analysis. This was an experimental period in Du Bois’s intellectual development.139 As a twenty- nine- year- old budding social scientist, he tried to approach the race problem by resisting preconceived conclusions. The “diffi culties of studying so vast and varied a subject are so large that the fi rst work to be done should be rather of an experimental or preliminary nature,” he wrote two months after the “Conservation” speech in a letter to Carroll D. Wright, the census offi cial who had worked with Hoffman years be- fore and was now seeking Du Bois’s expertise for an economic report on black southerners.140 Du Bois was, after all, setting out to practice what he preached against in Hoffman’s work.

But Du Bois could not entirely expunge his personal views from his own scholarship, a limit he recognized and fully admitted in the opening pages of The Philadelphia Negro.141 From “Conservation” to the Ameri- can Academy of Po liti cal and Social Science address to the fi nal Philadel- phia report, there is an unmistakable tension between his elitist sensibil- ity and Victorian concern about individual moral accountability, and his

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professional view of crime as a “tangible phenomena of Negro Preju- dice.” In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois did not hesitate to moralize against the young black gamblers and prostitutes of Philadelphia’s cor- rupt Seventh Ward, or to wage a full- scale rhetorical attack on the im- morality of poor black southerners.142 In Du Bois’s early writings, in Hoffman’s writings, and in the writings of many others who succeeded them, the data and discourse on black criminality at this founding mo- ment masked the full range of ideological differences among many white and black race experts. When the statistical reality of black criminality was fi rst making its way along the information railway of the industrial age, the critique of racism and the critique of racial inferiority were con- stantly overlapping. As numerous scholars have emphasized in their studies of racial uplift ideology, more often than not black elites’ intra- racial appeals for unity and progress in the Progressive era depended on one- sided jeremiads against poor and disreputable blacks.143

Contemporaries could hear or read in these statements the same con- demnation of blackness, if that is what they chose to do. For example, among Hoffman’s many proofs of crime and immorality as race traits, he wrote, “That an im mense amount of concubinage and prostitution pre- vails among the colored women of the United States is a fact fully admit- ted by the negroes themselves.”144 He also cited evidence from the ground- breaking book Hull House Maps and Papers. The fact was “so forcibly brought out” by Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, Hoffman wrote, that wherever large numbers of blacks lived in the urban North, “houses of ill- fame and dives of the lowest order abound.” Compiled by two white liberal pioneers of the settlement house movement, Hull House Maps was a proto- Compstat analysis, mapping vice and crime in Chicago’s slum communities for the ultimate purpose of community- based crime preven- tion.145 Context made all the difference in how both black and white ex- perts expected their crime analyses to be interpreted and understood.

Du Bois claimed that The Philadelphia Negro was fi rst and foremost a seminal study of the history and sociology of a black community in the urban North. It was the fi rst of many local “intensive,” systematic inves- tigations of the facts and real conditions of black life in America. “The world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know,” Du Bois wrote years later, refl ecting on his initial scholarly engagement with race- relations discourse. “The ultimate evil was stupidity.”146 The Philadel- phia Negro was the fi rst step in his multistep knowledge program to end the Negro Problem. With this purpose in mind, Du Bois produced an

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unpre ce dented in- depth analysis of the class structure of black Philadel- phia. Considering the whole as greater than the sum of its parts, the four classes he identifi ed— the “aristocracy of the race” (12 percent), the “hard- working, good- natured people” (52 percent), the “poor and unfortunate” (30 percent), and the “submerged Tenth (6 percent)”— amounted to a pow- erful rebuttal to the sweeping negative generalizations against all blacks, especially the charge of criminality. Du Bois saw the problem of black criminality much like the way Hoffman had characterized white criminal- ity, as an “unfortunate” consequence of economic conditions. “We have here the [statistical] record of a low social class, and as the condition of a lower class is by its very defi nition worse than that of a higher, so the situation of the Negroes is worse as respects crime and poverty than that of the mass of whites.” In the wake of a “period of fi nancial stress and in- dustrial depression,” he continued, black and white crime both increased, but less so for whites “by reason of their richer and more fortunate up- per classes.”147 Even his use of the term submerged shifted partial re- sponsibility away from this “lowest class of slum elements” by implying that these individuals were oppressed by means other than just their own behavior.

Within this frame of analysis, Du Bois intended for crime to be seen as “a phenomenon that stands not alone, but rather as a symptom of count- less wrong social conditions.” In an unfl inching chapter- long investiga- tion of the serious crimes of the “submerged Tenth,” Du Bois described mostly young black men who typically stole or assaulted others; who tended to be “ignorant,” southern- born, repeat offenders; and who lived “in such [an] environment that they fi nd it easier to be rogues than hon- est men.” Yet all of the lawlessness did not alter his assessment that rac- ism was the “vastest of the Negro problems.” He reminded readers that since the colonial period these “perpetrators” had been subject to all the handicaps of being poor and black defendants in the criminal justice sys- tem. He redefi ned race traits as temporary defi ciencies rooted in the moral debasement of slavery. He linked emancipation and northern mi- gration to the universal experience of displacement and strain, like the wilderness period for the Hebrews of the Old Testament. He emphasized ongoing, not simply historical, acts of white discrimination in every sphere of black life. Beyond the “ordinary,” all of these were aggravating causes of black criminality. According to Du Bois, they were the factors that made black people’s crimes both excessive and peculiar. Otherwise, the heart of the Negro Problem was not crime but the exclusion of black

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people from within the “pale of nineteenth- century Humanity.” In the work’s fi nal pages, he wrote:

We have, to be sure, a threatening problem of ignorance but the ancestors of most Americans were far more ignorant than the freedmen’s sons; these ex- slaves are poor but not as poor as the Irish peasants used to be; crime is rampant but not more so, if as much, as in Italy; but the difference is that the ancestors of the En glish and the Irish and the Italians were felt to be worth educating, help- ing and guiding because they were men and brothers, while in America a census which gives a slight indication of the utter disap- pearance of the American Negro from the earth is greeted with ill- concealed delight. . . . This is the spirit that enters in and compli- cates all Negro social problems and this is a problem which only civilization and humanity can successfully solve.

