“I’m not really a fan of how the middle- and upper-class AAs behaved before and how they still behave today. They are some of the most educated and have businesses and thus the noblesse oblige duty falls on them to be the representation of our community. You cannot complain that entertainers and athletes are the face of the community while at the same time you hide yourselves in your little pockets of privilege. How are the younger generation going to know such a path exists if you hide yourself? If you don’t want to be associated with the likes of Sexyy Red, then come out and be the face of the community. Come out and set standards for the younger ones to follow. STOP whining.” — commentator @blessedbethy on You Tube video This Is What Colored People Always Do
Where shall I start this essay this evening? It could go in several directions. I could critique a dishonest framing of Harlem life in the 1930s by Wikipedia. Oh, how my blood boils when I read history of black Americans and things are left out. My mood begins to shift from happy and mellow to the outer limits of annoyance. Probably fertile ground for an essay. But see, I really, really love to be mellow and laid-back about life. I just like reading the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
I can feel the muse stirring.
Let’s review social class in Harlem in the 1930s. As many readers well know and a new reader Quinn Que reminded me this week, there was so much intellectual energy and good that came out of Harlem in the 1930s. We call the cultural movement The Harlem Renaissance for good reason. My favorite writer out of the Harlem Renaissance was Jean Toomer, a grandson of Acting Louisiana Governor P.B.S. Pinchback. I suppose everyone has their favorite Harlem Renaissance writer, intellectual and artist.
The writers, intellectuals and artists were one side of Harlem. There was another side of Harlem as well that writers do not remember so much.
W. E. B. DuBois (1868 - 1963) is a noted black American writer, scholar and intellectual in our past. His seminal The Souls of Black Folks is a classic analysis of black American culture and consciousness around the turn of the last century. Published in 1903, “[i]n The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois used the term "double consciousness", perhaps taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson ("The Transcendentalist" and "Fate"), applying it to the idea that black people must have two fields of vision at all times. They must be conscious of how they view themselves, as well as being conscious of how the world views them.”
The Souls of Black Folks is now outdated and no longer useful as a prescription for living life in the modern era. See my The Souls of Black Folks essay (September 13, 2023). Isn’t it odd how there is a healthy multi-paragraph source on Wikipedia for The Souls of Black Folks (1903) and no reference whatsoever for The Black Bourgeoisie by E. Franklin Frazier (1957)? 76 paragraphs devoted to The Souls of Black Folks versus 0 paragraphs devoted to The Black Bourgeoisie.
The Dishonest Framing of Wikipedia
Did you know that DuBois wrote other books in addition to The Souls of Black Folks? Raise your hands if you knew. Well, he did. How many other books did Du Bois write over his career until his death in 1963? Du Bois would write around 21 books, depending upon the definition of a manuscript. That is a lot of books. More than the former President of Harvard University by the way.
I draw your attention to Dusk of Dawn, a book DuBois authored at the mature age of 72. DuBois wrote his book while living in Harlem. He was able to draw upon a wide range of experiences and observations of black Americans. Had I simply read the description of Dusk of Dawn in Wikipedia, I would have been bored. Wikipedia offers up a blanket of abstractions to describe the book. It traces the genealogy of race as it affected Du Bois’ life. The book offers a short autobiography of Du Bois’ childhood in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. It is about “illogical trends and irreconciliable tendencies.” The book offers an ideological concept — the concept of race— and theories on race as a psychological level to maintain exploitation of society. I saw a reference to the influence of Marx in the passage. I was disinclined to follow the whiff of dogma and slogan words.
Until I discovered Brooklyn Saint Mickell’s take on the book. And my head was turned around.
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What the Black Middle Class Really Thought — But Never Said Out Loud
Blacks in the 1930s had ideas about low-class black people in Harlem. Saint Mickell once again takes an unsung text and shares some raw honesty about people. It is illuminating. Dr. DuBois is a clear friend of black people, and a Marxist as well hanging out with Mao Zedong in 1959. So, if Du Bois has less than charitable observations to share…
In Dusk of Dawn (1940), DuBois observed the impact of class among black people in Harlem. DuBois prefaces his remarks in the Chapter The Colored World Within by examining black people in their “daily human intercourse and play.” I would expect no less from the author of the “book The Philadelphia Negro (1899), a detailed and comprehensive sociological study of the African-American people of Philadelphia, based on his fieldwork in 1896–1897. This breakthrough in scholarship was the first scientific study of African Americans and a major contribution to early scientific sociology in the U.S.”
Like the supreme sociologist that he was, DuBois looked behind the public mask of oppression performance blacks engaged in. You know, Blackness is Oppression. Nothing else matters, and all that. Du Bois recounted the following observed remarks on p. 89 of Dusk of Dawn:
“Just like n———.”
“This is what colored people always do.”
“What can you expect of the brother?
“I wish to God I had been born white!”
These sentiments came from the black middle class. They were not shy in the presence of Dr. DuBois.
My favorite passage in the book is when DuBois recounts the following setting. Four people have been playing bridge, and they are now waiting for supper to arrive. “The apartment is small but comfortable; perhaps a little too full of conventional furniture, which does not altogether agree in pattern.” The home belongs to a “fairly well-to-do people who like each other and are enjoying themselves.”
Now, what I find interesting is these people gathered together were intensely race conscious unlike moi. And this makes so much sense, right? People living in Harlem in the 1930s versus me living in San Diego in the year 2025. Let’s continue.
