Race and Photography in America

A
John Hope Franklin Center Book

SHAWN MICHELLE SMITH
For Sandy, Jay, Shannon, and especially forJoe

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xv
INTRODUCTION
Photography on the Color Line i
CHAPTER ONE
Envisioning Race 25
CHAPTER TWO
The Art of Scientific Propaganda 43
CHAPTER THREE
"Families of Undoubted Respectability" 77
CHAPTER FOUR
Spectacles of Whiteness: The Photography of Lynching

113
EPILOGUE
The Archivist in the Archive 147
Notes 161
Bibliography 203
Index 217

PLATES (between pages ilo-ifi)
PLATE i. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes,

Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. I, no. 2
PLATE 2. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes,

Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 11

PLATE 4. Bazoline Estelle Usher, Atlanta University student. W.

E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A.
(1900), vol. 1, no. 5
PLATE 5. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois,

Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (r9oo), vol. r,
no. 59



PLATE 9. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes,

PLATE io. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois,

Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia, US. A. (1900), vol. 1,
no. 66
PLATE ii. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois,

Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia, U. S.A. (r9oo), vol. r,
no. 53

Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia, U. S.A. (1900), vol. 3,
no. 210

Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia, US. A. (r9oo), vol. r,
no. 42
PLATE 14. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. The Summit

Avenue Ensemble. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia,
U. S.A. (1900), no. 356
PLATE 15. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U. S.A.

(r9oo), no. 274
PLATE 16. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A.

(1900), no. 350
PLATE 17. Dr. McDougald's drug store. W. E. B. Du Bois,

Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (r9oo), no. 284

(1900), no. 360
PLATE r9. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes,

Georgia, U.S.A. (r9oo), vol. 3, no. 247
PLATE 20. Interior view of grocery store. W. E. B. Du Bois,

Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3,
no. 236
PLATE 21. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U. S.A.

(1900), no. 286
PLATE 22. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. The home of an

African American lawyer, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B. Du
Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (r9oo), no. 352
PLATE 23. David Tobias Howard, an undertaker, his mother,

and wife, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in
Georgia, U. S.A. (r9oo), no. 283
PLATE 24. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, US.A.

(1900), no. 363
FIGURES
i. Thomas E. Askew, photographer, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B.

Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900),
vol. 3, no. 201 ...... 5
2. Henry A. Rucker, internal revenue collector, Atlanta,

Georgia. Active in the Niagara Movement and the NAACP.
W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U. S.A. (1900), no.
281 ...... 5
3. The American Negro Exhibit at the i9oo Paris Exposition ......

13
4. Stereograph, Keystone View Company. Trocadero entrance

to the exposition, Colonial Section in foreground, Paris, 19oo
...... 15
5. Stercograph, Underwood and Underwood. The famous
Trocadcro Palace from the end of the Seine Bridge, Paris,
r900 ...... 16
6. Stereograph, Underwood and Underwood. Natives of

Dahomey, AfricaDahomey Village, Paris, 1900 ...... 17
7. Cartoon, "Darkies' Day at the Fair," Worlds Fair Puck ...... 18
8. W. E. B. Du Bois at the i9oo Paris Exposition ...... i9
9. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.

S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no.1...... 45
io. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia,

U.S.A. (r9oo), vol. r, no.2...... 45
11. Daguerreotype by Joseph T. Zealy, for Louis Agassiz.

Drana, front view, 1850......48

Drana, profile view, 185o ...... 48
13. Photograph by John Lamprey. Frontal view of a Malayan

man, c. 186869...... 50
14. Photograph by John Lamprey. Profile view of a Malayan

man, c. 186869...... 50
15. Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, vol. r, plate 62

(1887), Running at Full Speed ...... 51
16. Francis Galton's "standard photograph" of himself ...... 52
17. Composite portraits by Francis Galton. "The Jewish Type"

...... 53
i8. Portraits of young African American men and women ...... 56
i9. Portraits of young African American men and women ...... 58
20. Portraits of young African American men and women ...... 59
21. Bazoline Estelle Usher, Atlanta University student. W. E. B.

vol. 1, no. 6 ...... 6o

Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (igoo),
vol. r, no. 5 ...... 6o
23. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia,

U.S.A. (1900), vol. 2, no. 197......61

U.S.A. (igoo), vol. r, no.3...... 62

U.S.A. (r900), vol. r, no.40...... 64
26. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.

S.A. (r900), vol. r, no.39...... 64
27. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. Henry Hugh Proctor,

minister, First Congregational Church, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E.
B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia, U. S.A.
(1900), vol. 1, no. 62 ...... 68

minister, First Congregational Church, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E.
B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A.
(igoo), vol. r, no. 61 ...... 68
29. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. Mamie Westmorland,

schoolteacher. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes,
Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no.79...... 70
30. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. Thomas E. Askew

Prepares to Scold His Five Mischievous Sons, c. 1870 ...... 73
31. Cartoon, "A Step in the Darwinian Development," Harper's

Weekly ...... 81
32. Drawing by Sol Eytinge Jun., "Wedding Trip of the TwinsOff

for Europe," Harper's Weekly, September 7, r878 ...... 84
33. Drawing by Sol Eytinge Jun., "After Doing Paris and the Rest
of Europe, the Bridal Party Return to Blackville," Harpers
Weekly, October 26,1878 ...... 85
34 From Alphonse Bertillon, Identification anthropometrique,

instructions signaletiques ...... 89
35 W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (igoo), no.

275 . . . . . . 94
36. Negro city tenements, Atlanta, Georgia, W. E. B. Du Bois,

Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no. 300 ...... 95
37 W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U. S.A. (r9oo), no.

327 . . . . . . 95

U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no.251...... 96
39 W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia,
U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no. 237 ...... 97

US.A. (1900), vol. 3, no. 220 . .. . . . 101
41. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), no.

354 . . . . . . 105
42. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U. S.A. (r9oo), no.

289 ...... io6
43 Detail from photographic postcard. The lynching of Lige

Daniels. August 3, 1920, Center, Texas ...... 120
44 Detail from photographic postcard. The lynching of Jesse

Washington. May 16, 1916, Robinson, Texas ...... 123
45 Detail from photographic postcard, verso side. The lynching

of Jesse Washington. May 16, 1916, Robinson, Texas ...... 123
46. Detail from photographic postcard, verso side. The lynching

of Jesse Washington. May 16, 1916, Robinson, Texas ...... 124
47. Detail from photographic postcard. The lynching of Jesse

Washington. May 16, 1916, Robinson, Texas ...... 124
48. Detail from photographic postcard. The lynching of Lige

Daniels. August 3, 1920, Center, Texas ...... 126
49 Detail from photograph, verso side. The charred torso of an

African American male. 1902, Georgia ...... 131
50. Detail from photograph. The lynching of Rubin Stacy. July

19, 1935, Fort Lauderdale, Florida ...... 133

53 Detail from photograph. The lynching of Thomas Shipp and

Abram Smith. August 7, 1930, Marion, Indiana ...... 136
54 Detail from photograph. The lynching of Thomas Shipp and

Abram Smith. August 7, r930, Marion, Indiana ...... 136
55. Detail from photograph. The burning corpse of William

Brown. September 28, 1919, Omaha, Nebraska ...... 140
56. Cover art by John Henry Adams, Voice of the Negro.

January 1905 ...... 150
57 Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois at Seventeen Months

Old, and His Mother, Voice of the Negro, March 1905 ......
153
58. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois at Six Years ofAge,

Voice of the Negro, March 1905 ...... 154
59 Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois at Seventeen, Voice

of the Negro, March 1905......154
6o. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois Spending a Quiet

Half Hour, Voice of the Negro, March 1905 ...... 155
61. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Head Picture of the Du Bois

of Today at His Desk, Voice of the Negro, March 1905 ......
157
62. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois Bracing a Sti
ffBreeze, Voice of the Negro, March 1905......157

It is a great pleasure to formally thank the many people and
institutions that have supported the production of this book.
Generous funding for research and writing was provided by a
Visiting Research Fellowship at the Center for the Humanities,
Oregon State University, an Irene Diamond Foundation
Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture, and a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Obert C. and
Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah. The
directors and staff at each of these institutions helped make these
years particularly productive and enjoyable, and I would like to
acknowledge Peter Copek, Wendy Madar, Howard Dodson,
Diana Lachatanere, Dian Alleyne, Peter Hobbs, Gene
Fitzgerald, Holly Campbell, Lindsey Law, Emily Heward, and
Richard Tuttle. Colleagues I met at each of these places
enriched my thinking as this project developed, and I'd like to
thank especially Colin Palmer, Carolyn Adenaike, Ivor Miller,
Lydia Lindsey, Kim Lau, Janet Theiss, Marouf Hasian, Ed
Rubin, Katie Pearce- Sassen, Ryan Spellecy, Crystal Parikh,
Brian Locke, Gillian Brown, and Vince Cheng. Kathryne
Lindberg was a particularly engaging and rigorous interlocutor,
and she, along with Martha Biondi and Shannon Miller, made
periods of hard work fun.
Mary Ison, Barbara Natanson, and Jan Grenci in the Prints and
Photographs Division at the Library of Congress were very
helpful over the course of many years, and I am especially
indebted to Jan for first introducing me to the W. E. B. Du Bois
collections and for later spending several afternoons working
through the albums with me. Mary Yearwood and Sharon
Howard at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
shared their expertise and aided me in situating the Georgia
Negro photographs within a broader historical context. I would
also like to thank Karen Jefferson at the Archives Department of
the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, the
staff of the Atlanta History Center Archives, and that of the
Auburn Avenue Research Center.
Several people gave me opportunities to present portions of this

work to stimulating audiences whose questions helped refine my
argument, and in this context I'd like to acknowledge especially
Wilfred Samuels, Richard Stein, and the graduate students of
Northwest Passages, an American Studies research group at the
University of Washington. Some of my initial thoughts along
these lines were first developed in the article "'Looking at One's
Self through the Eyes of Others': W. E. B. Du Bois's Photographs
for the i9oo Paris Exposition," African American Review 34, 4
(winter 2000): 581-99, reprinted in The Souls of Black Folk: One
Hundred Years Later, edited by Dolan Hubbard (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 2003), 189-217. I thank both
publishers for permission to rework that material here.
Most of the research and writing for this book was undertaken
while I was a faculty member at Washington State University,
and I am grateful to Sue McLeod and Victor Villanueva, chairs
of the Department of English during my tenure, for enabling me
to take research leaves in order to develop this project. I would
also like to thank my colleagues, especially Alex Hammond,
Joan Burbick, Carol Siegel, and Noel Sturgeon, for making my
work at wsu so enriching. Two College of Liberal Arts Initiation
and Completion Grants, an Arts and Humanities Travel Grant,
and funds from the Department of English and the Graduate
School at wsu, helped me to purchase negatives and prints during
my initial research, and I am especially grateful to Karen
DePauw for her support. I completed the final stages of this
work as a member of the Department of American Studies at
Saint Louis University, and I would like to thank my current
c h a i r, Matt Mancini, and dean Mike May for their
extraordinarily generous help in securing funds for final
reproduction of the images. I am grateful for support from a
Mellon Faculty Development Grant, the College of Arts and
Sciences, and the Department of American Studies at Saint Louis
University. My research assistants, Angie Dietz and Nancy
Thompson, were a great help in securing images, proofreading,
and preparing the index. As the manuscript was enter ing the
final stages of production, I had the pleasure of coteaching a
graduate seminar on W. E. B. Du Bois and race with my
colleague Jonathan Smith, and I hope this book will resonate with
some of the richness of that conversation.
I sincerely appreciate the long-standing support of Michael

Davidson and Wai Chee Dimock, and I am truly indebted to
them for responding to many calls for help over theyears. I also
continue to benefit from the insights Roddey Reid, Nicole
Tonkovich, Phel Steinmetz, and Stephanie McCurry offered
early on in my thinking. The friends and colleagues I have
turned to most often for intellectual camaraderie, creative
inspiration, and just for the fun of it, include Shelli Fowler, T. V.
Reed, Wendy Walters, Ralph Rodriguez, Loren Glass, Amy
Mooney, Geof Bradfield, Joseph Heathcott, Ashley Cruce, Jo
Nutter, Marsanne Brammer, Elise Hanley, and Krista Lydia
Roybal. Beth Freeman is that rare combination of good friend
and rigorous critic, and my work has benefited considerably
from her influence.
Deborah Willis's encouragement has meant a very great deal to

m e , and her foundational work in the history of African
American photography is a constant source of inspiration.
Writing this book has also brought me into new and renewed
conversation with many people working on photography, race,
and visual culture, and for their insights, and the example of their
scholarship, I would like to thank Sally Stein, Maren Stange,
Alan Trachtenberg, Lisa Bloom, Elizabeth Abel, Jeannene
Przyblyski, Eric Breitbart, Lisa Gail Collins, and Leigh Raiford.
My admiration for the work of Laura Wexler and Priscilla Wald,
and my deep appreciation for the kindness of their support and
the rigor of their intellectual challenge, is boundless.
Ken Wissoker has been a wonderful editor, guiding me

carefully through revisions and the nervous final stages, and I
am especially indebted to him for imagining a book that aims to
do justice to the remarkable photographs at its center. I would
also like to thank Kate Lothman and Petra Dreiser for their
diligent help in fine-tuning the manuscript.
I am profoundly grateful to my parents, Sandy and Jay Smith,

f o r their enthusiastic and steadfast support, and for their
continual reminders of the many pleasures of visual culture.
Shannon Smith and Derek Hutchinson have cheered this work on
along its way, and I would like to thank them especially for
letting me share in their own very thrilling project, that of Haley
Smith Hutchinson. Finally, this book keenly registers Joe Masco's
thoughtful engagement throughout, and I am most grateful to him
for keeping it under his close and constant care.

Looking back over an extraordinarily long and distinguished
career, W. E. B. Du Bois would remember: "At the beginning of
the twentieth century, when I was but ten years out of college, I
visited the Paris Exposition of i9oo. It was one of the finest,
perhaps the very finest, of world expositions.... I had brought
with me, as excuse for coming, a little display showing the
development of Negroes in the United States, which gained a
gold medal." i Despite his somewhat modest account, Du Bois's
participation in the American Negro Exhibit at the i9oo Paris
Exposition marked a formative moment in his early intellectual
life. The Paris Exposition launched Du Bois into national and
international recognition as an African American scholar and a
le a de r in the emerging field of sociology.' Further, Du Bois
introduced one of his "little displays" with what would become
his most prophetic pronouncement: "The problem of the
twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." At the Paris
Exposition, Du Bois declared that "race" would prove the
defining and most fundamental problem of the age, and his own
work from that period has shaped critical thinking about race for
the past century.
Du Bois's predictions about the color line continue to resonate in

the current historical moment, but some of the important nuances
of his original understanding of the color line have been lost to us
over the hundred years since his first articulation. This book aims
to recover the visual meanings of the color line, to excavate
from Du Bois's initial conception the visual theater of racist
projection and inscription, as well as antiracist resistance, which,
for Du Bois, structures the process of racial identification. While
scholars have productively employed the material meaning of
the color line as the marker of social and economic divides
engendered by slavery, segregation, colo nialism, and
imperialism, they have largely left untapped the conceptual
meaning of the color line as a nexus of competing gazes in
which racialization is understood as the effect of both intense
scrutiny and obfuscation under a white supremacist gaze. It is
this latter sense of the color line that this book teases out and
deciphers, an understanding that I bring into focus largely
through a reading of the remarkable collection of photographs
Du Bois compiled for the 19oo Paris Exposition.
In Photography on the Color Line, I argue that the 363

photographs Du Bois procured for the American Negro Exhibit
collectively function as a counterarchive that challenges a long
legacy of racist taxonomy, intervening in turn-of-the-century
"race science" by offering competing visual evidence.' But the
photographs themselves do not simply or transparently offer up
such a reading. Indeed, Du Bois's archive is almost impossibly
enigmatic, and, at first, intractable. Unlike other photographic
displays included in the American Negro Exhibit, Du Bois's
Georgia Negro albums do not offer an explanatory text; the
photographs do not have captions. The albums present hundreds
o f photographs of unnamed individuals, unmarked buildings,
unlocated streets, and vacant fields. In part, the very interpretive
challenge of these images captured and held my attention,
compelling me to theorize ways to approach an archive that
gives one very little help in deciphering its meaning. I found the
Georgia Negro albums especially provocative, for while the
message they contain is impenetrable to contemporary viewers,
in i9oo, an international jury awarded Du Bois a gold medal in
part for these images and the cultural work they performed. In
other words, what remains obscure today was apparently self-
evident in r9oo; the images themselves, without captions or an
introductory text, performed recognizable cultural work at the
turn of the century. It is thus my task here to make these images
comprehensible once again for a contemporary audience, to
recover their lost meaning, and to revitalize them as an antiracist
visual archive by restoring a signifying context that makes the
images readable and their critical cultural work intelligible.
To do so, I argue first that Du Bois himself was an early visual

theorist of race and racism. The 1900 photographs call attention
to the visual nexus of understanding and imagery that underpins
some of Du Bois's most influential written work on race at the
turn of the century, underscoring the visual paradigms that
inform "double consciousness," "the Veil," and "second-sight."
Du Bois aimed not simply to challenge "racist images" but also to
reconfigure the racialized structures of the gaze through which
he suggested race was formulated and racial identification
negotiated.
Second, I propose a critically comparative interpretive visual