As was commonly expressed on the white side of the color line, Du Bois wanted Philadelphia’s black crime problem to be greeted as a cause for concern and intervention rather than as a celebration of internecine genocide.148

Far less noted by historians was Du Bois’s initial linking of crime fi ght- ing to racism.149 Even in “Conservation,” Du Bois did not simply wag a fi nger at black criminals and prostitutes, though the tone and tenor of his rhetoric suggested otherwise. He combined his primary call for an anti- crime self- help solution with a secondary call for whites to end racism. “We believe that the second great step toward a better adjustment of the relations between races,” he stated, is the color- blind recognition and re- warding of talent in the “economic and intellectual world.” In The Phila- delphia Negro, he tipped the balance toward equal responsibility, calling for a dual approach to the crime problem: “The Duty of the Negroes” was to fi rst make every effort “toward a lessening of Negro crime” in spite of racial oppression; “[t]he Duty of the Whites” was to eliminate prejudice and discrimination in spite of “intermingling” with a “race so poor and ignorant and ineffi cient as the mass of the Negroes.”

That the Negro race has an appalling work of social reform before it need hardly be said. Simply because the ancestors of the present white inhabitants of America went out of their way barbarously to mistreat and enslave the ancestors of the present black inhabitants gives those blacks no right to ask that the civilization and morality

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of the land be seriously menaced for their benefi t. . . . But if their [whites’] policy in the past is parent of much of this condition, and if to- day by shutting black boys and girls out of most avenues of decent employment they are increasing pauperism and vice, then they must hold themselves largely responsible for the deplorable results.150

From “Conservation” to The Philadelphia Negro, even as he thought out loud and committed words to the page, the two sides of the problem were approaching inseparability in Du Bois’s mind.151 The complications in his own thoughts thus led him to doubt what the “public mind” was able or even willing to comprehend that November day before the American Academy of Po liti cal and Social Science.152

Du Bois’s admonition against Hoffman’s brand of racial analysis, two years before the fi nal publication of The Philadelphia Negro, seems to have been his attempt at saying that it was possible to criticize bad be- havior among blacks without eliminating racism as a major factor and passing fi nal judgment on the inferiority of the entire race. Elsewhere during this period he would begin to express his personal despair over the tendency of whites to simplify the race problem and to see in the struggle and “strivings of the Negro People” justifi cation for prejudice. In one of his most famous essays, fi rst published in the August 1897 issue of Atlantic Monthly, midway between his “Conservation” speech and his American Academy of Po liti cal and Social Science address, Du Bois fi rst described his own sense of living behind the veil, of being defi ned by others as a “problem.”153 “It is a peculiar sensation, this double- consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of mea sur ing one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused con- tempt and pity.” He then linked the racialized oppression of black people in America to an enduring conundrum:

A people thus handicapped [by centuries of enslavement and degra- dation] ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social problems. But alas! While sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is dark- ened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow pre- judice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defense of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the “higher” against the “lower” races. . . . But the facing of so vast

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a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self- questioning, self- disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany re- pression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate.154

Here, before The Philadelphia Negro was fi nished, was the fi rst arti- culation of the self- fulfi lling prophesy of racism, poverty, crime, and in e- qual ity in modern America. Still, the Philadelphia study was Du Bois’s most important scholarly contribution, an exegesis of this most compli- cated phenomenon. He opened the Souls of Black Folk, his most widely read publication— in which he intoned that “the problem of the twentieth- century is the problem of the color- line”—with a reprint (and slight revi- sion) of the 1897 Atlantic Monthly essay. For many years to come, in numerous reports, essays, speeches, and editorials, he would press his two- pronged solution to the crime problem, shifting emphasis and blame ever so slightly to suit the biases and “stupidity” of his audiences.

Immediately following the completion of The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois’s tendency to move back and forth between emphasizing the need for self- improvement and emphasizing an end to racism, depending on the complexion of the audience, is perfectly illustrated by an article and a speech he gave in the same year. The article, “The Negro and Crime,” ap- peared in the May 18, 1899, issue of the In de pen dent, a northern liberal magazine. In responding to an earlier article in the publication that had blasted blacks for their vices (“the negro is the mongrel of civilization”), Du Bois fi rmly insisted that the history of slavery and the emancipation experience went a long way toward explaining the “Negro criminal class”—“it is astounding that a body of people whose family life had been so nearly destroyed . . . should in a single generation be able to point to so many pure homes.” He then listed and explained four additional causes in the order of their signifi cance: convict leasing, discrimination in southern courts, mob violence, and “the drawing of the color- line.”155