“There is a young colored teacher from the public schools of New York-well-paid and well-dressed with a comely form and an arresting personality. She is from the South. Her mother had been a servant and housekeeper in a wealthy Southern white family. Her grandmother had been a slave of their own grandfather.
This teacher was mighty annoyed and put upon this evening. Why? She had to walk through Harlem that night and was assaulted with loud, vulgar words from the rough elements. Men blocked the sidewalks. No manners. No consideration. She ranted about “the familiarity and even insults of dark loafers.” For the curious, she meant idle black people on the street up to no good. “Insistent bad manners and resentful attitude of so many of these Harlem black folk.” Saint Mickell uses the label loud, vulgar black folks with nothing better to do than insult a school teacher on the streets.
There is no evidence that DuBois corrected the woman or took offense.
Next up was a lawyer. He lit up a cigar and launched into his own rant. A graduate of Fisk University and law school at the University of Michigan, “(h)e complained of the crowded conditions of living in Harlem; of the noise and dirt in any Negro community; of the fact that his life would be hell if he tried to live in a better white neighborhood. If one managed to buy a home in a white neighborhood, whites would sell out. “Homes were transformed into lodging houses, undesirable elements became your neighbors.” p. 90 Black Flight begat White Flight begat the hamster wheel of no forward constructive change. Just around and around from Black Flight to White Flight to Black Flight again. As Saint Mickell notes, the undesirable element brought a different set of values and attitudes. “They left the ghetto and moved into a better place” but the mentality they had remained the same. Violence to solve disputes.
The lawyer explained he had just moved into a nice apartment in Sugar Hill the previous year. “It had just been turned over to colored people. The landlord promised everything. I started out of the apartment last night; there was a pool of blood in front of my door, where they had been a drunken brawl and cutting the night before.”
Who wants to live in that environment? Even in the 1930s in Harlem, who wants to live in that neighborhood?
Next up in the conversation was a doctor. Native of New York and a graduate of Howard Medical School, the physician felt uncomfortable. But he vented to the assembled group. “I don’t mind going with colored people; I prefer it, IF they are my kind. So much common sense. Saint Mickell hammers home the point that it is not about skin color. It is about whether people share the same values and attitudes. This is true for all groups, not just the black middle-class in Harlem in the 1930s. Do you get along with someone or are you dumbing yourself down to engage someone across the lunch counter? “The ghetto stays with the ghetto. The criminals hang around the criminals. The white supremacists hang with the white supremacists. The good citizens of the universe hang with the good citizens of the universe.” — Brooklyn Saint Mickell
The doctor complained about discrimination at the hands of whites and his desire to discriminate against some kinds of black people: “But I gag at the kind of colored people always in evidence, against whom I want to discriminate myself.” p. 90. That is deep, dear readers, very deep from the color line in Harlem in the 1930s.
What the doctor revealed is a double consciousness of class, his discrimination at the hands of whites and his desire to discriminate against other kinds of black people. The Souls of Black Folks has morphed from a dual consciousness of race in 1903 to a dual consciousness of class in the 1930s in Harlem. The black doctor in Harlem must have two fields of vision at all times. He must be conscious of how he viewed Our Kind of People and how Other Kinds of People viewed him. “In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois used the term "double consciousness", perhaps taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson ("The Transcendentalist" and "Fate"), applying it to the idea that black people must have two fields of vision at all times. They must be conscious of how they view themselves, as well as being conscious of how the world views them.” DuBois witnessed at the gathering a dual consciousness grounded in social class.
As Saint Mickell surmises, the doctor wanted to identify with black people. But some kinds of people gave blacks a bad reputation.
Then the insurance man had his say. He talked about crime and the criminals. “Is this poverty, sickness and crime; the cheating of Negroes not only by whites, but by Negroes themselves; the hold-ups and murders of colored people by colored people. I am afraid to go to some places to make my collections. I don’t know of what is going to become of Negroes at this rate.” p.90 These are words of frustration spoken in the 1930s in Harlem.
I saved the best for last.
The wife of the insurance agent came out of the kitchen and joined the group. The daughter of laborers who had gone to Boston after emancipation, she became a social worker before she married. And she said
“What’s got me worried to death, is where I am going to send Junior to school. Junior is bright, and has got nice manners, if I do say it; but I can’t send him to these Harlem schools. I was visiting them yesterday; dirt, noise, bad manners, filthy tales, no discipline, overcrowded. The teachers aren’t half trying…I just can’t send Junior there; but where can I send him?
My Mom faced the same questions about her Junior and schools in 1970. Her solution? Send Junior to Salem Church Junior High School in the fall of 1972 in Chester, Virginia. Send Junior to Thomas Dale High School in Chester in the fall of 1976. Junior turned out just fine.
Conclusion: There has always been a separation of class among Black Americans since the dawn of the Brown Fellowship Society in 1790, if not before. That mother above could have been my Mom. My Mom faced those challenges in 1970 and she made a bee line for the suburbs. Just part of the American experience.
There is no evidence that DuBois heard these stories and took offense. I am not aware that he corrected anyone. He knew the difficult, corrupt and chaotic circumstances in Harlem in the 1930s. Everyone of the middle-class operated under a different set of rules from other kinds of people. We should be honest about the human condition. I am reminded of the quote "This is Africa" spoken by the character Danny Archer in the 2006 movie Blood Diamond. We must accept harsh realities of class.
To paraphrase the writer Quinn Que, if we have the will, it is not about race.