methodology, which reads visual archives against one another to
find photographic meaning in the interstices between them, in the
challenges they pose to one another, and in the competing claims
they make on cultural import. Drawing from Du Bois's insights,
this methodology opens up ways for contemporary scholars to
understand the multivalenced critical cultural work that
photographic images, and photographic archives, perform. Thus
Photography on the Color Line not only offers a critical
assessment and recovery of Du Bois's visual practice and theory
but also an exercise in visual cultural analysis, one that seeks to
make the photographic archive resonate with all its cultural and
historical significance.
This book demonstrates that visual culture was fundamental not

only to racist classification but also to racial reinscription and the
reconstruction of racial knowledge in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. My reading of Du Bois's photographs shows
how contested, mutable, and flexible visual culture has been as a
site through which race is posed and challenged. Photography on
the Color Line models a critical methodology that sees race as
fundamental to and defined by visual culture, that understands
race and visual culture to be mutually constitutive, and that reads
photographic archives as racialized sites invested in laying claim
to contested cultural meanings.
Du Bois's Georgia Negro Exhibit
For the i9oo Paris Exposition, Du Bois organized 363

photographs into three albums, entitled Types ofAinerican
Negroes, Georgia, U. S.A. (volumes 1-3), and Negro Life in
Georgia, U. S.A. The albums constituted part of Du Bois's larger
Georgia Negro Exhibit,4 which he produced at Atlanta
University in collaboration with students and recent graduates.'
Roughly modeled on his groundbreaking work The Philadelphia
Negro, Du Bois's Georgia Negro Exhibit was designed to show
"what the negro really is in the South," 6 and it included, in addi
tion to the photographs studied here, a series of charts and
graphs documenting the social and economic status of African
Americans,7 maps depicting the African American population of
various Georgia counties, and a multivolume set containing all
the Georgia state laws pertaining to African Americans from
1732 to 1899.8 The studies were highly regarded, and, as noted
earlier, Paris Exposition judges awarded Du Bois a prestigious
gold medal for his work as "compiler of [the] Georgia Negro
Exhibit." 9
Du Bois's Georgia Negro albums are large horizontal folios

filled with images rendered in the soft warm tones of albumen
p a p e r prints.10 Almost two-thirds of the photographs are
portraits, generally paired on a page, and they typically offer
two views of an individual, one frontal, the other in varying
degrees of profile." The remaining photographs depict domestic
interiors, homes, businesses, churches, rural scenes, street
scenes, group portraits, and an occasional single portrait.12 The
now decaying leather bindings on the albums present title,
volume number, and the words Du Bois in goldleaf lettering-"
Beyond the simple denotation of title and compiler, the albums

offer viewers little in the way of directive cues. Individuals and
places represented remain unnamed, except as being from
"Georgia, U.S.A."; photographers are not credited; and no
methodology is discussed. Once again, the images have no
captions. Only after seeing one of the Georgia Negro
photographs reproduced in Deborah Willis's groundbreaking
Reflections in Black, there attributed to Thomas E. Askew,
Atlanta's first African American photographer, was I able to
recover, reading across several Atlanta archives, other portraits
made by Askew also included in the Du Bois albums. Finally, a
signature lace curtain and tapestry linked even more of the
images to Askew. I have thus discovered that Thomas E. Askew
produced many of the studio portraits for Du Bois's Georgia
Negro albums, including one of the most striking images in the
collection, which depicts his sons in the Summit Avenue
Ensemble (plate 14).14I have also discerned that Askew himself
is represented in one of the photographs (figure 1),15 and
portraits taken by him include those of Henry Hugh Proctor,
minister of the First Congregational Church of Atlanta (figures
27 and 28),16 Mamie Westmorland, a schoolteacher (figure 29),
and her stepdaughter, Ernestine Bell,'7 as well as group portraits
of families posed outside their lovely homes (plate 22).18
i. Thomas E. Askew, photographer, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B.
Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900),
vol. 3, no. 201. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection,
Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.
2. Henry A. Rucker, internal revenue collector, Atlanta,
Georgia. Active in the Niagara Movement and the NAACP. W.
E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U. S.A. (1900), no. 281.
Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.
Not surprisingly, many of the photographs in the Georgia Negro

albums present scenes and people from Atlanta, Du Bois's home
a t the turn of the century. At least two churches are
represented,19 and prominent Atlantans include David Tobias
Howard, an undertaker, photographed in his carriage with his
mother and wife (plate 23),20 and Henry A. Rucker, an Internal
Revenue collector, photographed in his large office at his
imposing desk (figure 2).21 I have identified one of the young
women represented in the initial series of portraits as Bazoline
Estelle Usher, a student at Atlanta University from 1899 to 19o6
(plate 4),22 and it is almost certain that similar portraits also
depict Atlanta University students. While a small number of the
images in Du Bois's collection present rural scenes, including a
few of men and women farming (plate 19), and one of a small
group of men seated together on a rustic front porch, by and
large they represent a wellto-do urban population, Du Bois's
"Talented Tenth" of "influential and forceful men,"" and the
educated youth who will replace and surpass them.
While residents of Georgia might have recognized some of the

places and people in Du Bois's albums, a larger national and
international audience would not have had the benefit of such
visual clues. Those first viewers would have seen the albums as
they remain today, without captions or credits. They would have
been left simply to follow the images themselves, to read the
visual narrative pasted in place in Du Bois's albums, and perhaps
to heed the one public statement Du Bois himself made
concerning the photographs, namely, that visitors to the
American Negro Exhibit would find "several volumes of
photographs of typical Negro faces, which hardly square with
conventional American ideas."24
If Du Bois conceived his Georgia Negro photographs as

contestatory images, as representations that challenged
"conventional American ideas," then it is important to read them
against the racist "conventions" of U. S. visual culture in order to
understand fully the resistant nature of Du Bois's visual project.
This book offers such a critical inroad by considering Du Bois's
photographs in relation to scientific, institutional, and sensational
photographic archives intent on defining racial identities and
reinforcing racial hierarchies at the turn of the century. Du
Bois's Georgia Negro photographs signified in a cultural context
dominated by scientific racism, racial segregation, and lynching.
As we shall see, the photographs challenge the distortions of mug
shots made to uphold scientific discourses of "Negro inferiority"
a n d "Negro criminality," and they proclaim an African
American presence in the face of the spectacular erasures
produced by lynching.
Albums as Counterarchive
Du Bois's photographs for the American Negro Exhibit at the

i9oo Paris Exposition evoke multiple codes of photographic
meaning. As my analysis in subsequent chapters will show, the
images formally resemble a wide range of disparate kinds of
photographs, from the instrumental records of scientific and
criminological mug shots to middle-class portraits. Given this
diversity in genre and the paucity of explanatory information
provided by the albums, the photograph collection demands a
creative investigatory framework- one that critically compares
archives, and one that might be adapted to assess the many
different kinds of photographs that exist without ancillary
documentation.
Despite the fact that his name is embossed on the album spines,
Du Bois does not emerge as the "author" of the Georgia Negro
photographs in any simple way. Once again, Thomas E. Askew
made at least some of the photographs, and there is no evidence
suggesting that Du Bois ever used a camera himself. And yet, Du
Bois is clearly marked as the framer and organizer of the images
-it is his name on the spine of the albums, and it is Du Bois who
was awarded a gold medal for this work. Thus, if Du Bois does
not exactly function as an author in this case, he is certainly an
archivist- an assembler of already prepared parts, making
meaning by choosing and placing and pasting images in relation
to one another.
An archive circumscribes and delimits the meaning of the

photographs that comprise it, investing images with import
calculated to confirm a particular discourse. Even as it purports
simply to supply evidence, or to document historical
occurrences, the archive maps the cultural terrain it claims to
describe. In other words, the archive constructs the knowledge it
would seem only to register or make evident. Thus archives are
ideological; they are conceived with political intent, to make
specific claims on cultural meaning. Archivists choose certain
images while excluding others, and by comparing contemporary
archives, one can decipher the range of imaging options
available at a particular moment, and thus begin to interpret the
significance of the choices an archivist has made. Because
archives claim contested signifying terrain, they proclaim
importance in strained relation to one another, and often the
stakes involved in the cultural work that visual archives perform
are very high. For example, at the turn of the century, the
meaning of race, as visually codified, registered one's claims to
social and legal justice, economic opportunity, political rights,
a n d even basic human rights, including one's very survival.
Photographic archives defining race supported, or, in Du Bois's
case, aimed to dismantle, the racial hierarchies that
fundamentally informed legal and scientific knowledge around
1900.
Once an archive is compiled, it makes a claim on history; it
e xists as a record of the past. The archive is a vehicle of
memory, and as it becomes the trace on which an historical
record is founded, it makes some people, places, things, ideas,
and events visible, while relegating others, through its signifying
absences, to invisibility. In this sense, then, archives have an
ideological function not only in the moment of their inception but
also across time, for they determine in large part what will be
collectively remembered and how it will be remembered. Thus,
at the most basic level, Du Bois's archive (and its recovery)
resists the erasure of African Americans from the national
historical record, redressing the distortions and violence of racist
caricature and scientific typology. But as Du Bois's Georgia
Negro photographs make clear, with the passing of time, an
archive's specific import can also become obscured; its
particular engagement of historical debates can be lost. To
recover the original power of an archive, one must aim to
restore the cultural contexts of its originary moment by reading it
in relation to the other archives it first engaged. This book thus
addresses the general problem of how the archive signifies over
time by endeavoring to recover the contexts that illuminate the
cultural work Du Bois's specific archive performed at the
moment of its inception, reconstructing its historical resonance
and restoring its first meaning to provide a basis on which this
archive can continue to produce new meanings for our own
time.
In his foundational essay, "The Body and the Archive," Allan

Se kula suggests that "the archive became the dominant
institutional basis for photographic meaning" between 188o and
1910.25 He argues that the institutional archive produced
photographs (and bodies) as transparent, equivalent,
exchangeable texts organized according to an over riding
ideological surveillance invested in constructing middle-class
norms against criminal deviance. According to Sekula, the
popular middle-class portrait and the institutional criminal mug
shot have always been integrally intertwined, the police
repository serving as the limit that defines the bounds of middle-
class self-possession.26 And yet, Du Bois's archive troubles that
oppositional mutual reinforcement by subtly demonstrating how
hard an emergent black bourgeoisie had to fight the racist
imagery meant to inscribe and contain the black body in criminal
archives. Not everyone had equal access to privileged middle-
class representations, and certainly part of Du Bois's project at
the turn of the century was to reject the whitewash of normative
middle-class archives, claiming a space for African Americans
within the middle classes.
With his Georgia Negro albums, Du Bois produces a

counterarchive that reconfigures the contours of institutional
knowledge, refocusing photographic meaning and visual
identification out from the archival margin, shifting the apex of
normalcy to rest squarely on an African American middle class.
Du Bois's photograph collection intervenes in dominant ways of
knowing and representing race, reenvisioning a culturally
authorized visual record's codification of racial information. Du
Bois grounds African American identity in a contestatory
archive, offering a place from which a counter-history can be
imagined and narrated, and, as a counterarchive, Du Bois's
Georgia Negro albums underscore the ways in which both
identity and history are founded, at least partially, through
representation. If one cannot or does not produce an archive,
others will dictate the terms by which one will be represented
and remembered; one will exist, for the future, in someone else's
archive. Du Bois's counterarchive specifically highlights the
racialized contours of "official" photographic meaning and
scientific knowledge, precisely as it challenges such authorized
claims to truth.
Du Bois's Georgia Negro images signify in critical relation to,

a nd "signify on," the scientific, eugenicist, and criminological
archives that attempted to proclaim African American inferiority
at the turn of the century.27 The albums trouble the normative,
assumed transparency of authorized institutional knowledge. But
Du Bois's albums employ other visual tactics as well; they also
reproduce the sentimental and commodified forms of the middle-
class portrait to contest the conflation of African Americans
under the visual signs of crimi nality or biological inferiority. As
bell hooks has argued, the ubiquitous snapshot can become a site
of resistance and reorientation: "The camera was the central
instrument by which blacks could disprove representations of us
created by white folks."28 Indeed, the nineteenth-century
counterparts to the later snapshots that hooks examines-those
myriad popular forms Geoffrey Batchen has called "vernacular
photographies"29-rivaled institutional archives as preeminent
cultural sites producing photographic meaning throughout the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is, in part, the
personal photograph that Du Bois wields in order to challenge
a n d undermine dominant institutional archives of racialized
photographic meaning. Indeed, Du Bois's albums subtly recall
that most sentimental of cultural forms, the family photograph
album.30
Du Bois's archive does explicitly what all collections of
photographs do implicitly, namely, signify in relation to other
archives. Each photograph enters a visual terrain that has been
mapped and codified by other photographs, in the service of
competing discourses. One recognizes a photograph and
deciphers its various meanings by posing it (consciously or not)
in relation to other photographs. Each photograph negotiates not
only the past of its split-second historical referent but also a
photographic past of other images. But this is not to say that the
relative relation of one photographic archive to another remains
neutral: once again, the stakes in the production of archival
knowledge are very high, for particular photographic forms,
placed in specific collections, are utilized to support state
disciplinary technologies. For example, today, paired frontal and
hard profile head shots -the "mug shots" of early anthropologists,
criminologists, biological racialists, and eugenicists -are nearly
impossible to read outside of a long legacy of instrumental
function and identification; they cannot signify neutrally.
Particular photographic meanings depend on a viewer

experienced in reading culturally specific visual histories. Visual
perception is mapped by a web of intersecting gazes, some
sanctioned, others denied, their visions, even of self, obscured.
Du Bois's Georgia Negro photographs demonstrate how the
codifications of the color line instruct viewers to see race in
specific ways, and they simultaneously work to retrain viewers.
My own reading of the photographs, and of Du Bois's resistant
visual project, demonstrates how race and visual culture have
been mutually constituted in the United States. By this I mean to
suggest that the problem of the color line is much more
fundamental than the problem of racist representation, which is
itself immense. Indeed, visual archives reinforce the racialized
cultural prerogatives of the gaze, which determine who is
authorized to look, and what will be seen, such that looking itself
is a racial act, and being looked at has racial effects. Archives
train, support, and disrupt racialized gazes, infusing race into the
very structures of how we see and what we know. However, by
arguing that race is conceived not simply through representation
but also through acts of looking, I do not mean to reinforce a
literal notion of "color"; instead, I wish to emphasize the ways in
which racial identification and recognition are negotiated
through, and even instigated by, racialized gazes in a racist
culture.
Beginning here with the site of the American Negro Exhibit, its
history and place within the i9oo Paris Exposition, and moving
f r o m this point to the wider context of a history of
representations of race in subsequent chapters, I am interested in
how Du Bois's images evoke and contest the "authorizing
discourses" that enable viewing.31 Du Bois's Georgia Negro
photographs refuse the fiction of "the disengaged look of
universal man,"" challenging the continued authorization of a
white gaze; indeed, such disruptions of a racialized normative
gaze are central to the ways in which the images function as a
counterarchive. Du Bois's photographs engage viewers that
occupy particular historical and cultural positions, and they work
to dismantle and reconfigure the popular and scientific visual
genealogies of African Americans that inform dominant turnof-
the- century viewing practices. If the viewer, at least in part,
produces photographic meaning, Du Bois's albums suggest that
the viewer can also be directed to look and see differently.
Signifying between instrumental archives and sentimental
albums, Du Bois's photographs suggest that representations and
viewing are both determined and determining forces. The
middle-class portrait presupposes the emotional labor of an
invested viewer,33 and with his albums, Du Bois could use that
affective force as a critical wedge against racist interpretation.
By combining and juxtaposing objectifying photographs with
images that evoke a sentimental register, Du Bois reminds
viewers that institutional archives cannot contain individuals, nor
univocally determine photographic meaning. Identification is the
effect not only of an institutionally authorized sur veillance but
also of self-inscription, performance, and posing for a
sympathetic viewer. Personal archives, with their quotidian
images, always compete with institutional archives over the
foundations of knowledge. Indeed, Du Bois's albums, as
counterarchive, suggest that photographic meaning, and even
identity itself, is situated somewhere between the institutional and
the vernacular, between determination and agency, between the
archive and the album.
Displaying Race at the 1900 Paris Exposition
The r9oo American Negro Exhibit was a relatively new kind of

exhibition, representing African American achievements for an
international audience. While so-called Colored Departments
were created to oversee displays organized by African
Americans for world's fairs as early as 1885,34 separate exhibits
showcasing African American works were inaugurated most
conspicuously in 1895, with the Negro Building at the Atlanta
Cotton States and International Exposition.35 Two years after
African Americans were denied official participation in the
1893 Chicago Columbian World's Exposition, they were invited
to present their cultural achievements and industrial innovations
to the world at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895, and again at the
Tennessee Centennial Exposition of 1897. Following in this new
tradition, and at the encouragement of Booker T. Washington
and W. E. B. Du Bois, the U. S. commissioner-general,
Ferdinand W. Peck, invited Thomas Junius Calloway to oversee
the production of an American Negro Exhibit for the Paris
Exposition of 1900.36 Calloway's exhibit would win the highest
honor, a Grand Prix, from Paris Exposition judges,37 and from
Paris it would travel to Buffalo, New York-to be included in the
1901 Pan-American Exposition-and then to Charleston, South
Carolina-to be included in the 1901-2 South Carolina Interstate
a nd West Indian Exposition-before finally being stored at the
Library of Congress.38
In Paris, the American Negro Exhibit was housed within the