By contrast, a few months later he delivered a speech, “The Problem of Negro Crime,” at the Atlanta Negro Historical Society. According to a caption accompanying the January 1900 reprint in the Bulletin of Atlanta University, the address was “handled in such a way to make a deep impression upon those who heard.” Du Bois began by asserting that the strictest test of the “Negro’s progress is that of his criminal record.” Citing the 1890 census, he said, “despite, then, all the discrimination and all other excuses that might be brought there can be no reasonable doubt but that the Negroes of this land furnish two or three times as many

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criminals proportionately as the whites.” In his usual way, he linked crime to the natural disruption of the emancipation period and concluded with fi ve self- help recommendations: “establish better homes”; “educate our children”; inculcate a faithful and honest work ethic regardless of how menial the job; associate with “decent people” only; and unite with white Georgians to open a juvenile reformatory to keep young people from the “prison and chain gang.” Herbert Aptheker, who fi rst collected and as- sembled Du Bois’s voluminous body of work, observes that around 1904 Du Bois “rejected” the views he expressed that day. In an October 1940 address, Du Bois publicly refl ected on his change of perspective at that time.156

Still, despite all the moralizing and data crunching about black crimi- nals, Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro was “shamefully neglected.”157 The book never came close to attracting as large an audience as Hoff- man’s Race Traits. It did not become a nonfi ction bestseller. It did not turn race- relations discourse on its head. Although it was reviewed in a few academic periodicals, it was ignored by the American Journal of Sociology (AJS).158 No mention of the book appears in that journal until 1903, when it was listed among texts used at Hampton Institute as part of a survey of sociology curriculums around the country.159 Nearly a de cade passed be- fore it was fi rst cited in the footnotes of an AJS article.160 As late as the 1930s, not even the University of Pennsylvania’s sociology department offi cially acknowledged, as historians Thomas Sugrue and Michael Katz write, “the most signifi cant research in the history of the department.”161 It neither infl uenced a generation of sociology students nor garnered Du Bois critical praise and scholarly adulation befi tting his accomplishment. It was an ominous sign, no less clear than in Ida B. Wells’s case, of the outcome for a black race- relations expert or reformer who refused to let racism off the hook.

To be sure, Du Bois’s Philadelphia research helped secure his next posi- tion at the historically black campus of Atlanta University. But in Lewis’s assessment, he became a “scholar behind the veil.” He wrote and super- vised thirteen major research studies between 1898 and 1910, unmatched by most peers in quantity and quality, most of them cutting- edge reports that dissected all aspects of black life in the South. Du Bois nevertheless became an increasingly marginal fi gure to northern research foundations that repeatedly passed him over to fund white race experts who did not have a tenth of his training or experience.162 Only with historical hind- sight culminating around the centennial anniversary of The Philadelphia

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Negro’s publication have Du Bois’s scholarly contributions been posthu- mously recognized within the academy. A 1991 appraisal of his work in the American Economic Review notes that “the extent of descriptive and statistical detail in Du Bois’s studies is rarely matched even today.”163 Re- fl ecting on the legacy of his exclusion from the “white car of scholarship,” historian Ira Katznelson writes that American social science and history have suffered “intellectual conformity and normative bankruptcy” by fail- ing to include the “fi rst rate work” of Du Bois and other black scholars “relegated to the outer limit or edge of social standing.”164

Du Bois’s work was not totally unappreciated by white race- relations writers of his day. A review in the American Historical Review, the lead- ing journal of historians, praised Du Bois for his candor. “He is perfectly frank, laying all necessary stress on the weaknesses of his people, such as their looseness of living, their lack of thrift, their ignorance of the laws of health, the disproportionate number of paupers and criminals among them as compared with the whites.” The anonymous reviewer’s only criti- cism was that some of his conclusions were overly optimistic that the Negro Problem could be solved in social terms. Du Bois had not suffi - ciently considered the saliency of racial inferiority. Speaking for the pro- fession, the reviewer concluded, “We believe that separation is due to differences of race more than of status.”165 Du Bois’s crime rhetoric did draw attention, but not exactly in the ways he had intended.

In September 1899 Walter Willcox, one of the most infl uential econo- mists of his generation and the chief statistician of the United States Census Bureau, delivered one of his most widely quoted papers, “Negro Criminality,” before the American Social Science Association meeting in Saratoga, New York.166 The New England- born professor from Cornell University, promising a “fair- minded, clear- sighted and outspoken posi- tion,” asked his audience to reconsider their ideas about racial bias in the nation’s criminal justice system. Reminding them of familiar southern examples of racism, such as juror discrimination and sentencing bias, he asked whether the same arguments could hold true in the North. “Does it take less evidence to convict a Negro here, or is a Negro’s sentence for the same offense likely to be longer? Such claims have never to my knowledge been raised.” He then cited the latest prison data that showed that black prisoners in the North had higher per capita rates of incarcera- tion than in the South (69 versus 29 of every 10,000 residents). In light of the numbers, there was not an obvious answer to his question other than the presumption among these good- hearted northern academics that

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northern racism could not explain the difference. So as to be clear, he stated: “These facts furnish some statistical basis and warrant for the pop- u lar opinion, never seriously contested, that under present conditions in this country a member of the African race, other things equal, is much more likely to fall in to crime than a member of the white race.”167 In other words, what many already believed to be true was now proven.

