The Condemnation of Blackness

Alongside accounts of how white researchers on both sides of the ideological spectrum encouraged racist attitudes and practices, Muhammad also depicts the evolution of Black scholarship that occurred from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries. The Condemnation of Blackness establishes a clear ideological through-line that existed in the Black anti-racist scholarship of 1890 to 1940. Muhammad analyzes the work of intellectuals like Du Bois, Wells, Stemmons, Donald, and Johnson to illustrate how each generation of Black scholars worked off the research of their predecessors to act as a collective force for change. This Black intellectual moment is a critical period that laid the foundations for the Black civil rights movement of the 1960s, the Black Power movement of the seventies, and the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement.

Muhammad opens his book by likening it to a national “coming-of-age story” (1) and closes his final chapter by stating that as a result of innovative arguments of Black intellectuals like James Stemons, Donald, and Johnson, “A new antiracist crime discourse and civil rights activism emerged from the flames of racial hatred and oppression in northern cities during the postwar period” (268). Muhammad argues this history of race, crime, and modern urban America has essential ties to the larger history of Black activism and the United States as a whole. Just as his thesis is revisionist in its regional focus on the urban North, The Condemnation of Blackness is also a revisionist history in its emphasis of Black resistance and agency.

Muhammad’s research revises the dominant accounts of Black civil rights activism to include scholars and intellectual movements that existed before historians’ typical era of focus, the 1960s. By illustrating how specific Black scholars worked as a collective anti-racist force through the years, Muhammad’s book is an important historical account of how Black scholarship evolved from 1890 to 1940 to build a Black consciousness that combatted racist ideologies like Black criminality.

The work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells effectively provided the foundation for the anti-racist work that would evolve from the 1890s onwards. Both worked in implicit response to the white supremacist theses forwarded by Nathanial Shaler and Frederick Hoffman, who used racial statistics to argue that Black Americans were biologically prone to vice and crime. Race was not the only informer of Du Bois and Wells’s work. Muhammad points out how other aspects of their identities, such as gender and class, provided additional lenses to their bodies of research.

Wells, for instance, asserted particularly damning critiques of racial statistics and early works of Black criminality by arguing through the lens of gender. She dismantled white supremacist narratives of rampant sexual violence committed against white women by Black men. In powerful works such as A Red Record, she proved that the opposite was true: White men were the ones who had the history of enacting sexual violence on Black women. Wells used statistics to shed light on the fact that while white men were escaping punishment for the rape and assault of Black women, Black men were being criminally charged and lynched nearly every day for accusations of sexual assault. Notably, Wells used the same statistical methodology employed to create Black criminality to combat it. Muhammad reflects that Wells “method for compiling lynching statistics was the same as Hoffman’s” (60) and that she effectively “exposed the double bind of racial and sexual exploitation manifested in the figurative and literal dehumanization and destruction of black bodies” (61). Muhammad’s analysis of Wells forms a clear image of Black resistance that existed well before the 1960s.

Du Bois, meanwhile, was working at the same time as Wells to make convincing arguments that Black crime rates were not a result of biological inferiority but were due to environmental factors. While he was intrigued by Hoffman’s statistical methodology in his work Race Traits, he sought to defeat the concept of racial statistics by reading the numbers through a distinctly anti-racist lens. In works such as his 1897 speech “Conservation of the Races,” Du Bois sought to unite the Black community against white supremacist narratives of Black criminality. He described Black solidarity as essential against racism, proclaiming that “our one haven of refuge is ourselves” (66). Du Bois’s early work is an excellent articulation of rising Black consciousness in the Progressive Era. However, in the same breath that he encouraged solidarity, Du Bois also lectured that the Black community must police itself and rid Black neighborhoods of crime and vice that fueled stereotypes of Black criminality. In this way, he himself encouraged the ideology of Black criminality by placing the blame of high arrests on the Black community.