Palace of Social Economy, a wooden structure built in the style
of Louis XVI. It was situated next to the Palace of Horticulture,
on the banks of the Seine, across from the national buildings of
European and North American countries.39 In addition to the
exhibits Du Bois prepared from Georgia, the American Negro
Exhibit included a large portrait of Booker T. Washington,
hanging over the exhibit; portraits of B. K. Bruce, U. S. senator
from Mississippi, and Judson W. Lyons, registrar of the
Treasury; a bronze statuette of Frederick Douglass ;40
photographs, reports, and artifacts from Hampton and Tuskegee
Institutes, as well as from Fisk University; exhibits showing the
work of professional schools at Howard and Atlanta
Universities; a displayde- voted to African American Medal of
Honor men; four volumes containing the official patent sheets
issued to nearly four hundred African Americans; and two
hundred texts from Daniel Murray's extensive collection of
African American literary works 41 Within the Palace of Social
Economy, the American Negro Exhibit was joined by other U.S.
exhibits, including models of tenement houses, maps of industrial
plants, and the work of factory inspectors, as well as displays
from other countries, including the state insurance of Germany,
the mutual aid societies of France, and the international Red
Cross Society.42
3. The American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition.
Reproduced from the collections of the Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
Situated within the Palace of Social Economy, and thereby

rooted in the modern "science of society," the American Negro
Exhibit participated ideologically in the celebration of Western
European "civilization" and "progress." Further, as one of the
most "scientific" of the exhibits within the Palace of Social
Economy,43 the American Negro Exhibit claimed a place at the
forefront of a Western advance, offering evidence of African
American ability and leadership. The exhibit emblematized Du
Bois's then strong "faith in the power of empirical sociology,"44
in the power of "empirical investigation, the statistical method,
[and] unbiased evaluation" to bring about social change 45
However, the American Negro Exhibit's narrative of progress
a nd success was also easily appropriated for varied, and even
contradictory, purposes. Placed beside model tenement houses
and mutual aid societies, it was posed as a "solution" to a social
problem, as a remedy, undoubtedly, to what Du Bois decried as
the "half-named" American "Negro problem."46
Within the larger context of the 19oo Paris Exposition as a

w hole , the American Negro Exhibit existed in complicated
relation to other racialized displays. In one sense, it clearly
contested the racialized evolutionary scale on which so-called
native village exhibits were founded. Such exhibits, prominent at
international expositions from 1889 to 1914, helped to popularize
white supremacist scientific theories of evolution and human
development 47 At the turn of the century, people from all over
the world, and particularly from European colonies, were
brought to international expositions to construct, and then to live
in, "native villages."48 Arranged around the outskirts of
European centers celebrating Western industrial progress, the
native villages served to display exotic otherness, to showcase
imperial spoils. These exhibits functioned both as entertainment
a n d education, and anthropologists in France and the United
States saw them as important means for furthering ethnological
study.49 Feeding a fantasy of white supremacist evolutionary
theory, the native villages proposed to offer (white) Westerners
a glimpse "back," down a "sliding scale of humanity," toward a
"primitive" past of savagery. At many of the world's fairs, the
geographical layout of buildings and exhibits was designed
explicitly to reproduce this fantasy: Visitors to the 1893 Chicago
Columbian Exposition were encouraged to walk through the
Midway, with its native villages, toward the center of the fair,
marked by its literally white, Greco-Roman buildings, displaying
the latest European and North American scientific and cultural
achievements.50
4. Stereograph, Keystone View Company. Trocadero entrance
to the exposition, Colonial Section in foreground, Paris, i9oo.
Washington, D. C.
The "scientific" displays that drew evolutionary "evidence" of

primitive savagery from the colonies ideologically reinforced, in
turn, the virtues of European conquest, American imperialism,
and racial segregation. In France, according to Paul Greenhalgh,
such exhibits " `revealed' the apparently degenerate state the
conquered peoples lived in, making the conquest not only more
acceptable but necessary for their moral rescue." 51 In the
United States, according to Robert Rydell, "these hierarchical
displays of race and culture" suggested that "seemingly
backward `types' of humanity, including blacks, could
legitimately be treated as wards of the factory and field until an
indeterminate evolutionary period rendered them either civilized
or extinct." 52 The native village exhibits situated peoples of
color outside of history, placing them back in time in a
permanent prehistory of the white Western world, and they
suggested that the path to the present was paved with
subordination and service to what Du Bois called the "white
masters of the world." 53
The Paris Exposition of 1900, by far the largest international

exhibition of its time, drawing some 48 million attendants,54
greatly expanded the tradition of native village exhibits. The
entire area of the Trocadero gardens was devoted to these
colonial displays, and France alone presented over twenty of
them.55 The Dahomeyan village was among the most popular at
the exposition, and one writer described it as follows: "Superb
negroes are at work in their cabins, which are covered with
thatch. In the midst of them stands the table for the human
sacrifices ... ; the hatchets exhibited on it have sent many
unfortunates to the kingdom of shadows." 16
The American Negro Exhibit was forced implicitly to negotiate

such constructions of "Negro savagery" in the native villages.
Many African Americans were highly attuned to and disturbed
by the ways in which the sciences of biological racialism and
eugenics conflated all peoples of African descent into a racial
category or "type," defined as the essence and emblem of the
"primitive" and "savage." According to eugenicists, African
Americans shared a common biological destiny with diverse
African peoples, one that would severely impair their ascension
in white Western "civilization." Distressed by the assumptions
that linked African Americans to African peoples represented as
primitive by the native village, Frederick Douglass proclaimed
tha t the Dahomeyan village at the 1893 Chicago Columbian
Exposition exhibited "the Negro as a repulsive savage." 57
Protesting the exclusion of African Americans from official
participation in the 1893 world's fair, Douglass stated that while
no African American "gentlemen" served as fair commissioners,
"the Dahomeyans were there to exhibit their barbarism and
increase American contempt for the Negro intellect." 58
S. Stereograph, Underwood and Underwood. The
famous Trocadero Palace from the end of the Seine
Bridge, Paris, i9oo. Reproduced from the collections
of the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.
6. Stereograph, Underwood and Underwood. Natives of
Dahomey, Africa-Dahomey Village, Paris, i9oo. Reproduced
from the collections of the Library of Congress, Washington,
D. C.
While Doug-lass's denigration of Dahomeyans is certainly

troubling, it also clearly represents a response to racist
discourses in the United States. A cartoon from World's Fair
Puck, entitled "Darkies' Day at the Fair," lampooned the so-
called Colored People's Day, the one concession fair managers
made in response to African Americans' protests concerning
their exclusion from the 1893 Columbian Commission. The
cartoon depicts a long line of grossly caricatured African and
African American men and women-"savages" with spears and
"Zip Coons" in ill-fitting suits and top hats -as all essentially the
same in a white racist imagination. It jumbles racist stereotypes
in much the same way that the biological "type" collapses distinct
ethnic groups into one scientific category. In "Darkies' Day at
the Fair," Africans and African Americans alike, despite
extreme distinctions in nation, ethnicity, and culture, all become
the same Sambo types-all of them have the huge white lips of
American minstrelsy, and all of them are waiting for
watermelon. The Puck cartoon demonstrates how the scientific
"facts" of eugenicists and biological racialists and the racist
caricatures of white supremacists mutually reinforced one
another in popular responses to the evolutionary "lesson" of the
native village.
7. Cartoon, "Darkies' Day at the Fair," World's Fair Puck.
Washington, D. C.
Against such constructions of "Negro savagery," the American

Negro Exhibit-with its books, patents, sociological studies, and
documentary photographs -situated African Americans at the
forefront of Western social science and progress. Both in
method and content the American Negro Exhibit argued for the
superior intellect and strength of character of a people who
could make such advances just decades after emancipation, and
in the face of segregation and devastating discrimination. In this
light, a photograph of Du Bois himself on his visit to the i9oo
Paris Exposition proves instructive. In his tails and top hat, Du
Bois stands as the man of science and culture, of elite education
and superior refinement. He embodies the very position
Frederick Douglass was so troubled to see erased and supplanted
at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, namely that of the African
American gentleman. Indeed, Du Bois is himself on display as a
kind of embodied evidence in Paris, as a walking, talking
"American Negro Exhibit" of one.59
Despite, or paradoxically, because of its narrative of progress

and success, the American Negro Exhibit could be harnessed to
arguments critical of U. S. racism and European colonialism or
to arguments complacent about such global violence. In fact,
Thomas J. Calloway aimed to present a largely
accommodationist account of African American progress in the
American Negro Exhibit, a narrative reminiscent of that
forwarded by Booker T. Washington in his famous "Atlanta
Compromise" speech at the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States
Exposition.60 Calloway celebrated Washington as a hero and a
r a c e leader, and using Washington's portrait to frame the
American Negro Exhibit literally, he drew on Washington's
political positions to frame the exhibit ideologically.61 In 1895,
Washington had argued that segregation might be tolerated in the
short term for economic advances in the long term, and in i9oo,
Calloway suggested that lynchings, "horrible" as they were, must
not be allowed to overshadow the efforts of the United States in
educating African Americans.62 Rather than celebrating
African American resistance to overwhelming U. S. racism,
Calloway sought to congratulate the United States on a triumph
of racist paternalism.
8. W. E. B. Du Bois at the 19oo Paris Exposition. Reproduced

courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, W. E. B. Du
Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
In outlining "three strong reasons for a negro exhibit at the Paris
exposition," Calloway suggests that African Americans need
"occasional opportunities to show in a distinctive way the
evidences of their progress" -to "prove" their "value to the body
politic." That value, according to Calloway, lies in labor, in
producing the raw materials of national wealth. "The average
American citizen never stops to consider that practically every
cotton fabric he wears is a product of negro labor so far as the
raw material is concerned."63 Arguing further for the political
import of the American Negro Exhibit, Calloway proclaims that
the display will answer international critiques of U. S.
imperialism: "Much criticism of the United States is indulged in
abroad on the ground that this country has assumed to annex new
territory largely populated with dark races, when, it is charged,
this nation proscribes in every possible way the ten millions of
such people in its own borders. This exhibit can show other
nations the other side of the story and can furnish evidences of
marvelous progress of the colored people as an offset to the
charges of proscription." 64 In Galloway's vision, the American
Negro Exhibit could prove U. S. beneficence, and legitimize U.
S. imperialism, by showing how much "better off" men and
women of color were under the "civilizing" influence of the
United States. If, as Robert Rydell has argued, the United States
hoped, with its participation in the 19oo Paris Exposition, "to
demonstrate to the world and to Americans back home that the
newly reconstructed American nation-state had come of age as
an imperial power," 65 then it also hoped to show the
righteousness of that empire, and the American Negro Exhibit
could be held up as an example of U.S. "success" in "handling"
people of color.66
As the native village might be conceived as an emblem of the

problem to be solved by the so-called civilizing forces of Europe
and the United States, the American Negro Exhibit might be
perceived as a solution to that problem. Once again, Calloway
argues:
The "Fashoda incident" and the present Bocr war are only the
outcroppings of a tremendous European invasion of Africa.
This "dark continent" is no longer dark, as the most gigantic
efforts of capital are being directed toward opening up the
continent for the overplus population of Europe. The millions
of native Africans in the continent, who must in some way be
assimilated into the body politic, will more and more force
upon the statesmen of Europe and Africa the same ncgro
problem which this country has struggled with for three
centuries. Whatever faults may be charged to the people of
the United States, the people of African descent in this
country arc civilized, Christianized possessors of vast
educational privileges and owners of perhaps a half billion
dollars' worth of property. They are engaged in every industry
and pursuit common to white Americans, and universally
accredited with rapid progress. America can, therefore,
furnish Europe with such evidences of the negro's value as a
laborer, a producer and a citizen that the statecraft of the old
world will be wiser in the shaping of its African policies 67
According to Calloway, the American Negro Exhibit might

serve as a kind of how-to guide to civilizing and Christianizing
"the Negro." By following the American Negro Exhibit's
example, Calloway suggests, European colonizers might
transform "problems" into valuable laborers and producers.61
Du Bois's vision of an educated, elite Talented Tenth, of "co-
worker[s] in the kingdom of culture," 69 is clearly antithetical to
Galloway's colonial propaganda, and despite Calloway's intent,
his ideological framing of the American Negro Exhibit could not
contain all voices and visions of dissent represented in the
exhibit. In fact, as Robert Rydell has argued, "Just as the 1895
Atlanta Exposition had propelled Washington to a position of
national prominence, so the Paris Exposition bestowed
international recognition on Du Bois as an equally authoritative
spokesperson for people of African descent." 70 Du Bois's 1900
Georgia Negro studies provide a multivalenced example of his
own newly powerful antiracist vision at the turn of the century.
The global racializing of labor that Calloway seemed to support

was the problem of the color line that Du Bois first condemned in
his Georgia Negro studies for the 1900 Paris Exposition. A result
of the African slave trade and of European and North American
colonialism and imperialism, the racializing of labor enabled the
"doctrine of the Superior Race," a theory of white supremacism
that harnessed Western sciences and history to its purposes.71
According to Du Bois, "the real European imperialism pictured
in the Paris Exposition of 1900" (16) was not the image Europe
projected, of "Wealth and Science" (2; emphasis added) but a
vision of "wealth and power" (16; emphasis added) in which
science was called on to legitimize power, to "prove the all but
universal assumption that the color line had a scientific basis,"
and thereby to support racial segregation, discrimination,
exploitation, and slavery in biological terms (20).
Against this vision of scientifically legitimized white

supremacism, Du Bois wields his own science in the Georgia
Negro studies. He denaturalizes the color line, wrenching it from
biology and biological explanations, to relocate it back in the
terrain of social history, economics, and global politics. The
introductory chart that framed Du Bois's social study of "The
Georgia Negro" for visitors at the Paris Exposition of 19oo
carried his lasting declaration: "The problem of the twentieth
century is the problem of the color-line." 72 A couple of months
later, Du Bois would repeat those words at the first PanAfrican
Congress in London,73 and he would later use them to introduce
his best-known work, The Souls ofBlack Folk (19o3).74 Du
Bois's social and economic critique of the color line has had
tremendous influence on the scholarship of race (and of Du Bois
himself) for over a century. And while fundamentally important,
the critical emphasis on these particular structural insights has
overshadowed Du Bois's visual conception of the color line. This
book's task is to restore the visual significance of the color line,
an understanding of particular consequence now, as scholars
work to define an emergent visual culture studies.
As Irit Rogoff and Nicholas Mirzoeff have argued, the study of

visual culture is best defined by a common set of questions,
rather than a canon of objects or a privileged group of media.75
Visual culture scholars seek to understand how viewing creates
viewers, how acts of looking are encouraged and circumscribed
culturally, and how access to the gaze shapes subjectivity.76
What I aim to contribute to that conversation, along with bell
hooks and others, is an understanding of how race fundamentally
informs these visual dynamics.77 I argue that the questions we
ask as visual culture scholars must account for the ways in which
race both determines and is determined by acts of looking, and
for the ways in which the viewer and those viewed are racially
inscribed. In recovering Du Bois's visual sense of the color line,
this book demonstrates both how fundamentally the visual has
been racialized, and how race has been envisioned.
Photography on the Color Line reads Du Bois's Georgia Negro

photographs against archives that sought to pose African
American bodies and contain African American identities in the
service of a racial hierarchy at the turn of the century.
Methodologically, then, this book conceives historical context as
the contest of cultural meaning produced between and across
archives. But archives do not produce meaning solely in dialogue
with one another. Archives are created and utilized as evidence
to support varied cultural discourses; they emblematize
epistemologies. In chapter I, I aim to tease out such ways of
knowing by reading Du Bois's articulation of double
consciousness as the "sense of always looking at one's self
through the eyes of others" within an emergent psychological
conversation that posed self-recognition as a visual process.
"Envisioning Race" examines the visual paradigms that inform
Du Bois's understanding of double consciousness, the Veil, and
second sight, and suggests that race and visual culture were
mutually constitutive in the Jim Crow United States.
In the second chapter, I read Du Bois's Georgia Negro portraits

against the scientific archives that constructed a visual racial
typology at the turn of the century. I argue that Du Bois
replicates scientific methodology in the Georgia Negro albums to
undermine the assumptions about race forwarded by biological
racialists, especially by eugenicists. Further, Du Bois represents
elite class standing and cultural refinement to contest scientific
claims about innate "Negro inferiority," thereby evoking class to
trump (an essentialized hierarchy of) race. "The Art of
Scientific Propaganda" explains how photographs can critically
"signify" on specific visual genealogies, undermining the
presumed neutrality of visual evidence, and argues that even the
most commodified and sentimentalized of photographic forms
can be transformed into sites of resistance.
In chapter 3, "'Families of Undoubted Respectability,'" I

investigate the ideologically laden nature of this critical strategy,
teasing out the limitations of Du Bois's particular resistance to
racism. I suggest that Du Bois anchors his antiracist critique in a
patriarchal model of an African American elite, envisioning a
restrained and disciplined African American manhood in critical
contrast to the images of black manhood figured in the
discourses enabling lynching at the turn of the century. Here I
examine how Du Bois's vision of an elite African American
patriarchy depends on controlling, containing, and even
condemning the sexuality of African American women. By
heralding class to challenge race, Du Bois reinscribes the
constraints of a (middle-class) gender hierarchy.
The fourth and final chapter focuses more directly on the racial
terror of lynching, returning to the visual nexus of understanding
that informs Du Boisian double consciousness, the Veil, and
se c on d sight, but this time examining representations of
whiteness and the processes of white identification in early
twentieth-century lynching photographs. While my initial work
with these concepts in chapter i is focused through The Souls of
Black Folk, in chapter 4, I read these ideas through Du Bois's
later essay "The Souls of White Folk." In "Spectacles of
Whiteness: The Photography of Lynching," I examine the
representations of spectators' bodies in lynching photographs,
assessing these images as an obscured archive of whiteness.
I conclude with an epilogue that situates the archivist in the

a rc hive , exploring how representations of Du Bois himself
signified in relation to the emergent imagery of the New Negro
that his igoo Paris Exposition photographs helped to define.
Through this analysis, the epilogue reinforces the value of a
critically comparative archival methodology, arguing that such
work can generate a distinctvisual genealogy, and a new cultural
vision.
This book, therefore, assesses how Du Bois's Georgia Negro

photographs engage and challenge the meaning of the color line.
It recuperates Du Bois as a visual theorist of race, demonstrating
how he conceived and contested the color line from within the
domain of visual culture -in visual terms and through visual
media. Deciphering the contestatory meanings of the Georgia
Negro photographs, Photography on the Color Line also models a
way of reading photographic archives that is critically
comparative, that examines archives as ideological projects with
distinct visual genealogies. In so doing, the book suggests new
ways for scholars of visual culture to understand images as
directly informed by and participating in vital cultural debates.
Finally, the book demonstrates how central race has been to
visual cultural production and how visual culture has also
fundamentally shaped and informed the meaning of race in the
United States.