Willcox then cited the opinions of “representative Negroes” from the July 1898 annual Negro Conference at Hampton Institute. “The criminal record of the colored race in all parts of the country,” Willcox quoted, “is alarming in its proportion.” Like Booker T. Washington’s annual Tuske- gee conferences, Hampton’s annual gatherings were intended to show southern moderates and northern philanthropists the benefi ts of indus- trial education as a worthy movement for black self- help or, as the New York Times noted in its coverage, “the aim in regard to each [topic dis- cussed] was to fi nd the faults for which the negro was responsible and to see how to supply the lack or fi nd the remedy.”168 Given African Amer- icans’ own testimonies, then, racism was less the problem than racial in- feriority. Considering that slavery “was never established” in the North, and that across the region the percentage increase of blacks going to prison was even greater than in the South, Willcox argued that the na- tional black crime problem could no longer be ignored. “In these fi gures, one fi nds again some statistical basis for the well- nigh universal opinion that crime among the American Negroes is increasing with alarming ra- pidity.” In a fi nal attempt to dispel any remaining doubt about his con- clusions, he read Du Bois’s note of warning in “Conservation” and said, “I may quote the concession of the Negro who is perhaps doing as much as any member of his race to throw light upon its present condition.”169

At the dawn of the Jim Crow era, writing crime into race became the latest trend among race- relations writers across the country. Hoffman’s innovation of using crime statistics had helped to overcome the long- sought- after scientifi c goal of credibility within racial scientifi c discourse. Many of Hoffman’s pre de ces sors, who had once struggled to distance themselves from the charge of proslavery bias while objectively acknowledg- ing the “feral state” to which blacks had returned since freedom, welcomed the “new scientifi c study of the negro.” G. Stanley Hall, for example, a pio- neering Harvard psychologist, found er of the American Journal of Psychol- ogy in 1887, and one of Shaler’s mentors, described this period as a terrifi c opportunity to embrace the new social science research because it was a “more solid and intelligent basis” on which to end the sentimental notion

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of racial equality. Racial “differences are coming to be better under- stood,” he wrote, “so that what is true and good for one is often false and bad for the other.” As “an abolitionist both by conviction and de- scent,” Hall instructed black people to stop “sympathiz[ing] with their own criminals” and to “accept without whining patheticism and corrod- ing self- pity [their] present situation, prejudice and all.”170 With a grow- ing body of evidence of the excessive crime rates of black people every- where they could be counted— despite, or because of, the underlying social, po liti cal, economic, and racist realities underlying those statistics— the idea of black criminality quickly became a fundamental mea sure of black progress and potential in modern America.

Hall’s racialized vision of crime prevention— a call for a separate so- lution to crime among blacks— was emblematic of how the idea of black criminality shaped the thinking of many white reformers, including neo- abolitionists and progressives, in this era. White criminality was society’s problem, but black criminality was black people’s problem. Such think- ing contributed to discriminatory social work approaches and crime- fi ghting policies in black communities, with devastating consequences, including the worsening of social conditions. Among whites, struggling neighborhoods were considered a cause of crime and a reason to intervene. Among blacks, they were considered a sign of pathology and a reason for neglect. Against the grain, Du Bois called crime “a sinister index of social degradation and struggle.”171 Black criminality, he insisted, should be solved using “the very remedies which the world is using on all submerged classes” with “goodness,” “beauty,” “truth,” and “faith in humanity.” Such differences between Du Bois’s vision and Hall’s refl ected the malleability of the concept depending on one’s racial ideology.172

Still, the idea fl ourished even as some raised doubts about the accuracy of the census crime data as a source for comparing the criminal tendencies of different groups. One of the fi rst academics in the United States to have “statistics” attached to his title, the pioneering University of Pennsylvania professor Roland P. Falkner, believed that comparative analysis “should be thorough, systematic and reasonable.” More than a scientifi c issue, he wrote, “it is a matter of the gravest practical importance” since “pop u lar interest” in crime is chiefl y concerned with “the greater criminality of the foreign- born and colored elements as compared with the native and white.” He argued that the census would have been more accurate if it had reported the total number of prisoners received during the year ver- sus the population on a single day. The new method, he proposed, was

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able to account for new offenders who had served a short sentence but had been released before the census enumeration. It also avoided double- counting prisoners with sentences of one year or more. Falkner pointed out that by mea sur ing new commitments instead of population, sentencing bias would have been eliminated. “If one class receives longer sentences than another, or commit classes of crimes for which longer sentences are given it will appear unduly magnifi ed in the census report.” Falkner con- cluded that the 1890 census had distorted the criminal tendencies of dif- ferent groups. Blacks were shown to have committed more crimes than their total share and immigrants fewer.173

Falkner anticipated many of the criticisms of early prison and police data made by late- twentieth- century scholars. But, as social science histo- rian Lawrence Rosen has pointed out, these limits were not generally “obvious to the criminologists and criminal statisticians of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century.” Their “uncritical generaliza- tions,” therefore, have to be understood in the historical context in which they informed early- twentieth- century pop u lar and public policy under- standings of criminality.174 Similarly, historian Daryl Michael Scott warns contemporary scholars that too frequently social science “studies written prior to World War II have been interpreted not in light of the intellectual and po liti cal debates that prompted those research projects, but in con- nection with proposals and policies that originated during Lyndon John- son’s Great Society.”175 Signifi cant doubts about the accuracy, reliability, and interpretive use of crime statistics for comparisons of racial groups did not emerge among white social scientists until the 1920s and 1930s in the midst of a nationwide campaign to standardize arrest statistics, culmi- nating in the Uniform Crime Reports.176