Muhammad argues that such perspectives pointed to Du Bois as an example of how “black elites’ intra-racial appeals for unity and progress in the Progressive era depended on one-sided jeremiads against poor and disreputable blacks” (68). Granted, Du Bois worked well into the 20th century, and his ideology would evolve over time. However, his early work is important because despite any weaknesses, Du Bois was already critiquing Black criminality. Indeed, Muhammad argues that crime fueled much of Du Bois’s work. The scholar even recommending crime fighting as the Black community’s top priority going forward into the 20th century. Muhammad’s analyses of Du Bois and Wells thus make it clear that Black scholars were active critics of Black criminality as soon as the racist ideology was born.

In his investigation of how gender and class played a role in Wells and Du Bois’s work, Muhammad also sheds light on the role that identity (race, gender, class, etc.) played in their foundational research of the 1890s. Different facets of identity continued to inform Black scholarship into the 20th century. Muhammad argues that class played an important role in James Stemons’s work, for instance. Stemons worked in direct relationship with Du Bois’s research, making Du Bois’s theoretical solutions into actionable plans in Black communities.

Interestingly, while class was at times neglected by Du Bois, his successor Stemmons used class as a primary lens to inform his work. As a working-class postal clerk, Stemons knew the economic and career limitations that Black Americans faced in the urban North. This class perspective drove him to engage in race reform work, and instead of engaging with academia, he focused his efforts on the community; he encouraged local employers to hire Black employees, involved himself in political campaigns, and wrote for local newspapers. It was a markedly different approach to anti-racism activism than his predecessors, but with projects like his League of Civic and Political Reform, he responded directly to the work of previous intellectuals. The LCPR was a real-life answer to Du Bois’s calls for crime fighting efforts in the Black community.

This relationship between Du Bois, Stemons, and class illustrates how Black intellectuals of the 19th and 20th centuries built off of predecessors’ works. Stemons was deeply inspired by Du Bois’s statistical research concerning American race relations. At the same time, he was able to use this inspiration to bring Du Bois’s theoretical arguments into the practical realm and improve upon Du Bois’s weaker areas such as class. Stemons thus represented and important evolutionary step in Black scholarship in the 20th-century urban North. However, Muhammad makes it clear that Stemons had his own weak areas. Because systemic critiques had yet to truly take off, Stemons trusted that partnering with the government would prove a fruitful route for Black equality and community improvements. Yet this trust in the system would prove to be his downfall, as Chapters 4 and 5 detail how Stemons’s crime fighting ideas were essentially co-opted by state actors like Mayor Blankenburg and used only in white neighborhoods, neglecting Black needs.

The failures of practical activist efforts like Stemons’s LCPR caused the new generation of Black intellectuals to be more militant in their approach to anti-racism in the 1920s and 30s. Among the most influential was Henderson H. Donald. Breaking from his predecessors’ arguments, he used crime statistics to explicitly link racism to policing methods. Donald argued that racist policemen patrolled Black neighborhoods with a discriminatory eye and arrested Black people at disproportionate rates as a result. He was among the first to push past environmental arguments of high crime statistics and insist that it was the entire flawed system that was to blame.

Such arguments provided a clear foundation for anti-racist activists to build their critiques of systemic racism later in the 20th century. Even though Donald represented a remarkable shift in how anti-racist intellectuals approached the issue of race, crime, and statistics, Muhammad makes it clear that this breakthrough could not have been achieved without the evolution that had taken place in Black scholarship beforehand. He observes that the decades-old “antiracist criticisms of the black crime discourse by Du Bois, Wells, and local black reformers including James Stemons […] had helped to reframe, from the bottom up, the way that Henderson […] would analyze the data” (238). This quote reflects the crux of the book’s exploration of the evolution of Black scholarship from 1890 to 1940, drawing a clear line from the foundational research of Du Bois and Wells to the groundbreaking thesis asserted by Donald.

Muhammad’s analysis also reflects the primary function of this theme, lending to The Condemnation of Blackness’ revisionist argument. Situating Donald within a larger trajectory of collective anti-racist scholarship, Muhammad shifts the locus of Black consciousness away from the late 20th century and emphasizes the active role that Black scholars of the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries play in the larger history of Black American scholarship.