In what has become one of his most widely quoted propositions,
W. E. B. Du Bois describes "double-consciousness" as "the sense
o f always looking at one's self through the eyes of others," i
thereby drawing on a visual paradigm to articulate African
American identity in the Jim Crow United States. It is the
negotiation of disparate gazes and competing visions that
imposes the "two-ness" of double consciousness. The recognition
of violently distorted images of blacknessthose projected
"through the eyes of [white] others" -produces the psychological
and social burden of attempting to assuage "two souls, two
thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals."'
Many of Du Bois's most influential concepts from the turn of the

century are focused through visual imagery, including, in
addition to double consciousness, what he calls "the Veil" and
"second-sight," and this chapter argues for Du Bois as an early
visual theorist of race and racism. Du Bois not only utilized
visual images to describe racial constructs but also
conceptualized the racial dynamics of the Jim Crow color line as
visual culture. In Du Bois's early writings, the color line
represents not only the systemic inequity of racialized labor but
also a visual field in which racial identities are inscribed and
experienced through the lens of a "white supremacist gaze."3
While race may be structurally codified and entrenched
according to the movement of global capital via colonialism,
imperialism, and the slave trade, in Du Bois's understanding, the
experiences of racialization and racial identification are focused
through a gaze and founded in visual misrecognition. Attending
to the visual in Du Bois's early written works enables one to see
identity and race as both effects and cornerstones of visual
processes, as both products and producers of visual culture .4
Double Consciousness as Visual Culture
Over the course of the century following his initial

proclamations, double consciousness has proven to be one of Du
Bois's most evocative conceptions, framing and shaping much
creative and scholarly work on the cultures of the African
diaspora.5 Despite its influence, however, double consciousness
remains a subtle and complicated insight, and recently scholars
have begun to historicize Du Bois's use of the term by tracing its
genealogy.6 In my own assessment here, I aim to draw out the
relatively unexplored legacy of visual psychological ideas that
Du Bois draws on and fundamentally reconfigures to theorize
double consciousness.? Once again, it is the image of himself
that Du Bois sees through the eyes of white others that makes
him feel his "two-ness"; it is the image of self as other that Du
Bois cannot fully assimilate.
By focusing on the visual terms through which Du Bois

conceives double consciousness, one finds that the connections
between his theory and William James's early work in
psychology are both less direct and more fundamental than
others have posited. Indeed, the most important conceptual links
shared by Du Bois and James, which clarify Du Bois's unique use
of double consciousness, become fully apparent only when
considered through a visual lens. My argument necessarily takes
issue with part of Shamoon Zamir's recent and important study,
Dark Voices, in which he spends considerable energy distancing
Du Bois's thought from that of James. Zamir has argued that
during Du Bois's years at Harvard, it was not his studies with
James, but his studies with George Santayana, of Hegel and
German philosophy, that most influenced Du Bois's
understanding of double consciousness. In a detailed comparison
of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind to Du Bois's The Souls of
Black Folk, Zamir suggests that Hegel provided a means by
which Du Bois could theorize "the relationship of consciousness
to history." 8 But while Zamir argues carefully and convincingly
for the Hegelian thematics in The Souls ofBlack Folk, his
analysis fails to account for the visual dynamics central to Du
Bois's conception of double consciousness. Indeed, the one
aspect of Du Boisian double consciousness Zamir cannot
reconcile with Hegelian philosophy- "the linking of self-
consciousness to seeing and being seen" 9can be illuminated by a
closer analysis of James's Principles of Psychol ogy. And as
Zamir notes, James was teaching portions of Principles in 1889,
the year Du Bois studied with him at Harvard.'0
While I will persist in drawing connections between the early

work of Du Bois and the contemporary work of James, I do not
aim to make a case for scholarly influence by tracing a
genealogy of great ideas through great men. For certainly, as
David Levering Lewis suggests, "the irreducible fact that Du
Bois's existence, like that of other men and women of African
descent in America, amounted to a lifetime of being àn outcast
and a stranger in mine own house,' as he would write, was a
psychic purgatory fully capable by itself of nurturing a concept
of divided consciousness, whatever the Jamesian influences.""
And yet, the particular manner in which Du Bois articulated
double consciousness does run parallel to James's thought in
important ways. Ultimately, however, I am interested, as is
Zamir, in demonstrating how Du Bois adapted, rather than
adopted, the critical thinking of his day, and further, like Priscilla
Wald, in how Du Bois's adaptations commented on the limitations
of the thought he worked with and transformed.12 Du Bois's
thinking was clearly in flux at the turn of the century. He was
struggling to refashion received models of inquiry, attempting to
develop new languages and methods for assessing and
articulating African American life in all its geographic,
economic, and gendered variety. He sought fervently to develop
an anti-essentialist methodology that could challenge the legacy
of biological racialism and the emergence of eugenics, both of
which claimed to delineate a hierarchy of innate, inherent,
biological racial differences. Following an elite education and
training in the United States and Germany, Du Bois modified and
reformulated the purportedly "universal" theories that he
inherited -theories outwardly unmarked but clearly Eurocentric,
white supremacist, and masculinist-to make them adequate to his
own experience and race-conscious social, economic, cultural,
and psychological analysis. Thus, while the particular
psychological conversations he entered into shaped his own
thinking at the turn of the century, Du Bois also pushed the limits
and challenged the foundations of those conversations by
attending to the question of race.
Several scholars have noted James's use of double

consciousness to discuss personality disorders and pathologies.
And while interesting overlaps exist between James's clinical
psychological use of the concept and Du Bois's adaptation, Du
Bois's specific articulation of double consciousness in visual
terms resonates most powerfully with the more general
processes of identity formation and self-recognition that James
describes as fundamental to the development of "normal"
consciousness. In other words, Du Bois does not adopt the
c a te gory of an anomalous pathology to articulate African
American distinctiveness; instead, he racializes the very process
of identity formation itself, as posited by James, demonstrating
how race in a racist culture fundamentally changes and
determines everything. Du Bois's use of double consciousness
transposes James's theory of social selfrecognition into African
American experience; it places James's undifferentiated "Me"
back into a world divided by the color line, and specifically into
an African American world shut off from the white world by "a
vast veil." 13 Du Bois's adaptation of James's psychological
theories explores an African American psyche to emphasize the
social pathology of a racist American culture.
Having said that, however, there are significant connections

between James's discussion of personality disorders and Du
Bois's conception of a racialized double consciousness. In his
analysis of "alternating personality" in The Principles of
Psychology, James discusses several cases of double
consciousness, describing individuals who have experienced a
spontaneous, radical transformation of personality concomitant
with severe memory loss.14 He comments on the case of Felida
X., a young woman who at age fourteen began to pass into a
"secondary" state marked by a significant loss of inhibitions.
While in the second state, she could remember the first, but once
restored to her original state, she could not remember the
second. Thus, over the course of several years, her original self
would express bewilderment at changes that had occurred
during her secondary state, such as becoming pregnant, of which
she had no memory's Another young woman, Mary Reynolds,
fell into a deep, unshakeable sleep and woke up twenty hours
later with an entirely new personality. The formerly melancholy
young woman awakened cheerful and mischievous, with no
memory whatsoever of her previous self. She did not recognize
family and friends, and she forgot how to read and write, and
initially, she even forgot how to speak. After five weeks,
Reynolds awakened to find herself restored to her usual self, as
if nothing had happened in the interim. These severe alterations
in personality continued over the course of fifteen years.16
James accounts for these pathological states by suggesting that
the "brain-condition" must allow for distinctly organized
"association-paths." According to James, the brain must be
structured to permit "the processes in one system [to] give rise to
one consciousness, and those of another system to another
simultaneously existing consciousness." Explaining the memory
loss that occurs in a state of double consciousness, James
suggests that the two selves remain largely unknown to one
another: "Each of the selves is due to a system of cerebral paths
acting by itself." 17
For Du Bois, double consciousness is marked by a similar two-

ness, by "two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two
warring ideals in one dark body." 11 And yet, Du Bois is acutely
aware of both selves simultaneously. His is a strangely conscious
double consciousness. And further, for Du Bois, double
consciousness does not arise from two distinct "cerebral paths"; it
is not a "brain-condition," a biological structure, but a social
construct. Du Boisian double consciousness results when one
attempts to reconcile radically different perceptions of self;
competing representations split consciousness, not competing
cerebral paths. In short, two-ness is an effect of the color line.
Du Bois does not outline an anomalous psychological pathology,
but the condition of being African American in white
supremacist America. Ultimately, he describes the struggle of a
healthy mind forced to confront and inhabit a perverse world;
pathology finally resides not in an African American brain, but
in America's social body.
Du Bois's understanding of double consciousness most closely

resembles James's description of the basic components of
selfconsciousness. For Du Bois, African American
consciousness is marked by the discordant splitting that James
describes as an effect of disjunctions between one's various
"social selves." The two-ness of Du Bois's self-consciousness is
engendered by the conflicting images he finds of himself held in
social worlds divided by the color line.
In Psychology: The Briefer Course (1892), William James

describes the self as "duplex," "partly known and partly knower,
partly object and partly subject," both "Me" and "I." 19 The
elusive I is finally, for James, thoughts themselves as thinkers
(83); the I is that which "is conscious," and the Me is simply one
of the things the I is "conscious of " (62). The Me is the more
readily apparent aspect of the self, according to James, for it is,
quite literally, that which is known, that which the thinker thinks
about.
In James's understanding, the Me is constituted by three parts,

namely, the material me, the spiritual me, and the social me (44).
The material me includes one's body, clothes, family, house, and
possessions, and is thus characterized by external attributes. The
spiritual me, on the other hand, is specifically internal; it is "the
entire collection of [one's] states of consciousness," most notably
marked by "active feeling states" (48). Finally, one's social me is
"the recognition which [one] gets from his mates" (46).
According to James, "Properly speaking, a man has as many
social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and
carry an image of him in their mind" (46; emphasis added). The
social self is multiple, and divided, sometimes even by
"discordant splitting" (47), as one shows different sides of one's
self to different groups of people (46). What James describes as
one's sense of "images of [one's] person in the minds of others"
holds incredible importance within his theory of the self (61).
Just as one must take an intense self-interest in one's own body,
so, proclaims James, one must also be guided and directed by the
ways in which one is perceived: "I should not be extant now had
I not become sensitive to looks of approval or disapproval on the
faces among which my life is cast" (6i). What Du Bois would
call the "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of
others," is, then, for James, fundamental to selfknowledge and
even to one's survival.20
In James's depiction of the functions of the social self, one finds

an avowedly social, and developmentally secondary, rendition of
what Jacques Lacan would later describe as the mirror stage."i
Lacan's mirror stage depicts ego formation as a process founded
in misrecognition, in one's misrecognition of self in and as an
image reflected in the mirror. According to Lacan, such a
process generally takes place between the ages of six and
eighteen months. During the mirror stage, an infant's
fragmentary experience of self coheres as the ego around a
unified image of self seen in the mirror. This idealized image of
wholeness is illusory, greater than the sum of felt, fragmented
parts it magically combines in spectacle. The image initiates the
infant into the psychological cycle of lack and desire, for the
child will forever attempt to maintain this illusion (this self-
delusion) of ideality and wholeness realized only in reflection.
Through the mirror stage, the ego is thus founded both in the split
between body (or physical experience) and image and in the
perpetual psychological effort of suturing self-identification to
image."
According to Lacan, the mirror stage takes place at a time in

which the infant is still "unable as yet to walk, or even to stand
up," when he or she is "still sunk in his [or her] motor incapacity
and nursling dependence."23 As such, it is a process that
requires "some support, human or artificial,"24 and most likely
maternal. While Lacan downplays the mother's role in the mirror
stage, proclaiming that this development takes place "before [the
ego's] social determination,"25 the mother is the phantom
support that carries the child in its "nursling dependence," and I
would argue that she provides important social reinforcement for
the child's misrecognition through her own approving gaze. One
might suppose that as the infant looks into the mirror, the mother
corroborates the child's misrecognition- "Look! Who's that? Yes.
That's you!"-affirming the child's identification with his or her
reflection 26 Thus the infant's initial identification with an
idealized image of self is reinforced by the intimate gaze of the
mother, whose adoring eyes corroborate and accept the
idealized (whole) image as an adequate representation of the
child's self. For a brief moment, the infant's fantasy of wholeness
is shared by another, and thus the mirror stage (what one might
call primary (mis)identification), despite Lacan's assertions to the
contrary, can also be considered social. Viewing the mirror
stage through the lens of Jamesian psychology, what
distinguishes this first moment of misrecognition (in the mirror
stage) from later scenes of social misrecognition is that the
image of self reflected in the eyes of the mother (the social
other) is not partial, nor distorted by "discordant splitting" or
multiplicity, but is equivalent (for the child) to the child's own
(mis)perception of self. In this revised rendition of Lacan's
mirror stage, the adoring gaze of the mother supports
misrecognition and reinforces the suturing of self and image.
One can read Du Bois's depiction of double consciousness as

the result of the (Jamesian) social self's first direct encounter
with the color line. This violent negotiation proves shocking and
transformative, and its effects reverberate back to and disrupt
the very foundations of one's initial, idealized misrecognition of
self as image in the (Lacanian) mirror stage. Indeed, for Du
Bois, double consciousness results from an inverted mirror stage
brought about by a classmate's racialized rejection of him. In "Of
Our Spiritual Strivings," the first chapter of The Souls of Black
Folk, Du Bois sketches his awakening to double consciousness as
a kind of developmental pattern:
It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation

first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well
when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away
up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic
winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee
wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls'
heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards-ten cents a package- and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,-refused it peremptorily, with a
glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness
that I was different from the others??
Du Bois describes a negation of the social recognition James

sees as essential to the social self. Double consciousness is an
effect of disidentification, in which a representative of Du Bois's
social world disavows his self-image, and that self-image is
consequently wrenched apart and found lacking. What the
young Du Bois newly recognizes is that he is different from
others, or, rather, "like [them], mayhap, in heart and life and
longing,"28 but seen as different, with a peremptory glance.
The discovery of racism reveals a split and divided identity

construct, in which the (newly racialized) "black" subject is
forced to see the gulf that divides self from idealized image.
Racialization is the process whereby the psychological suturing
effects that meld selfperception with an idealized image of
wholeness dissolve. "Race," or rather, "blackness," as projected
through the eyes of white supremacist others, forces the black
subject to recognize the misperception on which ego formation is
founded. Racialization ruptures the fantasy of idealized
misrecognition, and this traumatic disruption induces Du Boisian
double consciousness. Du Bois does not simply see a Jamesian
"partial self" reflected in the eyes of another, but an antiself.
Indeed, in the white girl's eyes he sees an image that he does not,
and cannot, recognize in relation to himself, an image that
fractures the illusion of an ideal and complete ego. This first
encounter with the color line troubles the cornerstone of initial
misrecognition of self as image in the mirror stage. This inverted
mirror stage initiates a process of self-splitting, whereby the
illusory image of wholeness is assaulted by the dividing force of
the color line, cleaving the ego into two-ness. While any social
encounter might trouble the ego's idealized image of wholeness,
in a social world divided by the color line, race emerges as the
dividing force that splits the self beyond (unconscious) suture.
For the racialized subject, both the splitting and the suturing of
the ego are made apparent, visible, conscious. As the ego is
founded in attempts to merge the split between body and image,
the ego maintains itself only by constantly attempting to
reconsolidate an image of wholeness. Thus that which forces the
e g o to recognize the illusory nature of its wholeness is
profoundly disconcerting and disruptive. In the Jim Crow United
States, blackness makes one vulnerable to this vision of
fundamental fracture; racialization makes apparent the illusory
nature of the ego's wholeness. For Du Bois, the problem of the
(Jamesian) social self resides in the fact that "the eyes of [white
supremacist] others" project a violently negative image of
blackness aimed to obliterate the (black) self, as well as any
claims to interracial social bonds. It is only whiteness-culturally,
legally, socially, economically, and institutionally privileged as
an unmarked racial category-that enables the "white" ego to
remain blind to the suturing effects of its own fundamental
misrecognition.29
Several decades later, and in the rather different context of