In the meantime, Willcox acknowledged Falkner’s doubts about the census data in a footnote. He agreed that prison statistics “exaggerated the criminal tendencies of Negroes” but felt that this distortion was off- set by the fact that comparing prisoners to “persons of all ages” tended to “understate the true criminality of a race.” This was a weak defense since age distortion— population infl ation due to the inclusion of children and the elderly— impacted all races, which he also admitted. The sentencing distortion still adversely singled out blacks. Willcox nevertheless “[brought] the facts home” by ending his statistical proof of black criminality with a quotation from Du Bois.177

Black race- relations writers often contributed to the crime discourse with the intent of challenging white supremacists’ interpretations.178 As

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Du Bois’s and Wells’s works demonstrate, black crime experts often used crime data and racial violence as symptoms of oppression to focus pre- cisely on the “conditions of life” in the North and South that many white race- relations writers often dismissed. At times, however, they also unwit- tingly contributed to the writing of crime into race.

Monroe N. Work, for example, a graduate student at the University of Chicago and soon to be its fi rst black sociologist, answered the chal- lenge to the race posed by Hoffman’s research.179 Complementing Du Bois’s Philadelphia fi ndings, Work launched his own intensive fi ve- month study of black criminality in Chicago from November 1897 to May 1898, which was published in late 1900. Focusing primarily on arrest statistics since 1872, he confi rmed the then well- known trend that black criminal- ity was proportionately highest in the North and was increasing.180 He also found that black Chicagoans were arrested on average six times more frequently than immigrants. Written in a dry, clinical voice more characteristic of empirical reports today, “Crime among the Negroes of Chicago: A Social Study” was nearly devoid of antiracist tones and must have confi rmed what many readers of the American Journal of Sociology believed to be true. In a somewhat incoherent fi nal section, however, Work disagreed with Hoffman’s “position that the negro is retrograding” by countering that blacks were “making progress in civilization.” If the “hypothesis of his social advancement” was true, the graduate student tentatively suggested, the black man’s crime is due to his “transitional state from a lower to a higher plane” and the “economic stress” accom- panying it. Work observed that 75 percent of Chicago blacks “had, or gave, no occupation” at the time of their arrests compared to 38 percent of whites. In addition to economic factors that increased black criminal- ity, Work added the causes of crime “common to all races” and “the race characteristics peculiar” to blacks.181

In comparison to Du Bois, Wells, Kelly Miller, and the future work of Richard R. Wright, Jr., what ever nod to racism Work intended by his fi nal comments could not have been very convincing. Like other black writers, he mistook white social scientists’ ability to cite white criminal- ity as a symptom of the ravages of the industrial economy and modern civilization—“common” causes— as an invitation to apply the same logic on their side of the color line. Ultimately, the crime research and espe- cially the intra- racial appeals for moral betterment by many black writ- ers and reformers often achieved the opposite effect, reifying the ten-

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dency among most whites “to believe the worst about Negro character and prospects.”182

The premium placed on the work of black writers whose crime dis- course explicitly confi rmed white supremacists’ beliefs and practices was on full display in the reception of William Hannibal Thomas’s 1901 book, The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become. The Ohio- born black missionary, educator, and journalist in the postbellum South based his study on twenty- fi ve years of personal observations. His methodology alone should have made his work mar- ginal by the standards of the audience for whom he claimed to be writ- ing, especially since he dismissed the reliability of existing data to mea- sure the “actual crime instinct in the negro.”183 Nevertheless, the book was, according to the author, an indispensable “contribution to Ameri- can sociology.” Speaking directly to “American white people,” Thomas gave his readers more justifi cation for depicting the race as criminal than any “accurate” statistic could ever have accomplished by itself. His most recent biographer writes that Thomas’s “list of negative qualities of Negroes seemed limitless.”184 Unmatched in his racist rhetoric by any other black writer of his day, Thomas insisted that the majority of blacks were men- tally retarded, “savage[s] at heart,” and amoral—“unable practically to discern between right and wrong.” Most “negroes” were an “intrinsically inferior type of humanity” who preferred a “low order of living” and whose history was a “record of lawless existence, led by every impulse and passion.” Equating the sum of black humanity to apes, Thomas wrote: “Really, the inferiority of the negro in mind, morals, judgement [sic], and character is such that there is no doubt that some very plausible confi r- matory evidence of the justness of the simian theory of human origin might be derived from a close inspection of his demeanor.”185

Controversial and attacked by the vast majority of African Americans of every ideological perspective, The American Negro was hailed by many whites as the most authoritative treatise to date on African American in- feriority.186 Even before the manuscript had been accepted for publica- tion by the Macmillan Company, Franklin H. Giddings, one of the found- ing fathers of American sociology, the found er of Columbia University’s sociology department, and the third president of the American So cio log- i cal Association, wrote in his reader’s report that the book was the most complete, detailed account of the American Negro ever published: “As a so cio log i cal study it is one of the most valuable things to [be] put in the

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hands of genuine students of american [sic] conditions that I know of.”187 As news of its forthcoming release hit the market, the book was hailed not only for its thorough treatment, but for its objectivity as well. The writer “presents his subject without an atom of the sentimentality which has so often proved a blemish in many books otherwise most ex- cellent,” announced the New York Times book review section a month before the book’s release.188

