Race and the Burden of History

‘White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret’By A.J. Baime, Mariner Books, 383 pages‘The Color of Abolition: How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation’By Linda Hirshman, Mariner Books, 330 pages‘Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird’By Gene Andrew Jarrett, Princeton University Press, 560 pages‘Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik’By Winston James, Columbia University Press, 464 pagesThe phrase “poet laureate of his race,” applied to Paul Laurence Dunbar, made me think of “Who Speaks for the Negro,” by Robert Penn Warren, a white Southern writer who renounced his segregationist sensibility, first enunciated in a 1929 essay. In the early 1960s, he interviewed scores of African Americans, some famous and some not, about the contemporary state of racial politics.Warren discovered, of course, a huge range of opinion about racial problems, depending on his interlocutors’ positions, ranging from the judicious president of a Negro college to a truculent Malcolm X, poised outside not only American institutions but skeptical of Warren himself, to Martin Luther King Jr., careful to maintain the composure of an integrationist public figure. What makes Warren’s book so arresting is the dramatic biography of the poet/novelist’s interaction with the different African-American voices he heard. What he heard is that to be African American is a contentious question. That seems to be the intriguing subtext of Michelle Obama’s funny remark in the recent “First Lady” Showtime series, when she calls her husband “half-black Superman.” She is amused. He is amused. But as several recent biographies suggest, who speaks for African Americans is often not a laughing matter.The head of the NAACP, the light-skinned Walter White (1893-1955), could pass for white, and did, investigating lynching and other forms of racial injustice. The color line becomes an intriguing, complex story in A.J. Baime’s well-told narrative of a “race man” who lived in two worlds and bucked the demands of both.White ran into trouble endorsing his friend Carl Van Vehten’s novel, “Nigger Heaven” (1926), a white man’s interpretation of the Harlem Renaissance. The novelist introduced white patrons to African-American artists and befriended Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, both of whom defended the novel. Yet that did not spare White from accusations of supporting a white man engaged in cultural appropriation. W.E.B. Dubois called Van Vechten’s work a “blow to the face.” Dubois needed to take a shower after reading it. At nearly the same time, in 1928, Dubois and Marcus Garvey — not usually allies — denounced Jamaican-born Claude McKay’s harshly realistic characters in “Home to Harlem,” McKay’s biographer notes.Linda Hirshman’s group biography of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and the lesser known Maria Weston Chapman, a “beautiful, wealthy Bostonian nicknamed ‘the Contessa,’” is a fitting companion to Baime’s book, as an exploration of the fraught relationships between white abolitionists with their own racial prejudices and Douglass. Chapman, Ms. Hirshman argues, played a pivotal role in the estrangement between Douglass and Garrison, but also in the emergence of Douglass as his own man who went on to exert considerable influence on the Republican Party. Chapman bankrolled a Douglass speaking tour, but then accused him of disloyalty. In effect, Ms. Hirshman argues, Chapman’s letter-writing campaign against Douglass steeled him and prepared him for dealing with the connivery of politics and of white abolitionists he had to placate and manipulate. Douglass had to become more than a prophet of freedom; he had to politic for it. This brings us back to the political evolution of Robert Penn Warren, who realized that nothing he could say on race could strike home without those conflicting perspectives that made him confront his own past as well as that of the nation. As David Blight, Frederick Douglass’s biographer, observes in his 2014 introduction to “Who Speaks for the Negro?”: It could only have been written by the creator of Jack Burden in “All The King’s Men,” who sees the conflict in his own biography as a work of history, inspiring, as well, C. Vann Woodward’s classic, “The Burden of Southern History.”Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”

Race and the Burden of History

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