Fr e nc h colonialism, Frantz Fanon would also powerfully
describe the psychological splitting of black consciousness under
a white gaze. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon muses: "I am
being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am
foxed." 30 As a black Antillean man, Fanon experiences a white
Parisian gaze as a rupturing and dividing force, one that splits
him into "a triple person." "'Look, a Negro!' .. . `Mama, see the
Negro!"' A young white boy fixes Fanon in objectivity. Fanon
declares, "It was no longer a question of being aware of my
body in the third person but in a triple person. . . . I was given not
one but two, three places.... I existed triply: I occupied space. I
moved toward the other ... and the evanescent other, hostile but
not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea.""
Seeking recognition from the white other, Fanon's black self
f inds nothing. Or rather, the black self finds-" `Sho' good
eatin,"'32-an inverted mirror image-an "effigy of him[self ]," 33
to which he is fastened as a young white boy screams, " `Look at
the nigger! ... Mama, a Negro!'" 34 As Fatimah Tobing Rony has
argued, the dilemma for Fanon is "what does one become when
one sees that one is not fully recognized as Self by the wider
society but cannot fully identify as Other?" 35 It is this
"uncomfortable suspension," 36 this "nausea," that Fanon
experiences as the white boy's call to "Look!" at the "Negro"
forces him, in Du Bois's terms, to look at himself "through the
eyes of others." Fanon states: "I subjected myself to an objective
e xa mina tion, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic
characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms,
cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects,
slave-ships, and above all else, above all: `Sho' good eatin.' "37
As Diana Fuss suggests, "Forced to occupy, in a white racial
phantasm, the static ontological space of the timeless `primitive,'
the black man is disenfranchised of his very subjectivity."38
In Fanon's depiction of this encounter, we see how an inverted

mirror functions from both sides. As the white child screams and
points at "a Negro," he reinforces his own ideal self-image
through negative projection. This is not a simple distinction
between self and other being made, but a racialized attempt to
shore up a (mis)recognized (white) self by obliterating the
other's subjectivity. Here the hysterical rejection of an image of
blackness enables the white subject to remain blind to his own
split subjectivity and fundamental investment in self as image.
The suturing of whiteness with an ideal image is enabled in part
by underscoring a split between self and image only for black
subjectivity, and in fervently discarding a grotesquely fashioned,
negative image of blackness as antithetical to the (white) self. In
the negative reinscription of a white ideal image through the
rejection of a projected image of blackness that Fanon describes,
the white mother plays a reinforcing role as the one who looks
and affirms: "Yes. That's not you." In this exchange, Fanon
becomes the anti-ideal for the young white boy, and forced to
look at himself through the eyes of the child, he sees a
fantastically negative construction impossible to reconcile with
his own self-image.
For Du Bois, African American self-consciousness is similarly

marked by discordant splitting because the specters held in the
minds of white others-" `Sho' good eatin"'-are imposed over and
over again. Du Bois is thus acutely aware of the images white
others "carry ... of him in their mind," images upheld and
fortified by a vast social, economic, scientific, and legal machine
that privileges and empowers them with "truth." Those images
shatter the suturing of selfperception on which the ego has been
founded, forcing the "black" self to recognize the split through
which identity is established, to see "two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals." It is the refraction of
two social selves divided by the color line that will not allow
one's thoughts to focus in the comforting illusion of a sutured
self-consciousness.
Du Bois's deployment of double consciousness racializes

William James's theory of self-recognition, drawing out the
whiteness so central to James's (and later to Lacan's) purportedly
"universal" psychology.39 Du Bois demonstrates how an
African American social self becomes conscious of a
fundamental split as it is perceived through the eyes of white
others in a Jim Crow culture divided by the color line, a culture
that "only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other
world."40 Triggered by a peremptory white glance of dismissal,
the moment of self-conscious social recognition that effects
double consciousness is one in which Du Bois is forced to
negotiate an obliterating image of self refracted through an
inverted mirror. For Du Bois, double consciousness is produced
when the suturing of selfperception is made visible and ruptured
for the racialized subject in a racist American social sphere.
Double consciousness thus enables a powerful social critique,
for it is the African American condition that discloses the
pathology of white supremacist America.
Race and the Gendered Gaze
As Hazel Carby has noted, "It is significant that Du Bois claims

that his first encounter with racism was the moment when his
courtly, nineteenth-century advances were rejected by a young
white woman."41 In Du Bois's depiction of an inverted mirror
stage in the first recognition of racism, it is a white girl who
denies him his idealized self. In this second gendered scene of
misrecognition, one might think of the white girl as a kind of
antimother, driving a wedge between the black boy and the
idealized self-image of wholeness first sanctioned by his African
American mother.42 In refusing to accept the black boy's
identification with wholeness, the white girl poses lack as a
conscious quotient-and racializes that lack 43 Du Bois's social
world is divided by the force of the color line - split along racial
lines, but also, it would seem, in the very recognition of the color
line, divided by gender.44
In Du Bois's discussion of double consciousness, the gendered

a n d racialized scene of an inverted mirror stage leaves the
African American boy's self-perception radically altered. If one
reads that rupture back through a revised and explicitly
gendered version of Lacan's mirror stage that includes the
mother, one must wonder what might happen to the child's
perception of his mother, of she who has collaborated in
constructing and maintaining the child's ideal self-image, after
the child is forced to recognize the color line and the split and
suture on which identity is founded. Once the child's self-
perception has been transformed, once the suturing of a split self
has been made conscious-has been seen through the process of
racialization-can the child continue to trust the mother's
perception? Might he adore her for her idealized vision, or
resent the way she has "protected" him from the trauma of the
color line? And conversely, if the child fervently attempts to
reinscribe psychologically his own image of ideal self-wholeness
after the split self has been illuminated, does the child have to
contain his mother, in his perception, within a kind of limbo
before or outside of the world of the color line? Can she be (in
th e child's eyes) both an adoring mother and a woman who
negotiates the color line on her own terms? Such questions may
subtly inform Du Bois's celebration of the African American
woman as mother, and his subtle collapsing of the category of
woman into mother, in some of his early twentieth-century
essays. It is the "mother-idea" that Du Bois heralds as the
greatest gift of the "black race" to the world in "The Damnation
of Women,"45 and it is the mother-idea that dominates his
celebration of his first wife in The Souls of Black Folk. He
cherishes his wife as his "girl-mother," "she whom now I saw
unfolding like the glory of the morning-the transfigured woman,"
on the birth of their son, and he deems her "the world's most
piteous thing- a childless mother," after their son is taken away
by death 46 While Du Bois is at pains to reconcile the social
paradoxes facing African American women in "The Damnation
of Women," in The Souls ofBlack Folk it is as mothers that he
seems to grant them his full social acceptance.47
The role of the mother in the African American boy's initial ego
construction and later double consciousness is taken up quite
explicitly in James Weldon Johnson's novel The Autobiography
of an Ex-colored Man (1912). In Johnson's fictional depiction of
a dawning double consciousness, an inverted mirror stage is
made surprisingly literal, as a young boy runs to the mirror to
see, for the first time, his own blackness. As in Du Bois's The
Souls of Black Folk, the discovery of racism first comes at
school, and a white woman again functions as the vehicle for
that discovery. However, for Johnson's narrator, the initial scene
of racism is doubly charged, for it is also the moment in which
the child himself first learns of his African American heritage.
After a white woman classifies Johnson's narrator among the
children of color in his class, he returns home to scrutinize
himself in the mirror: "I rushed up into my own little room, shut
the door, and went quickly to where my looking-glass hung on
the wall. For an instant I was afraid to look, but when I did, I
looked long and earnestly." In his face, the child discovers the
dark eyes and hair and lashes that frame his whiteness, the
darkness that he himself finds "strangely fascinating." But for
Johnson's narrator, this second mirror stage also requires the
corroboration of the mother:
How long I stood there gazing at my image I do not know.... I

ran downstairs and rushed to where my mother was sitting.... I
buried my head in her lap and blurted out: "Mother, mother,
tell me, am I a nigger?" ... I looked up into her face and
repeated: "Tell me, mother, am I a nigger?" There were tears
in her eyes and I could sec that she was suffering for me. And
then it was that I looked at her critically for the first time. I
had thought of her in a childish way only as the most beautiful
woman in the world; now I looked at her starching for defects
48
In Johnson's depiction of a dawning double consciousness, the

child's mother has clearly played a central role in the
construction of his idealized self-image, and he needs her
verification in order to recognize a secondary image. It is also
apparent that as the child's selfperception is transformed, his
vision of his mother is also altered. As the child's own ideal
image, conceived before knowledge of the color line, is
changed, so, too, is the image of she who collaborated in its
construction. For the first time, the child regards his mother
"through the eyes of others."
His self-perception and most intimate social relations

transformed, Johnson's narrator now holds an altered view of the
entire world: "And so I have often lived through that hour, that
day, that week, in which was wrought the miracle of my
transition from one world into another; for I did indeed pass into
another world. From that time I looked out through other eyes."
Through this inverted mirror stage, Johnson's narrator attains a
"dual personality," a double consciousness.49 Much later in the
novel, after the narrator's mother has died, and after he has
made his momentous decision to pass as a white man in the white
world, a white woman's look once again becomes the arbiter of
difference, the mirror in which he learns to see himself "through
the eyes of others." Johnson's narrator confesses his African
American ancestry to his white beloved, and relates: "When I
looked up, she was gazing at me with a wild, fixed stare as
though I was some object she had never seen. Under the strange
light in her eyes I felt that I was growing black and thick-
featured and crimp-haired." 50 Johnson's narrator is ultimately
reconciled to this white woman, and marries her while passing as
a white man, but the specter he once saw in her eyes continues
to haunt him, and he is condemned to wonder if some slight fault
might not recall this racialized reflection, might not impose the
image of the inverted mirror stage.
In their depictions of double consciousness, Du Bois and

Johnson both pose a gendered vision, describing an African
American boy's first encounter with the color line through the
vehicle of a white girl's or woman's gaze. For both, the scene of
racialized misrecognition is gendered, and they articulate double
consciousness as a masculine African American dynamic.
Indeed, the figure largely missing from each of the three male-
authored accounts of a dawning double (or triple) consciousness
that I have discussed is that of the African American woman, or
the woman of African descent, independent of a man of color,
negotiating her own double consciousness vis-a-vis the color
line. In the most extreme example, in Fanon's Black Skin, White
Masks, the woman of color becomes important only in relation to
the formation of black male consciousness, and, in Fanon's eyes,
only negatively, as he imagines her to reject and impede the
development of an idealized image of black masculinity. It is the
woman of color's possible rejection of a black man for a white
lover that particularly enrages Fanon: "Every woman in the
Antilles, whether in a casual flirtation or in a serious affair, is
determined to select the least black of the men.... I know a great
number of girls from Martinique, students in France, who
admitted to me with complete candor - completely white candor-
that they would find it impossible to marry black men. (Get out of
that and then deliberately go back to it? Thank you, no.)"51
Fanon proclaims with deep sarcasm: "In a word, the race must
be whitened; every woman in Martinique knows this, says it,
repeats it. Whiten the race, save the race." 52 As Lola Young
has argued: "Fanon only refers to black women's experiences in
terms which mark her as the betrayer (tainted with white
blood)."53 In Fanon's text, Du Bois's celebration of the African
American woman as ideal mother is transformed into a mistrust
of women of color as diluters of the race, as the anti-African
mothers of white babies. The problem, as Fanon sees it, is that
the woman of color who chooses a white lover refuses to
recognize black manhood.54 She refuses to play the idealized
role of Du Bois's mother-idea; she will not reconfirm Fanon's
primary misidentification with an ideal self-image. For Fanon,
the woman of color becomes a vehicle of the color line. Indeed,
she is transformed, in Fanon's negative fantasy, into the mother
whose white child screams, "Mama, a Negro!"
James Weldon Johnson's narrative depicts an African

American child's relationship to a mother positioned as the
woman of color Fanon condemns, namely, as the unmarried
lover of a white man, a "whitener" of the race. As we have seen,
Johnson's narrator's mother momentarily diminishes in the eyes of
her child as she is recognized as the progenitor of African
American identity, as she is newly measured by the color line.
But Johnson's narrator's temporary wavering is distinct from
Fanon's particular racial condemnation, for the child scrutinizes
the mother as bearer of blackness, rather than of whiteness. For
Johnson's narrator, this emotionally and psychologically
ambiguous moment is passed through, or perhaps, retreated
from, as the child redirects his confusion and anxiety toward the
absent white father. He subsequently idealizes his mother once
again, particularly on her death, which he deems "one of the two
sacred sorrows of my life." 55 The death of his mother also
makes the narrator's subsequent decision to pass less difficult
(which Fanon would also despise), as he can conceive it as a
rejection of white constructions of blackness, without having to
socially deny his mother-without having to forsake her, or her
blackness - directly. In other words, he can suppose himself to
expel white misrepresentations of blackness without scorning
African Americans or African American identity per se. But
once again, in Johnson's narrative, the African American man's
identity, his selfconception, his idealized self-image-even as he
chooses to cross the color line and assume a white identity-
depends on containing the African American mother in a
temporal place before or beyond (as in death) the color line.56
Du Bois and Johnson clearly offer a much less negative, much
less obliterating image of the African American woman than
does Fanon. If, for Fanon, the woman of color rejects, and
thereby assaults, black masculinity, for Du Bois and Johnson, the
woman of color, as mother, confirms the African American
male child's ideal identity. But in confining the African American
woman to her role as mother, as one who plays a supporting role
in the male child's drama of racial identity, Du Bois and Johnson
contain the African American woman even as they celebrate
her. For Du Bois and Johnson, the African American woman is
the epitome of virtue - as long as she keeps her adoring gaze
focused on an idealized African American masculinity.
The Veil and Second Sight
As double consciousness, for Du Bois, describes the racialized

subject's forced recognition of psychic splitting, the Veil denotes
such a split writ large culturally. Arnold Rampersad has
suggested that the Veil connotes "the dim perception by the races
of each other," and further, I would argue, the Veil is that which
dims perception.57 The Veil functions as a kind of cultural
screen on which the collective weight of white misconceptions is
fortified and made manifest. The Veil is the site at which white
fantasies of a negative blackness, as well as fantasies of an
idealized whiteness, are projected and maintained.58 The Veil
thus shrouds African Americans in invisibility by making
misrepresentations of blackness overwhelmingly visible. Just as
an illuminated film screen seems to project the spectacle it
reflects, relegating everything else around it to darkness, so the
Veil as screen stands in for the African American subjects it
sentences to invisibility. The Veil is the site at which African
Americans are asked to see themselves "through the eyes of
others."
Perhaps making literal this sense of the Veil as screen, Frantz

Fanon states: "I cannot go to a film without seeing myself. I wait
for me. In the interval, just before the film starts, I wait for me.
The people in the theater are watching me, examining me,
waiting for me. A Negro groom is going to appear. My heart
makes my head spin." 59 Fanon experiences double
consciousness as feeling himself split by the image others take
for him, the image he also is invited to greet as self onscreen.
The negative image projected through the eyes of white others
onto the screen of the Veil makes apparent the split on which
identity is founded, the split between body and image that the
psyche sutures by creating the ego. As Fanon feels other eyes on
him, he feels his very body transformed by and into a cultural
screen, subsumed by the images of blackness white viewers
anticipate.
In his account of a dawning double consciousness in The Souls

o f Black Folk, Du Bois emphasizes the darkness of the Veil,
describing it as a "shadow" that sweeps across the African
American child, enclosing him within the "shades of the prison-
house."60 Du Bois depicts life within the Veil as life within the
dark void rendered by the spectacle of misperceptions projected
on the Veil as screen. Describing the world enfolded in the
shadow of the Veil as a "prison-house," Du Bois evokes and
transforms the metaphor William Wordsworth, the British
Romantic poet, employs in his poem "Intimations of Immortality"
to denote a child's path from a spiritual, divine existence into the
doldrums of the material world. Du Bois's prison-house connotes
an African American child's path from unknowing innocence to
a forced recognition of the color line and the assaulted self-
image it proffers. What Wordsworth depicted as a natural, if
regrettable, falling away from the spirit, Du Bois describes as a
forced incarceration of the African American child's psyche.61
While Wordsworth's prison-house signifies a failure of

perception, a gradual dimming of one's capacity to see and
understand one's own divinity, Du Bois's prison-house connotes
both a failure to be perceived, an invisibility, and a heightened
insight.62 Seeing the Veil also rends the Veil for Du Bois; it is a
moment of transformed awareness, of enlightenment. In
perceiving the Veil, Du Bois consciously recognizes that to
which he has been blind, namely, the shadow of the Veil itself,
the racist division of a Jim Crow social sphere and the
cumulative weight of its psychic rift. Thus, as the Veil engenders
double consciousness, it also produces a vision that pierces the
structures of racism construed as the natural order of things. As
one comes to see one's self doubly, one also learns to see the
world anew. In short, the Veil that produces double
consciousness also produces a doubled, or second sight.
The Veil and second sight are intricately interwoven in Du

B o i s ' s writings; congruent in the concept of double
consciousness, they even, for a moment, share the same name in
Du Bois's work. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois muses:
"After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the
Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born
with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American
world."63 The Veil enables the racialized subject to see not only
the split through which identity is established but also the
foundations of racism, the glance that dismisses, the workings of
whiteness. Indeed, the Veil, as screen, is not one-sided, and
second sight enables the racialized subject to see what (white)
others are blinded to by their very visions, namely, the psychic
projections that enable white viewers to maintain a sutured self-
image of ideal wholeness.64 Du Boisian second sight enables
one to see how, in Diana Fuss's words, " `white' defines itself
through a powerful and illusory fantasy of escaping the
exclusionary practices of psychical identity formation.."65
Second sight thus enables viewers within the Veil to see the
cultural and psychological production of both blackness and
whiteness.
In "Criteria of Negro Art," Du Bois proclaims, "We who are

dark can see America in a way that white Americans can not."
66 He suggests that he perceives, through the Veil, an image of
whiteness that white viewers refuse. As Priscilla Wald has
argued, "In the veil, white America sees reflected an
(unrecognized) image of its own guilt and anxieties."67 If for
African American viewers the Veil functions as an inverted
mirror that forces them to see the fractured foundation of
identity formation, then for white viewers the Veil functions in
an opposing manner, as a screen that allows them not to see the
psychic splits and suturings of self construction.
Second sight is, finally, a vision split and multiplied by double

consciousness, a vision that can perceive the misrepresentations
projected on the Veil. It is a vision that, in part, considers self
through those filters, but one that also looks out from the dark
side of the screen - and sees back through the looking glass. This
is a vision that ascertains the refraction of the Veil, the fissures
in the illusory image of white wholeness. Veiled eyes detect the
refused image of white othersimages distorted and fragmented,
the illusion of ideality splintered and warped. Through second
sight, "the look of [white] surveillance returns as the displacing
gaze of the disciplined"; "the observer becomes the observed."68
Second sight constitutes a critical vision, a sight that enables one
to recognize the constructed nature of the Veil and all of its
projections, to see the fundamental splitting and suturing of all
selves, both black and white. If it is through the visual culture of
the color line that the racialized self is fractured in Jim Crow
America, then it is through the second sight engendered by the
Veil, through the powerful critical vision that is the "gift" of
double consciousness, that a newly racialized self can begin to
be reenvisioned.