More impressive still was the fact that the author was a black man. After the book appeared in print, the New York Times gave it another rave review: “Mr. Thomas is probably, next to Mr. Booker T. Washington, the best American authority on the negro question” because of his race and his enlightened perspective on his own people. “No white man has ever so far as we can remember, arraigned the freedman with such scath- ing denunciation of his faults and vices” as Thomas. “Such a jeremiad, delivered by one belonging to the very race against which it is hurled, carries unmistakable conviction of the writer’s sincerity and knowledge whereof he speaks.” Thomas’s observations lead to a “mental vision” of a “sinister and terrible fi gure still to be dealt with in our social economy.” Finally cutting to the book’s most damning observation, the unsigned review noted that there was nothing whites could do to help, “since the most ignorant and degraded examples of freedmen are to be found in the North, where they have enjoyed every advantage around them unrestricted. What better proof of racial incapacity is needed?” With- out a fundamental change in the “negro’s” nature, the situation was nearly hopeless.189

Thomas’s observations, like Hoffman’s data, revealed as much about the hardening of racial categories in the new century as they attempted to explain why crime was a growing problem in black communities.190 The inseparable linking of the two social categories of race and crime was not inevitable; it was the conscious result of several writers’ attempts to expand defi nitions of blackness beyond physical traits, historical association with slavery, and nineteenth- century romanticiza- tion of blacks as a child race. White or black writers who could marshal crime statistics from government data with alarmist predictions about the future of the race in urban places, especially northern cities, plus tie in a compelling narrative of the historical and biological factors that made American Negroes fundamentally different from American whites, and fi nally repudiate charges of racism, were sure to be noticed by many.191

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In the same vein as the New York Times, C. C. Closson, a white re- viewer for the Journal of Po liti cal Economy, praised Thomas as a candid and courageous black writer. Recommending the book, Closson wrote that despite some of Thomas’s tendencies to exaggerate, “unfortunately, there is probably too much of truth in the picture.”192 Although the American Journal of Sociology never reviewed Du Bois’s so cio log i cal treatise, it did review Thomas’s. Ironically, the reviewer, Richard R. Wright, Jr., a theology student at the University of Chicago and a pioneer black Social Gospeler on the city’s South Side, panned the book for high- lighting only the worst elements of the race. “His book is as fair a char- acterization of the race as a detailed description of the slums and dens of vice of Chicago would be of the whole city,” he wrote.193 It may or may not have been considered a mistake by the journal to give Wright the op- portunity to denounce the book. But in light of the high praise it received among whites Wright’s review likely corroborated, for some at least, a sense that Thomas’s study stood alone against a rising tide of black “sen- timentality.” Putting Du Bois in the ranks of those with a “rosy faith in the negro’s prospects,” one critic jointly reviewed The Philadelphia Ne- gro and The American Negro, giving the edge to Thomas. “Professor Du Bois’s statistics are worthy of careful study,” but “they are a little weak in the pages devoted to showing that the negro is not so criminal as he is popularly represented to be.”194 That Du Bois was even compared to Thomas— two “negroes” of equal talent— was a sign that his credibility among white social scientists was in free fall. Du Bois nonetheless pointed out that the enthusiastic reception of Thomas’s “virulent criticisms” was not at all surprising. “Mr. Thomas’s book is a sinister symptom” of the times, witnessed in “the exigencies of the book market” and the “more or less unconscious Wish for the Worst in regard to the Negro,” he ex- plained. “If the Negro will kindly go to the dev il and make haste about it, then the American conscience can justify three centuries of shameful his- tory; and hence the subdued enthusiasm which greets a sensational arti- cle or book.”195

The excitement surrounding The American Negro revealed just how quickly black criminality had captured the nation’s imagination after 1896. To be sure, southern rhetoric about black criminals— racist justifi - cations for lynching, convict leasing, prison farms, and chain gangs— preceded Hoffman’s book. But in the wake of new national crime statis- tics, especially northern prison and arrest data from Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York, southern claims of blacks’ criminal nature were fi nally

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exorcized of the ghost of their Confederate past. In the wake of the new crime discourse, Shaler’s call for the scientifi c “union of endeavor on the part of those of North and South, of ex- slaveholder and ex- abolitionist alike” was fi nally being answered, even from the pen of a black man.196

Southern white writers wholeheartedly welcomed the new lines of com- munication as an important step toward national reconciliation. Thomas Nelson Page’s 1904 book, The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem, was one of the earliest and most explicit attempts in the new century to convince northern readers that white southerners were not inherently any more racist or violent toward blacks than northerners were. Page was a descen- dant of the Virginia planter class and a pop u lar fi ction writer of the Old South. He explained that “deep racial instincts are not limited by geo- graph i cal bounds”; the increasing numbers of northern lynchings and mob attacks on “wholly innocent” and “unoffending Negroes” were proof of that. Southerners only appeared more brutal, reasoned Page, because of the “greater number of Negroes in that section.”197

Page effectively used population and crime statistics the same way a Prudential Insurance statistician had in 1896: where blacks are, crime will follow. The ex- chief of the Census Bureau, Willcox, had helped clear the way for Page’s argument by showing that black criminality in the North was increasing at a higher rate than in the South. Clearly, Willcox argued, a racially biased southern criminal justice system could not ex- plain higher black criminality in the racially liberal North.198 Either the North was not as tolerant of blacks as federal policy and some northern writers had made it appear, Page added, or black criminality brought out the worst in everyone. To argue the latter, Page relied on “the most re- markable study of the Negro which ha[d] appeared.” Referring to Thomas’s book, he ominously boasted:

His chapter on this subject will be, to those unfamiliar with it, a terrible exposure of the depravity of the Negroes in their social life. . . . Unfortunately for the race, this depressing view is borne out by the increase of crime among them; by the increase of super- stition, with its black trail of unnamable immorality and vice; by the hom i cides and murders, and by the outbreak and growth of the brutal crime which has chiefl y brought about the frightful crime of lynching which stains the good name of the South and has spread northward with the spread of the Negro ravisher.199

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With his northern readers at full attention at the “frightful” thought of more “Negro ravishers” and more northern lynchings— based con- vincingly on the “depressing view” of an “open- minded” black expert and increasing crime rates— Page made black criminality a rallying cry for national reconciliation. In his view, the fact that both sections of the country were vulnerable to being “drag[ged] down” by the “debased” Negro threatened the nation’s future and whites’ racial supremacy. “No country in the present state of the world’s progress can long maintain it- self in the front rank,” he wrote, “and no people can long maintain them- selves at the top of the list of peoples if they have to carry perpetually the burden of a vast and densely ignorant population.” With ten million Negroes within its borders, the South needed understanding, not repudi- ation, from the North.200

Two years earlier, in 1902, Thomas Dixon, Jr., a southern lawyer, min- ister, and playwright, wrote a best- selling novel similarly focused on na- tionalizing white southerners’ views on black criminality.201 According to a reviewer, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Bur- den was meant to justify white supremacy to northern readers by pre- senting as “vividly as possible the faults and crimes current among the Negroes of the South.”202 At the book’s climax, a black man was burned at a stake for having raped and murdered a white woman. “Plainly the design is that the reader,” a reviewer wrote, “shall exclaim in his indigna- tion, ‘I too would have helped to do the same, under the same circum- stances!’ ”203 The “circumstances” portrayed by Dixon gave the book’s eye- catching title its signifi cance, implying that there was no possibility of changing black people’s brutal nature through philanthropy and edu- cation. By Dixon’s rendering, then, the outlook was grim if northerners continued to try to elevate Negroes to the same level as whites. The two grand themes found in The Leopard’s Spots— national unity and black retrogression— reached hundreds of thousands of Americans through its print run of nearly one million books.204

Dixon’s work, with its commercial success, and Page’s book, which followed shortly, demonstrated the increasingly pop u lar appeal of think- ing about black criminality and white responses on a national scale. Dixon’s other bestseller, The Clansman, which was adapted for the big screen and became one of the fi rst motion picture blockbusters as The Birth of a Nation, put the lynching of a black rapist at the heart of a na- tional narrative about exterminating the danger within.205 The general

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recognition of this trend in pop u lar culture and social scientifi c thought inspired a major roundtable at the 1907 annual meeting of the American So cio log i cal Association in Madison, Wisconsin. Some of the most promi- nent sociologists in the country gathered to hear and discuss Alfred Stone’s paper, “Is Race Friction between Blacks and Whites in the United States Growing and Inevitable?” Stone, a southern sociologist and a Mississippi plantation own er “who controlled the lives of hundreds of black tenants,” wanted his northern colleagues to be very clear about one thing.206 Race prejudice was inevitable, but it was not a southern white phenomenon or a northern white aberration, he stated. It was the natural “antipathy” of whites, “an inherited part of his instinctive mental equipment,” to the presence of a fundamentally different and inferior race. “The proposition is,” Stone continued “too elementary for discussion, that the white man when confronted with a suffi cient number of negroes to create in his mind a sense of po liti cal unrest or danger, either alters his form of government in order to be rid of the incubus, or destroys the po liti cal strength of the negro by force, by evasion, or by direct action.”207

Stone’s paper only implied a connection between black criminality and black inferiority as a source of race friction. Apparently stating that ex- plicitly might have been too elementary, since four of the eight socio logists who published responses to Stone’s paper— Walter Willcox of Cornell University, U. G. Weatherly of Indiana University, J. W. Garner of the Uni- versity of Illinois, and Edwin L. Earp of Syracuse University— interpreted black criminality as the center of the problem. Willcox referred to it as a “rough index of race friction.” Weatherly spoke of it as one of the most obvious indications of black inferiority: “Patience and toleration toward [the black man] are diffi cult when the facts that come most to the atten- tion of the average white are those of crime, unthrift, and po liti cal corrup- tion.” Garner tied black criminality to migration and urbanization, while Earp, expressing the most liberal interpretation, saw it in relation to a lack of economic opportunities.208 In a subsequent review of Stone’s con- ference paper after it had been repackaged in Studies in the American Race Problem along with others of his essays (and Willcox’s “Negro Criminal- ity”), Frank Blackmar, a University of Kansas sociologist, praised the book for “being the most valuable contribution yet appearing on the race prob- lem in the United States.” Impressed by the race- relations interpretations of his esteemed northern colleagues, Blackmar added, “Owing to his igno- rance, superstition, indolence, childish nature, and racial characteristics,” the black man “is his own worst enemy.”209