In his 1926 essay "Criteria of Negro Art," W. E. B. Du Bois
muses: "Suppose the only Negro who survived some centuries
hence was the Negro painted by white Americans in the novels
and essays they have written. What would people in a hundred
years say of black Americans?" 1 Du Bois argues that African
American art must testify to African American identities,
providing a record to challenge a long legacy of racist
representation, and such testimony was, in fact, central to much
African American artistic production and self-representation
throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As
Henry Louis Gates Jr., has argued, "In the first decades of the
nineteenth century, the few prominent blacks who obtained
access to the middle and upper classes commissioned paintings,
and later photographs, of themselves, so that they could
metaphorically enshrine and quite literally perpetuate the
example of their own identities."' At the turn of the century,
portraits of African Americans implicitly signified in relation to
images of "the Negro painted by white Americans," and by
collecting hundreds of portraits of African Americans that
"hardly square" with "typical" (white supremacist) ideas, Du Bois
was reinscribing African American identities, using photography
to represent "the human face of blackness" so forcefully hidden
behind "representations of blackness as absence, as nothingness,
as deformity and depravity." 3
Du Bois's portraits of young African American men and women

in the three volumes of Types of American Negroes, Georgia,
U. S.A. powerfully evoke the paradox that animates all
photographic por traits, namely, the functional tension between
identity and identification. If all portraits are posed as either
authorizing or regulatory images, for African Americans this
dynamic was especially charged at the turn of the century, as the
archive lurking behind the African American portrait was a
scientific catalogue calling on the photograph as "evidence" of
African American inferiority. Indeed, at the turn of the century,
when Du Bois identified himself foremost as a scientist and was
committed to the power of "facts" to change racist social
structures, the images of blackness he sought most fervently to
challenge were not those painted by white American novelists,
b u t those physiognomic "portraits" heralded by biological
racialists and eugenicists as the signs of African American
degeneracy. As Du Bois argues in The World and Africa, in
1900 Europe was intent on legitimizing the color line through
science, inscribing assumptions about "Negro inferiority" onto
bodies of color.4 In response, Du Bois aimed to reanimate the
African American body, transposing it from the realm of (racist)
science to that of class and culture.5 In "Criteria of Negro Art,"
Du Bois proclaims, "All Art is propaganda," and it is propaganda
from the "other side," propaganda that challenges the basis of
(white supremacist) scientific "truth," that he produces for the
Paris Exposition.6 Du Bois's 1900 Georgia Negro photographs
present a counterarchive, one that contests the racial logics of
biological racialism and eugenics, transforming the middle-class
photographic portrait into a site of African American resistance.
Signifyin(g) on Science
Du Bois's 19oo Georgia Negro photographs present

contemporary viewers with a startling visual surprise. The first
thirty-eight photographs in volume I, and ninety-six (of one
hundred) photographs in volume 2 of Types of American
Negroes, Georgia, U. S.A., present closely cropped, paired
portraits of young men and women, one image frontal, the other
in profile. While some of the photographs show subjects less
rigidly posed, many pair a direct frontal position with a hard
profile, resembling unmistakably the photographic archives of
early race scientists, as if Du Bois's albums are haunted by those
forms. I would like to suggest that this unexpected similarity has
a pointed purpose, that Du Bois's images "signify on" the formal
visual codes of scientific photography, repeating those visual
tropes "with a difference" in order to invert the dominant
significations of those particular photographic signs.? Du Bois's
albums first evoke the images that would fix African Americans
in the lowest levels of social, economic, and evolutionary scales,
reproducing the imagery of assumed scientific truth, in order
finally to produce new images of the American Negro.
U.S.A. (i9oo), vol. i, no. i. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray
Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
io. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia,
U.S.A. (i9oo), vol. i, no. 2. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray
Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
In these "mug shots," the camera has come in close to focus on

the head and face (plates i-4). Subjects are posed against a plain
gray cloth that erases them from a social context; they float,
unsituated in these photographic frames. Or rather, this plain
backdrop locates individuals within the institutional contexts that
privilege identification and documentation. Such institutional
portraits suggest the viewer's symbolic control or domination
over subjects photographed because they are, by definition,
made for a viewer who will study and catalogue. While any of
the images individually might be taken simply as a portrait, the
manner in which the photographs are paired, and the repetition
of that pairing sixty-seven times, evokes instrumental archives.
The doubled poses encourage viewers to scrutinize the head and
face, to learn to identify the individual represented; hard profiles
accentuate the shape of the nose, the strength of the jaw, the
angle of the forehead, and the curve of the head. As in early
anthropological studies of racial "types," documentation has been
standardized here, the distance between subject and camera has
been maintained, and the consistency in pose and form invites
comparison between subjects photographed.
The frontal and profile paired photographs that introduce Du

Bois's Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A., visually
recall a long-standing tradition of scientific race photography.
As early as 185o, Louis Agassiz, a Harvard scientist,
commissioned a series of daguerreotypes of enslaved men and
women in Columbia, South Carolina.' Agassiz hoped to use the
photographs to support theories of polygenesis, which, contrary
to Christian beliefs in monogenesis, proclaimed that the different
races constituted distinct species, created uniquely, separately,
and unequally.9 The fifteen daguerreotypes that Robert W.
Gibbes secured from photographer Joseph T. Zealy on behalf of
Agassiz include full-body images of men standing, completely
naked, posed in direct frontal, profile, and rear postures, and
half-body images of men and women sitting, naked from the
waist up, in direct frontal and hard-profile poses.1 The
daguerreotypes demonstrate how quickly photography became
harnessed to the sciences of biological racialism in efforts to
provide "evidence" of racial difference and inferiority. They jar
and disturb. The very status of these images as daguerreotypes
makes their dehumanizing objectivity even more shocking, for
daguerreotypes are generally regarded as keepsakes, treasured
mementos that memorialize loved ones, jewel-like images on
mirrored plates, framed by scalloped gold edges, and encased in
small, velvet-lined leather boxes with pressed patterns and
delicate hinges. In viewing a daguerreotype, one anticipates a
precious image, a portrait. The nakedness and equivocal looks of
the se men and women viscerally disrupt such expectations;
clearly, these images were not made for intimate eyes, but for
the cold, hard stare of the laboratory.
Zealy's daguerreotypes of enslaved men and women exist due

to extreme differences in power between photographer and
subjects. No one asked these men and women for their
permission to make these photographs; the scientists asked their
purported masters. The men and women photographed are
identified by first name, by ethnicity, and by owner and
plantation. In the seated poses, rolled shirts at waistlines highlight
the process of stripping, recalling the repeated scenes of
stripping and beating and whipping recounted in slave narratives.
Women's testimonies, in particular, demonstrate that the public,
sexual exposure of one's breasts and body heightened the terror
and denigration of whipping. (The scars on Drana's breasts may,
in fact, be traces of such violence.) The stripping documented
here, then, recalls other strippings, and one cannot separate this
photographic act, the scene and setting of this image, from the
physical torture and sexual exposure of enslaved men and
women. The power of the scientific gaze here is aligned not only
with presumed intellectual mastery and control but also with the
explicitly violent facts of objectification and the literal ownership
of the body photographed."
Joseph T. Zealy's daguerreotypes for Louis Agassiz inaugurate

a history of nineteenth-century anthropometric photography.
Early anthropologists, such as Thomas Henry Huxley and John
Lamprey, attempted to use photography to further studies of
comparative anatomy and physiognomy." As Elizabeth Edwards
has argued, "through photography ... the `type,' the abstract
essence of human variation, was perceived to be an observable
reality."" In Huxley's and Lamprey's images, one finds naked
bodies of men and women photographed in paired frontal and
hard-profile poses. But here one also finds measuring devices-
rulers and grids-represented within the photographic frame.
Each scientist was apparently intrigued by the seeming
objectivity of the photograph, and yet frustrated by the actual
difficulty of standardizing such images, of making them useful
for comparative study. In Huxley's photographs of Ellen, a South
Australian aboriginal woman, Ellen is asked to hold an enormous
ruler beside her body, so that later viewers will be able to
measure her height. In Lamprey's photographs of a Malayan
man, he has posed his subject in front of a grid. The presence of
such measuring devices in these photographs doubly testifies to
the desire of white scientists. While the anthropologist himself is
not situated within the photographic frame, these photographs
are clearly representations of his imagination and scientific
schema, representations of him more than of his subjects.
ii. Daguerreotype by Joseph T. Zealy, for Louis Agassiz. Drana,

front view, 1850 (N 3431o). Reproduced courtesy of the
Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
Drana, profile view, 1850, (N 27798). Reproduced courtesy of
the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
In anthropological images, the scientific gaze is presumed to be
white; such photographs are made for white European or white
North and South American eyes to study and compare the bodies
of men and women of color. The anthropologist is never
positioned in front of the camera, except when he (or sometimes
she) is photographed with "the natives," white shirt and pants and
hat standing in stark and strange contrast to naked or partially
naked dark bodies. Indeed, in these latter photographs, this
juxtaposition-of clothed and naked, "civilized" and "savage" -
appears to be the very point. Such photographs suppose white
viewers who will enjoy with shock, horror, or wonder the
"exotic" experiences of their white counterparts. But do we ever
see scientific photographs of naked white men and women in the
nineteenth century? In Eadweard Muybridge's Animal
Locomotion (1887), one finds the naked white body posed in
front of scientific grids. And yet it is not the body itself that is
studied here; it is not the body as a type that holds any
importance. In Muybridge's archive, the white body walks, runs,
jumps, crawls, works, and plays -the white body's actions come
under scrutiny, but the white body itself is simply assumed.
Muybridge's are studies of male or female figures walking, not
studies of bodies of any particular height, with any special arm
span, nor any specific cranial capacity. His studies of human
motion take the white body as neutral, examining its actions as
normative.14
Situated within a trajectory of scientific race representation, Du

Bois's photographic types resonate profoundly with the
contemporary photographs Francis Galton, the founder of
eugenics, attempted to popularize in his 1884 The Life History
Album. Indeed, the "model" photographs Galton provided of
himself as samples for parents might also have served as models
for Du Bois's paired photographs of "Negro types," as Du Bois's
mug shots replicate the visual codes of Galton's eugenicist
documents, of his paired frontal and profile headshots, down to
their very oval frames. Galton designed The Life History Album
to serve as a kind of scientific baby book, in which parents could
record the physical, mental, and moral development of their
children. He strongly believed in the scientific value of
photographic records, and he encouraged parents to make
paired portraits of their children, both a full-face and a profile
image, every several years. With The Life History Album
Galton hoped to standardize the haphazard collection of
sentimental family mementos, and thereby to open up a vast
colloquial archive to scientific research.ls
13. Photograph by John Lamprey. Frontal view of a Malayan

man, c. 1868-69. Reproduced courtesy of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, London.
14. Photograph by John Lamprey. Profile view of a Malayan
man, c. 1868-69. Reproduced courtesy of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, London.
15. Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, vol_ i, plate 62
(1887), Running at Full Speed (2001-13033). Collotype.
Reproduced courtesy of the Photographic History Collection,
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D. C.
16. Francis Galton's "standard photograph" of himself.
Reproduced from Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters, and Labours
of Francis Galton, vol. 2, Researches ofMiddle Life
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924)
Galton planned to use such records in the service of his larger

project, eugenics, which he deemed both a "science of heredity"
and a "science of race." He argued that races could be divided
into nine unique biological types, defined by distinct sets of
essential physical, moral, and intellectual characteristics. Galton
was an avowed white supremacist, and he proclaimed that
Anglo-Saxons represented a modern racial pinnacle to which
those of African descent would never rise. The ultimate project
of eugenics aimed to improve society through "controlled
breeding" by encouraging reproduction of the so-called strong
and discouraging reproduction of the so-called weak. For
Galton, the "strong" were always white, while the "weak" were
criminals, the feebleminded, the insane, and people of color. As
h e aimed always to strengthen what he deemed the superior
AngloSaxon "stock," Galton adamantly opposed interracial
reproduction, viewing such unions as a threat to his version of
white supremacy. In Galton's eyes, a biracial individual
constituted a degenerate blot on both parent groups, a biological
anomaly that inevitably must die out. Indeed, Galton believed
that ancient Athenian culture, which he posed as an unreachable
racial height, even for nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxons,
deteriorated due to mixture with foreign immigrants.16 Galton's
theories of race and racial mixture held wide sway at the turn of
the century, for as Du Bois notes, in 1900, "mixture of races was
considered the prime cause of degradation and failure in
civilization." 17
In order to define and classify his sliding scale of biological

ty p e s , Galton utilized photographs to create "composite
portraits"- shadowy averages of individual images layered on top
of one another. Galton claimed to capture with these images "the
central physiognomical type of any race or group," and he
argued that the composite enabled him "to obtain with
mechanical precision a generalised picture; one that represents
no man in particular, but portrays an imaginary figure possessing
the average features of any given group of men." 18 Galton's
composites were literally statistical averages. For example, to
make a composite image from six standardized individual mug
shots, Galton would expose each image on top of another for
one-sixth of the total exposure time. Thus each individual image
would be represented equally in the final photograph,
constituting one-sixth of the whole.19 In Galton's composite
portraits of imagined biological types, we once again find the
standardized frontal and profile images of The Life History
Album, and, surprisingly, of Du Bois's Types ofAmerican
Negroes, Georgia, U. S.A.
17. Composite portraits by Francis Galton. "The Jewish Type."
Reproduced from Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters, and Labours
of Francis Galton, vol. 2, Researches ofMiddle Life (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1924)
At the turn of the century, Du Bois saw eugenics as the

"growing" and most troubling "assumption of the age." 20 Indeed,
eugenics was to influence U. S. culture profoundly in the first
decades of the twentieth century, becoming important in both
scientific and popular arenas. In 19io, Charles Davenport
founded the Eugenics Record Office, and in 1918, he became
the first president of the New York Galton Society. Writers such
as Albert Edward Wiggam popularized eugenics,21 and
according to Marouf Arif Hasian Jr., "Growing up in the Anglo-
American world in the first few decades of the twentieth century
meant being constantly bombarded with lectures on eugenics
from ethical, debating, and philosophical societies."" Eugenics
infiltrated a wide variety of U. S. cultural venues: state fairs
sponsored "fitter family contests"; lobbyists drew on eugenicist
arguments to campaign for the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act;
and several states practiced sterilization on mental patients in the
early twentieth century.23 Eugenics was called on to naturalize
many forms of social oppression, suggesting that an individual's
capacity for social progress was biologically determined, rather
than the effect of positive or adverse environmental
conditions.24
Given Du Bois's antipathy toward eugenics, how can one

explain the repetition of scientific visual forms and eugenicist
terms-the type-that one finds in Du Bois's albums? Another
archive suggests interesting answers. In The Health and
Physique of the Negro American (19o6), Du Bois reproduces a
series of sixty-six photographs of young African American men
and women.25 The initial sixteen images, lettered A through H,
were taken later, but forty-eight of the following fifty numbered
images were first presented in volumes i and 2 of the Paris
Exposition albums. Apparently, Du Bois recycled the 1900
photographs for another purpose here, cropping the ovals down
further into circles that focus even more tightly on the head and
shoulders. In this slightly later study, Du Bois appears to have
embraced photographs as transparent scientific texts; indeed, Du
Bois's "objective" documentation here seems disturbingly
objectifying. None of the subjects are named, and the
descriptions accompanying these photographs are numbered
notations of physical features, moral character, and intellectual
aptitude -the very categories of racial classifi cation outlined by
Francis Galton: "# io. Brown, mass of curled hair; short and
plump; unusual mental ability, cheerful and good character";
"#39. Light yellow, long, nearly straight hair; large and plump;
slow, but willing." And yet, even in this narrowly circumscribed
adoption of eugenicist categories and methods -even where Du
Bois explicitly documents physical attributes, moral tendencies,
and intellectual capacities-he uses scientific methodology to
undermine racist scientific claims. Comparing multiple, minutely
designated "types," Du Bois states: "Today one hears, on the one
hand, that mulattos are practically all degenerates, ranking
below both the parent races; and, on the other, that only the
mixed blood Negroes amount to much, and this by reason of their
white blood. So far as this study is concerned, neither of these
theories receives any especial support." Regarding "mental
ability," Du Bois suggests that "the evidence" is "contradictory":
"The exceptional scholars include three nearly full-blooded
Negroes, three Quadroons and one Octoroon. Of these, a boy
(number 18), with but a slight admixture of white blood, if any, is
easily first." 26
Du Bois uses Galton's scientific terms and visual forms of

documentation -he replicates Galton's methodology- to reach
very different conclusions. In eugenicist scientific paradigms,
the purported degeneracy of biracial individuals demonstrated
the essential differences between the races, providing evidence
that the races were unequal and should remain separate. The
figure of the biracial individual or so-called mulatto, then,
became an important site through which to challenge eugenicist
claims about essential racial differences and inferiority. If one
could demonstrate that there was nothing degenerate about the
biracial individual, one might also suggest that the different races
were not so terribly distinct. In this sense, Du Bois's conclusions
in The Health and Physique of the Negro American prove
particularly important: "A word may be added as to race mixture
in general and as regards white and black stocks in the future.
There is, of course, in general no argument against the
intermingling of the world's races. Àll the great peoples of the
world are the result of a mixture of races.."127 Thus Du Bois
collects his own data, reproducing the authoritative forms of
race scientists to contest the dominant conclusions about race at
which eugenicists arrived.
As Du Bois formally emphasizes scientific methodology in The