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This roundtable discussion, published in the May 1908 issue of the American Journal of Sociology, crystallized the way in which African American criminality had gradually helped to bridge deep divisions over the meaning of black freedom since the end of slavery and Reconstruc- tion, opening new lines of communication between the North and the South in search of a national solution to the race problem. In light of the conclusions reached at the Wisconsin meeting, Lewis writes, a “grim truth” emerged that “the march of science and industry tended to exacerbate race relations in the North as well as the South.”210 Two months later, in this “climate of national victimizing,” New York feminist writer and evo- lutionary theorist Charlotte Perkins Gilman offered her own “suggestion on the Negro Problem.” Since the problem was “the question of conduct” or preventing those “who are degenerating into an increasing percentage of social burdens or actual criminals,” she recommended state- run forced labor camps.211

The race writers who conducted major studies or seminal works with a new emphasis on crime as the Negro Problem at the dawn of the Jim Crow era identifi ed the transition from slavery to freedom as the origin of the problem. Frederick Hoffman argued that it was a “well- known fact” that crime did not exist during slavery, but in freedom, and espe- cially in large cities, blacks were being reduced by their inferiority and immorality to “the anti- social condition” that “before many years will be worse than slavery.” Walter Willcox insisted that slavery had not built up moral capital in black people; therefore they were unprepared and irre- sponsible in freedom. W. E. B. Du Bois believed that crime was a normal result of a “vast and sudden change like that of emancipation,” especially for those “unable to adjust themselves to the new circumstances.” Wil- liam Hannibal Thomas noted that slavery had effectively restrained the “abeyant passions of [negroes’] undisciplined nature.” Thomas Nelson Page observed that slavery had civilized the “savage from the wilds of Africa.” It was precisely the blacks who had not grown up in slavery, whom he called the “new issue,” who were fueling black crime rates. Thomas Dixon, Jr., like Page, pointed out that crime was an immediate consequence of the loss of southern whites’ control during Reconstruc- tion.212 While it is obvious that these writers did not all agree about whether slavery had bred crime— Du Bois called crime a “heritage of slavery”— or had restrained it, they did agree that the present situation represented a sharp break from the past.

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Many white race- relations writers hoped to blaze a research trail to solve the Negro Problem by writing crime into race. In the pro cess, they also hoped to save the nation by using black criminality as a rhetorical bridge to heal deep sectional divisions and distrust rooted in the postbel- lum era. These writers saw vital racial statistics as a pathway to certainty and serenity. Beginning with Hoffman, they wanted their fellow Ameri- cans to see the indisputable evidence of black criminality as the key to binding the nation together in a campaign to keep the “negro” in his place.

Although the notion of black people as a race of criminals was perva- sive and ubiquitous, the future was not all bleak. Some white race ex- perts were not entirely convinced despite the new crime statistics. Like most black scholars and reformers, they resisted the temptation to com- pletely dismiss “conditions of life” and racism as factors in the crime problem. M. V. Ball had been among the fi rst northern whites to call the racialization of crime statistics into question, just as Ida B. Wells had been among the fi rst southern black women to do the same. Even the pop u lar science writer and Harvard scholar Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, who had done as much as any northern race- relations expert in the post- bellum period to call for statistical investigations of black inferiority, balked at the new crime data. “The statistics of crime are not in such form as to make it clear in what regards they depart from the averages of the white population,” he wrote in a 1900 Pop u lar Science Monthly ar- ticle. Even the most horrifying crimes, Shaler believed, were not “pecu- liarly common among the blacks.” Given that of fi ve million black men “probably not one in ten thousand” was guilty of rape, and given that rapes by white men tended to be underreported, Shaler was “inclined to believe that, on the whole, there is less danger to be apprehended from them in this regard than from an equal body of whites of the like social grade.”213 Shaler’s speculation that white men were as guilty (if not more so) of rape as black men was surely perceived by some whites as an act of racial treason. Wells’s work might have infl uenced him.

Seeing the arc of the discourse after nearly twenty years had passed from Shaler’s fi rst article on “The Negro Problem,” the self- described racial liberal took an optimistic view of “the future of our American negroes.” Though still a “half- savage people” and an “unexplored race,” Shaler re- mained hopeful that over time, through industrial training and with the “masterful race’s” help, blacks could become “valuable citizen[s].” That black people actually had the inherent capacity for citizenship, in Shaler’s assessment, was a repudiation of the racial Darwinism of Hoffman and

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many others, and spoke to the shifting winds of the discourse among northern liberals. Du Bois’s efforts, like Wells’s, it seems, were not totally in vain. A dim light was beginning to shine on northern racism. “Sambo,” Shaler wrote, was deprived “of opportunities in all the higher walks of life” in the North and the South. “In this matter there are but two courses open to us— one of folly, the other of wisdom. We may leave the black people to work out their own salvation as best they may, to lie as a mass at the bottom of our society. . . . Or we may set to work” with knowl- edge and strength to meet the great challenge ahead.214

Although Shaler passed from the world a few years later, in one of his last articles he renewed his call to solve the Negro Problem and to save the nation. But this time, well into the Progressive era, he was insisting that a rising cohort of racial liberals pursue a middle ground between racial research and racial reform:

A necessary part of the work of true emancipation of the negro is a careful inquiry into the history and former status of the people. Such an inquiry, placed and kept in good hands, is a necessary pre- liminary to sagacious action. It may serve to unite the men of all parts of the country in a work that so nearly concerns us all. There is not, nor is there likely to arise, a situation that so calls for intel- ligent patriotism as this we are sorely neglecting. We may go far away and rear an empire with our armies; but if we leave these, our neighbors, without a fair chance to develop the good that is in them, we shall have lost our real opportunity for great deeds— mayhap we shall fi x among us evils that in the end will drag us down.215

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