Health and Physique of the Negro American, objectifying young
men and women as examples, he also notes that he shares a level
of intimacy with his subjects, that he knows them personally, as
individuals:
i8. Portraits of young African American men and women.
Reproduced from W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The Health and
Physique of the Negro American (Atlanta: Atlanta University
Press, 19o6).
In the following pages, I have selected out of a school of

about 300 young people between the ages of 12 and 20 years,
56 persons who seem to me to be fairly typical of the group of
young Negroes in general. The types are only provisionally
indicated here as the lines are by no means clear in my own
mind. Still I think that some approximation of a workable
division has been made, so far as that is possible without exact
scientific measurements. Among these 56 young persons, all
of whom I have known personally for periods varying from
one to ten years, I have sought roughly to differentiate four
sets of American Negro types?8
In his most objectifying use of photographs, then, Du Bois also

signals that he knows the individuals represented as subjects,
thereby highlighting the transmutation whereby people are
transformed into evidence and, vice versa, whereby such
"evidence" is also always a marker of subjectivity in another
register, for another viewer.
The young men and women photographed for the Paris

Exposition of 1900 and The Health and Physique of the Negro
American were almost undoubtedly students at Atlanta
University, where Du Bois lectured as a professor at the time.
Yet another collection of twenty-four of these oval-framed
photographs, pasted onto folding cardboard folios, remains in the
Atlanta University archives. There is significant overlap among
the three collections: all twenty-four of the Atlanta University
images are reproduced in the 19oo Paris Exposition albums, and
nine of the images are included in all three archives.29 I have
definitively identified one of the young women represented in all
three collections as Bazoline Estelle Usher, a student at Atlanta
University from 1899 to 19o6.30 According to David Levering
Lewis, Usher helped with domestic chores in the Du Bois
household on Saturdays during her first year at Atlanta
University, and thus became rather closely acquainted with both
W. E. B. and Nina Du Bois.31
The intimacy that Du Bois alludes to in his introductory

comments in The Health and Physique of the Negro American,
and which necessarily also animates the forty-eight overlapping
1900 Paris Exposition photographs, is hinted at in some of the
images themselves. For while the formal style of the portraits is
clearly meant to be objective and scientific, many of the images
belie the individuality and personality of the sitters, and perhaps
recognition between photographer and subjects. The images do
not always or exactly reproduce the hard profiles and straight-on
head shots of the laboratory. Further, in the overlapping 1900
and 19o6 photographs, students clearly have come before the
camera with forethought: their neat, crisp clothes are
embellished with pins, and here and there a lilac adorns a lapel.
Most of these young men and women have managed to assume a
serious countenance for the photographer, but some cannot
contain their pleasure and amusement. The young women
wearing lilacs appear universally good-humored, suppressing
grins, even in profile. Indeed, the bright- eyed young woman
identified as "#22" in The Health and Physique of the Negro
American, who also graces the second page of the first volume
of Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A., is ready to
burst into laughter. In the 1900 albums, this young woman's
giggles suggest to viewers that the formal objectivity of Du Bois's
so-called types will be shaken rather quickly.
i9. and ao. Portraits of young African American men and
women. Reproduced courtesy of Atlanta University Photographs,
Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library,
Atlanta, Georgia.
Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (i9oo),
vol. i, no. 6. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection,
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (i9oo),
US.A. (i9oo), vol. 2, no. 197. Reproduced from the Daniel
Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.
Further, while the first images in Du Bois's 1900 Paris
Exposition albums formally recall the photographs that
eugenicists and biological racialists used to codify bodies in
racial terms, Du Bois's albums as a whole dismantle the physical
coherence of the imagined racial type, disengaging the images
of African American men and women from the circumscription
of a sliding evolutionary scale. For what is the "Negro type" as
represented in Du Bois's photograph albums? First, it is plural-
"types"-a diverse array of individuals not bound by physical
appearance, by the "hair and bone and color" that Du Bois
rejects as singular signs of racial belonging in his 1897 essay
"The Conservation of Races."32 In Du Bois's albums, blond and
pale "Negro types" are placed beside brunette and brown ones, a
juxtaposition that challenges color codifications as markers of
racial difference and the body itself as sign of racial meaning.
Looking back on this period later in his life, Du Bois would
declare: "I was of course aware that all members of the Negro
race were not black and that the pictures of my race which were
current were not authentic nor fair portraits."33 In his 1900 Paris
Exposition albums, Du Bois loosens the narrow circumscription
of race as defined by Francis Galton; he unfixes the "Negro
type."
24. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes,

Georgia, U.S.A. (i9oo), vol. i, no. 3. Reproduced from the
Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress,
Washington, D. C.
Du Bois's portraits of biracial individuals and white-looking
African Americans contest a white supremacist racial taxonomy
of identifiable difference (plates 5 and 6). The images of young
African American men, women, and children who could pass
for white in Du Bois's Types ofArnerican Negroes highlight the
paradoxes of racial classification in Jim Crow America. By the
turn of the century, several states had laws deeming one-thirty-
second African or African American ancestry the key that
separated "black" from "white," a distinction so narrow as to
make blackness and whiteness indistinguishable.34 As Mary Ann
Doane has argued, the individual of mixed ancestry, "whose
looks and ontology do not coincide, poses a threat to ... the very
idea of racial categorization." 35 People of mixed racial
a nc e stry challenge the color codes of a racial taxonomy.
Historically, at the very moment at which segregation required
whites and blacks to be divided, "white" and "black," as legally
defined, could not necessarily be differentiated. With his
Georgia Negro photographs, Du Bois uses visual "evidence" to
undermine the color coding of racial identity.36
White hysteria over the "threat" of racial passing at the turn of

t h e century both spurred an increased fervor in racial
surveillance and marked the extent to which a long history of
forced interracial mixing during and after slavery had blurred
the boundaries of white privilege. Du Bois's photographs of a
young, blond, very pale African American child (plate 5)
challenge white supremacists' investment in separating the races
by signaling an undeniable history of physical union between
them.37 In Du Bois's visual archive, these images create a space
"f or an exploration and expression of what was increasingly
socially proscribed" 38 at the turn of the century, namely, social
and sexual contact between the races. As Robert J. C. Young has
argued, "The ideology of race ... from the 1840s onwards
necessarily worked according to a doubled logic, according to
which it both enforced and policed the differences between the
whites and the non-whites, but at the same time focused
fetishistically upon the product of the contacts between them."39
White supremacists posed the biracial woman both as evidence
of racial decline and as instigator of interracial mixing.
Discourses imagining the lusts of women of color were long
evoked in efforts to legitimize institutionalized rape in slavery,
and to perpetuate rape and concubinage after slavery. In Types
ofArnerican Negroes, Georgia, U. S.A., Du Bois reclaims the
image of the biracial woman so highly regulated in racial
hierarchies, re-presenting her as a woman of grace, elegance,
and refinement (and, as we shall see in chapter 3, as a woman
contained within the confines of a patriarchal African American
family). Indeed, Galton would have hard work depicting the thin
young woman, with mild countenance and wavy hair,
photographed standing composed and quiet in her high-necked
white dress of lace and ribbons in Du Bois's albums (plate 7), as
a bearer of the downfall of civilization. Galton's fantasy of pure
racial types must falter under the weight of Du Bois's "white
types with Negro blood.."40
The Politics of Portraiture
As the Georgia Negro photographs dismantle the scientific

category of the type, what do they offer in its place? As one
progresses through Du Bois's albums, seemingly scientific
photographs blend and fade into middle-class portraits. The
strictly paired images with their oval frames are replaced by
single photographs in full, rectangular frames, or pairs that offer
markedly different views of an individual, such as a close-up
and a full body. Hard profiles transform into the softer, slighter
turns typical of portraiture. The camera has been placed at a
greater distance, to show more of the body and surrounding
accoutrements. Large feather hats, formal Victorian dresses,
ornate chairs, lace curtains, plants, books, and statuettes come to
fill the photographic frame. African American "types" turn out to
be middle-class gentlemen and ladies (plates 7-10).
U.S.A. (i9oo), vol. i, no. 40. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray
Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.
(below) 26. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes,

Georgia, U. S.A. (i9oo), vol. i, no. 39. Reproduced from the
Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.
C.
These latter images, many of which I have identified as
Thomas Askew photographs, evoke a popular cultural genealogy
as clearly as the tightly cropped mug shots that precede them
recall scientific and institutional archives. The images' size and
the albumen paper on which they are printed suggest that they
are cabinet photographs, a form that had become standard for
commercial portrait photographers by the 187os, and one with
which Thomas Askew worked, as noted in an advertisement in
which "T. E. Askew, The Photographer" proposes a "Special
Christmas Offer! i Doz. Cabinets for $2.75." 41 The popularity
of the approximately four by five-and-a-halfinch cabinet
photograph was indebted to the much smaller two-anda-quarter
by three-and-a-half-inch carte-de-visite, which it ultimately
supplanted. Patented in 1854 by Andre Adolphe Disderi of
France, the carte-de-visite "began as a novel extension of the
traditional calling card"42 and capitalized on the new
reproducibility of photography inaugurated by the wet-plate
collodion-albumen, negative-positive process in 185143 Disderi
invented a camera that would expose multiple images on a single
plate, a process greatly increasing the number of different
images that could be produced in a short time. Multiple prints of
varied poses became newly possible with the advent of Disderi's
carte-de-visite, and what started as an aristocratic whim soon
became a middle-class craze in France, Britain, and the United
States. Throughout the late 185os and 18 6os, members of the
middling classes collected Disderi's celebrity cartes of heads of
state, artists, and writers,44 and they had their own likenesses
recorded for posterity as well. As Elizabeth Anne McCauley has
suggested, carte photographers provided sitters with "a ready-
made `home,' class, and taste" in their studios;45 they added
atmosphere with painted backdrops, carved wooden chairs,
pillars, curtains, plants, and even elaborately constructed papier-
mache props, such as little fence gates and window frames.
According to Brian Coe, "To make the customer feel relaxed,
the studio often contained much of the paraphernalia of the
Victorian drawing room."46 Despite the small size of the cartes,
fulllength, or sometimes, three-quarter poses became typical in
these images, thus visually emphasizing the stylish clothing of the
sitte r s over their facial features and expressions 47 Men,
women, and children usually wore their best street garments for
nineteenth-century photographic portraits, often including hats,
coats, and shawls, as incongruous as such articles might seem
within an interior parlor setting. Except for actresses and
entertainers, women rarely, if ever, wore their more revealing
evening attire in the photography studio.48
The larger size of the cabinet photograph, in addition to a new

vogue of bust poses, encouraged photographers and later
viewers to focus on the appearance of an individual's face and
expression, on what identified him or her as an individual, more
than the earlier cartes had done 49 Nevertheless, elaborate
clothing, Victorian parlor trappings, and painted backdrops
continued to be popular in portrait photography well into the
early twentieth century. Daylight remained the standard source
of illumination for photographic portraits throughout the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,50 and so one can
imagine Thomas Askew's studio at 114 Summit Avenue
occupying a room of the house dominated by a bank of windows
a nd skylights. The gelatin dry-plate process, in general use by
the i88os, greatly reduced exposure times to a few seconds,51
minimizing the need for headrests and elaborate back supports
and thus greatly enhancing the photographer's ability to capture
sitters in relaxed poses.
As paper albumen prints had a tendency to curl, they were

pasted to stiff cardboard backs (hence the name cabinet
cards),52 typically bearing the photographer's insignia and studio
address. As with the earlier cartes-de-visite, collectors kept
images of loved ones and celebrities organized in albums with
precut window pockets made to hold the thick photo cards. In
this respect, Du Bois's albums prove quite unusual, for here the
paper prints are pasted directly onto the cardboard pages of the
albums themselves. This suggests that the albums were not
assembled haphazardly, compiled from existing family
collections (for those prints would have already been backed),
but instead gathered with considerable planning and foresight, as
the images must have been procured before the final step in the
normal production process. This may also suggest that Thomas
Askew, the only photographer I have been able to associate
definitively with a number of the Georgia Negro images,
produced all of the photographs for Du Bois's albums, culling
negatives from his studio archive and printing them especially
for the Georgia Negro albums.
What are the terms by which the Georgia Negro photographs

served to "metaphorically enshrine" (to borrow Gates's
language) the subjects they represent? What are the formal
characteristics of these images? The portraits of men included in
the albums generally, and those identifiable as Thomas Askew
photographs specifically, tend to be rather closely cropped
images of individuals posed against a plain background that
reads as solid or mottled gray in the black-and-white
photographs. Typically, the men are positioned at a slight angle
to the camera, their shoulders filling the photographic frame;
they sometimes look directly at the camera, but more often just
off to the side of center, assuming the lofty gazes of
contemplation that signal interi- ority.53 Askew's men are
formally dressed in dark three-piece suits, crisp white shirts with
stiff collars, and knotted ties. Their bodies are cropped below the
chest, and hands remain invisible; thus the portraits offer a rather
close study of the face, sculpted and highlighted by side
illumination. One of Askew's portraits of Henry Hugh Proctor,
minister of the First Congregational Church of Atlanta, provides
a good example in this regard. Proctor faces the camera at a
slight angle, his body clearly in the center of the frame, with
ample space around his head. Strong side lighting illuminates
Proctor's high forehead, parted and peaked hairline, full cheek,
nose, ear, lips, neatly trimmed moustache, and chin. Proctor's
eyes - one highlighted under a sculpted brow, the other receding
further into shadow-look calmly past the photographer and
viewer, focusing on an object well outside the photographic
frame. His expression appears serene and quiet, thoughtful, but
not overly dreamy. His dark suit is impeccable but plain, his tie
simple, without pattern, and lacking the lustrous shine of silks and
satins. The arms of his jacket are creased, conforming to his
body, suggesting a suit in which he lives and works. The general
feeling conveyed by the image is one of intimacy through
proximity.
In his albums, Du Bois matches this portrait of Henry Hugh

Proctor with another photograph, in which Proctor turns his body
a bit further away from the camera. Given this pairing, how is
one to distinguish these images from the doubled mug shots
discussed earlier? Such distinctions are a matter of both form
and function. Askew's paired portraits of Proctor show slightly
more of the body than the mug shots, and their rectangular
framing evokes the aristocratic traditions of portrait painting.
Here, the gray background suggests a formal studio setting,
while in the former images, a cloth hung behind subjects in a
rather makeshift manner serves as the backdrop. Neither of
Proctor's portraits is a hard profile or a direct frontal image.
More important, perhaps, the pair does not form part of a series
of objectifying images, but instead finds its place within a group
of middleclass portraits of women and children supported by
Victorian studio props. This final difference signals a distinct
signifying function; it situates the photographs within a specific
register of evaluation, one that is honorific, sentimental, and
often familial. If Proctor's face is to be studied in these portraits,
it is to be admired as the surface sign of noble thought and
feeling. Indeed, the only "type" to be studied here is that of a
man to be emulated and revered. As situated in Du Bois's albums,
Proctor's portraits demonstrate how important function is to
photographic meaning. A photograph of a face can be used
alternately for regulatory as well as laudatory purposes, and it is
ultimately the combination of formal conventions and the
contextual evidence of the archive, the relation of one image to
other images, that determines photographic meaning.

minister, First Congregational Church, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B.
minister, First Congregational Church, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B.
While some of Askew's portraits of women and children are
closely cropped like those of the men, his portraits of women
generally include more of the body and studio surroundings.
Even in the relatively stark portrait of Mamie Westmorland, a
schoolteacher, the subject is given some space within the
photographic frame. Posed against a plain background,
Westmorland looks out at the viewer from a more distanced
position than her male counterparts; over half her body is shown,
including her arms and hands. She turns slightly away from the
camera, resting her elbow on the arm of a chair and leaning her
head on folded fingers and an extended thumb. As she supports
her face on her hand, Westmorland's wedding ring is brought up
prominently to cheek level. Thus as viewers engage her direct
look, they cannot help but recognize her married status. The
gaze that invites intimacy also frames and contains it by marking
Westmorland as a member of a discreet social unit. While
Askew does not show the hands of his male subjects, in his
portraits of women, the wedding ring seems to function as a
symbol of women's respectability. While the men are depicted as
sufficient unto themselves, their faces represent ing the story of
their lives, women's narratives are subtly scripted in service of
others.
29. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. Mamie Westmorland,

schoolteacher. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American
Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (i9oo), vol. i, no. 79. Reproduced
from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
In some of Askew's other portraits of women, the setting
resembles more that of a parlor or a sitting room than of a studio.
While the neutral background that supports the men tends both to
universalize and individualize them, the women are associated
more directly with the comforts of home, their identities rooted in
an interior, domestic space. Askew's portrait of a young woman
in a marvelous hat proves exemplary in this regard (plate io). In
this portrait, the sitter is posed a bit off to the center of the
photographic frame; she faces the camera with a slight turn, her
eyes focused just to the left and above the camera. Strong side
lighting illuminates three-quarters of her rounded face and
smooth hands, also throwing her elegant dress into sharp detail.
The lace trim of her bodice, shoulders, and sleeves picks up the
pattern of Askew's signature white lace curtain. This is not the
dark, heavy tapestry one would find in many studios, such as that
of Mathew Brady, but a delicate hanging, light and flowery, of
the kind that often adorned the windows of Southern homes. The
camera is situated at some distance from the sitter, capturing
three-quarters of her body, and leaving ample space on either
side. She half leans and half sits on the table that supports her,
with hands crossed rather formally and her enormous hat tilted
stylishly on her head. The strong side lighting picks up the glint of
her jewelry-a round pin at the neck, something peeking out from
her waistband, and prominently displayed wedding rings. Once
again, while Askew's men are represented as self-contained,
rings and props are called on to locate the individuality of
Askew's women. This sitter divides a photographic frame split
nearly down the middle: To the left is the plain gray background
typical of Askew's portraits of men; to the right is the lace curtain
and a touch of tapestry pinned to the table. On the one side, the
woman's individuality stands on its own; on the other, it is situated
by textiles that evoke domesticity. This sitter's half-illuminated,
intimate side is anchored in the domestic, over which she casts
her shadow and which doubles her form in lace, as if her very
shade is one of domestic grace.
Thomas Askew made some remarkably beautiful photographs

o f young children (plates i1-i3). He must have been especially
adept at putting them at ease, for theseyoung girls and boys
appear perfectly at home in their little bodies, without the
awkward gangliness of youth; their expressions are soft and
composed. Even tiny children, in long, white baptismal gowns
that swallow their limbs, appear rather selfpossessed in their
propped-up positions (plate 5). Despite their adult composure
and poise, however, the children in these photographs are
supported by a much larger array of props and objects than
Askew's adults. It is as if the narrative of their lives has not yet
fully developed enough to stand on its own, or to be represented
by their bodies, and needs some formal scripting in order to be
communicated to the viewer. In a number of Askew's portraits of
young girls, the child is placed in the center of the photographic
frame, seated or standing behind a table to which a patterned
tapestry has been tacked. Open on the table before them are
what appear to be architectural drawings or photographs. The
images in the oversize folio are not fully readable, but they are
clearly meant to be seen by the viewer; indeed, one of the girls
holds the images at a slight angle, tipping the edge of the folio
toward the viewer. The images bear shapes that suggest Grecian
columns, implying the study of classical forms, masterpieces of
antiquity, and of a Greek past whose racial origins were widely
disputed in the nineteenth century. The girls do not look at the
images, but stare off a bit to the side, as if in contemplation of the
structures and their weighty history. One girl rests her head
against a fisted hand, with one long finger pointed up sharply
(plate 12). The position of her hand is forceful, and her overall
appearance is commanding compared to her ruffled and
flounced counterparts, an effect augmented by her stiff sailor
dress with its huge collar, bold stars, and white striped and
looping trim.
Figurines resting on the table, two small sculptures that show up

again and again in Askew's portraits of children (plates 12 and
13) , closely flank the girl and the images she studies. The
figures, which nearly touch her and crowd the table so that the
architectural drawings curl up between them, almost appear to
be assessing the images with the girl, peeking over her shoulder
for a glimpse. One is a small, dark, seated figure, perhaps a
bronze statuette, ornate in its detail and lustrous shine, which
appears to be a warrior of Western antiquity. His tufted helmet
and muscular physique, visible even in miniature, suggest
physical strength and power. One arm is draped in cloth, while
the other rests on what may be a sword or shield; his legs are
slightly crossed at the ankles. In strange contrast to this figure,
another, larger statuette sits on the opposite side of Askew's
primary subject: a chipped figure of a barefoot boy, with pants
rolled up and hat cocked to the side. What probably began as a
comical figure has been made more pathetic by the large white
chunks of exposed plaster left by untold bangs and bumps. The
boy appears to be white; he is almost elfinlike, evoking the
wayward Huck Finn. The overall effect of his creased clothes
and rolled-up pants is floppy and sloppy, and the figure, not very
well cared for itself, seems to emblematize carefree or careless
youth. The plaster child scowls and grabs his foot, as if he has
been injured in a summer romp. An innocent expletive stands out
i n relief on the base supporting the figure-"By Jingo"-an
expression of the child's pain, surprise, or annoyance.54 Askew
positions his child models between a figure of ancient nobility
and one of unkempt childishness, and if the images are meant to
suggest the paths that might define the future of Askew's
subjects, the impeccable grooming, crisp, clean, stylish clothes,
and composed faces of these African American children clearly
distinguish them from the sloppy white boy figure and align them
with the classical ideals of the warrior. These children are
neither frivolous nor unkempt; indeed, they are already studious,
lost in contemplation of the future and the past, woven into a
(contested) cultural history of classical antiquity and racial
superiority.
30. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. Thomas E. Askew
Prepares to Scold His Five Mischievous Sons, c. 1870.
Reproduced courtesy of Herman "Skip" Mason, Isiah S.
Blocker Collection, Skip Mason's Archives, Ellenwood,
Georgia.
The seriousness with which Askew depicts his subjects in the

photographs collected for Du Bois's Paris Exposition albums is
highlighted further by the humorous genre of photographs he
also made of his own children. "Joke" carte-de-visite,
stereograph, and cabinet card photographs remained a vogue
throughout the nineteenth century. Large stereograph companies
printed multi-image sets that developed a short narrative, often
depending on gender and racial stereotypes and slurs for their
"humor." Portrait photographers also made a range of offbeat
images, posing subjects in casual, goofy, and theatrical positions.
In an early image, entitled Thomas E. Askew Prepares to Scold
His Five Mischievous Sons, Askew has encouraged his five
y o u n g boys to adopt performative poses ranging from
nonchalance to despondency. The boys are dressed in striped,
polka-dotted, and patterned shirts, short pants, and floppy felt
hats, all of them a little battered and worn (with the exception of
one boy who wears a straw hat pushed back jauntily on his
head). All are barefoot, and their poses seem relaxed and
exaggerated in their slouchiness; they have approxi mated the
attitude of the "By Jingo" figure that embellishes Askew's later
portraits. One boy is flopped down in the dirt, bent arm propped
on bent leg. Another arches his back and rests his hand on a
protruding hip. The "mischief" the boys are engaged in is
smoking; all but one hold cigars, and two exchange a light. The
smallest, and presumably youngest, is the only one who is left
out; he buries his head in his hands, flinging himself against the
fence, as if distraught over not being able to partake of the older
boys' pleasures. Askew himself, in his own soft, floppy hat, peers
over the fence that separates him from the boys, and divides the
photographic frame from front to back and top to bottom. He
brandishes a narrow switch, and his hand is blurred by the
beginning of a downward stroke. In this tableau, the boys exist in
their own little world, and Askew plays the comical part of the
father always two steps behind the shenanigans of his children.
While Askew apparently enjoyed a wide range of photographic

entertainments, the image he chose to represent his family to the
world at the Paris Exposition differs radically from this comically
staged view. The photograph that portrays Askew's sons (and by
proxy Askew himself) in Du Bois's photograph albums depicts
t h e m as sophisticated young men in the Summit Avenue
Ensemble (plate 14). In this later photograph, Askew's sons are
elegantly dressed in suits with boutonnieres, and each holds a
classical string instrument. Here the young men represent the
epitome of culture and refinement. Seated and standing closely
together, they are joined by Jake Sansome, identified as a
neighbor. The boys are arranged in an elegant parlor or living
room, very likely the ensemble's (and Askew's) Summit Avenue
home, outfitted with carved and polished wood furniture, lace
and tapestry-draped windows, a plush, white fur rug, a framed
image on the wall, ornamental vases in the window, and
decorative objects on the mantel. As small children, Askew
photographed his sons, at least once, as little rascals, barefoot
and dressed in the floppy clothes and hats of his "By Jingo"
statuette; as young adults, he depicts them as practitioners of
Western high art, well suited in a string ensemble. If Askew
imagined two paths for African American children, it is clear
which one he has encouraged his sons to take. It is also apparent
that Du Bois's albums, which present a carefully crafted vision of
African American elegance, sophistication, and cultural elitism,
leave no room for play.
As he inscribes African American children into an ennobling

nar rative, Thomas Askew also inscribes himself into a
genealogy that reaches back to a classical age, claiming a space
for himself, for his African American subjects, and for
photography in the realms of the ideal, of the exalted, of
(Western) art.55 By marking his subjects and his very medium
the stuff of art, Askew anchors photographic portraiture in the
realm of subjectivity and identity, defying the purported
objectivity and identification of the scientific mug shot. Askew's
portraits challenge the "evidence" of race science by posing
counterimages, and they contest white supremacy on subtler
terms as well. For while Egyptologists in the mid-nineteenth
century claimed ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman culture for
Caucasian history, others claimed the heights of Western culture
for Africa and Afri- cans.56 Much was at stake for biological
racialists in these debates, for if they claimed "Negro inferiority"
as biologically determined, how could they explain that the
pinnacles of Western civilization Francis Galton and other
eugenicists most celebrated might be Negro creations? Art was
one of the artifacts commonly wielded in discussions of racial
genius; white supremacists claimed that the Negro had no art,
and therefore no superior culture. In "Criteria of Negro Art," Du
Bois proclaims, "Until the art of the black folk compels
recognition they will not be rated as human." 57 With his
portraits, Thomas Askew commands a space for himself as an
African American artist and subtly inscribes his work and his
subjects within the Western cultural traditions most guarded by
white supremacists, as signaled by the Greek or Roman warrior
figure gracing many of his images. And lest the viewer attribute
the apparent cultural superiority of Askew's light-skinned
subjects to "white blood," as one of Du Bois's antagonists might
have done, Askew marks whiteness in his photographs with "By
Jingo," the figure of a little boy that stands as the rumpled
antithesis of cultural and class refinement.
Askew's photographs perform a social and political function

similar to that described by Pearl Cleage Lomax in her essay
about the later African American photographer P. H. Polk, who
worked in Atlanta and extensively at Tuskegee in the 193os and
1940s- Imagining Polk's Tuskegee subjects' responses to his
gorgeous portraits, Lomax muses:
He would take our pictures and let us see that those who said
we were invisible were lying. That those who said we were
ugly were lying. That those who claimed we were less than
human were lying. That those who said we did not love each
other, and marry, and produce children, and suffer, and grow
old were lying. Mr. Polk would let us bloom in the safe zone
before his camera, and we saw ourselves differently through
his lenses. We saw ourselves shining in all of our specificity.
I n all of our generalities. In all our terrible humanness. We
saw ourselves just shinc.58
The same might be said of Askew's earlier portraits, but

African Americans were not the only intended viewers of these
images. Framed within Du Bois's albums, made explicitly for a
national and international audience, including white Americans
and white Europeans, Askew's images also encouraged white
viewers to see that many of them were perpetuating a lie that
would not hold up to his photographic evidence.
Du Bois draws on the codes of very different photographic

practices in his Paris Exposition albums, and it is in the tension
between these two poles of identification and identity- one
scientific and "objective," one auratic and sentimental-that the
albums perform much of their cultural work. Du Bois reclaims
the African American image, wrenching it from the confines of
the scientist's racist archive, from those institutional sites that
would define African Americans as inferior, bound to the lowest
rung of an evolutionary ladder. With the artistic help of Thomas
Askew, he took images of African Americans out from under
the presumed mastery of an "objective" white supremacist gaze
and resituated them within African American albums. The
middle-class photographic portrait is meant for sympathetic eyes;
such images are made at one's request and circulated among
one's family and friends. The portrait presumes an audience of
admirers; it addresses viewers with the unquestioned call of
intimacy. If Du Bois's initial scientific mug shots first present
images of African Americans as projected "through the eyes of
others," his portraits ask viewers to look at images of African
Americans with other eyes.

In "Of the Coming of John," a short story in The Souls of Black
Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois examines the wide-ranging cultural
anxieties that his celebration of an African American elite
engaged. "Of the Coming of John" tells of a young African
American man's return to his small Southern town after seeking
an education in the North. John comes home a teacher, ready to
"uplift" a largely reticent rural population. His newfound
knowledge alienates him from his African American family and
friends, and strains the rigidly racialized class hierarchy
enforced by Southern whites. In a particularly charged scene,
John is "put in his place" by a white judge who is the father of his
forme r playmate, a young white man whose fate becomes
tragically entwined with John's own.' The judge proclaims:
Now I like the colored people, and sympathize with all their
reasonable aspirations; but you and I both know, John, that in
this country the Negro must remain subordinate, and can
never expect to be the equal of white men. In their place,
your people can be honest and respectful; and God knows, I'll
do what I can to help them. But when they want to reverse
nature, and rule white men, and marry white women, and sit
in my parlor, then, by God! we'll hold them under if we have
to lynch every Nigger in the land?
The immediacy with which Du Bois's fictional white judge
move s from an imagined social equality in the parlor to the
desire to lynch is both terrifying and telling. In Du Bois's
depiction, the middleclass African American man, the man who
might "presume" to sit in a white man's parlor, constitutes, in and
of himself, a source of white rage. In the judge's imagination,
such an economically successful and culturally refined African
American man-a social equalis also one who desires to "marry
white women," overturn a racial hierarchy ("reverse nature"),
and "rule white men." This complicated nexus of white male
anxiety is precisely the set of fears that fueled the rhetoric and
practice of lynching in the postemancipation and
postReconstruction South.
As Ida B. Wells, a journalist and antilynching crusader,

observed in the 189os, lynching ultimately served as a form of
economic terrorism, as a racialized class warfare translated into
the terms of sexual purity and transgression.' Wells came to this
conclusion after three of her friends were lynched for the
"crime" of operating a successful grocery store that undermined
the business of a white-owned establishment in the same
neighborhood. Wells saw the cry of rape of a white woman that
legitimized lynching in the eyes of many as a cover enabling
whites to lash out at and resist the African American progress
they perceived as threatening their own economic and cultural
capital. The African American man who posed a financial
challenge to white business was transformed, by the lynch mob's
cry of rape, into a man who menaced the sexual purity of white
women. Thus as one pillar of white patriarchy, the control of
capital, was challenged, it was, in a psycho-sexual domain,
displaced into a threat to another cornerstone of white
patriarchy, namely, white women and their reproductive power.
The rhetoric of lynching, which aimed to justify the torture and

murder of African American men by calling it retribution for the
crime of rape, figured black male sexuality as "savage." In the
scenarios construed by the white lynch mob, a white woman was
posed as the pure, passive victim of black male sexual
aggression. In her antilynching work, Wells questioned the purity
and passivity of the white female victim, as well as the absence
of African American women from the lynch mob's outcry over
the crime of rape. According to Wells and others, the rape
stories so often rehearsed by a white mob worked to obscure the
history of consensual relationships between white women and
African American men, as well as white men's rape of African
American women, institutionalized during slavery and continuing
in the postemancipation and post-Reconstruction periods. Indeed,
turn-of-the-century white anxiety over interracial mix ing
figured, in part, a return of the white patriarchy's repressed
le ga c y of interracial rape and reproduction. Invariably, the
cause of white men's rape of African American women was
attributed to African American women themselves, represented
not as victims but as the instigators of sexual "encounters" with
white men. Thus, in the intertwined forces of rape and lynching
that worked to consolidate a white patriarchy, black male and
female sexuality were construed as uncivilized and criminal in
order to mask the violence and aggression of white male and
female sexuality. In Du Bois's short story, his hero John is
lynched for protecting his sister against the sexual violation of his
white counterpart (also named John), the white judge's son.
It is within this highly charged and dangerous cultural context

tha t Du Bois challenges the color line by forwarding class
standing to trump a biologically inflected racial hierarchy in the
Georgia Negro albums. Du Bois's photographs of well-to-do
African American men and women signified against the
backdrop of lynching and racial terror that sought to obliterate
the African American man's economic power and class standing
and deem him a criminal. In the context of such discourses of
sexualized "Negro criminality," which depicted African
American men as depraved, Du Bois poses a vision of an
African American patriarchy, of a black middle class making
c la ims to both economic advancement and cultural privilege
through the performance of gendered respectability and sexual
control. Du Bois founds an African American middle class on
gender differentiation and sexual discipline; ultimately, in the
Georgia Negro photographs, his claims to racial equality through
class stratification are figured through gender hierarchy.
While Du Bois reinvests the image of the African American

ma n posed in the white supremacist rhetoric surrounding and
enabling rape and lynching, he reconfigures the image of the
African American woman to a lesser extent. Indeed, Du Bois's
representational strategies concerning African American
women within an African American patriarchy are complicated
and problematic, particularly in his sociological texts of the turn
of the century. While he celebrates the purity of African
American women, protected by upstanding African American
men, he does so only after denouncing their sexual "looseness,"
which he argues must be reformed by sexual restraint and
gendered submission. Du Bois first condemns the African
American woman's sexuality to then "reform" her, not as a victim
of white (or black) male aggression, but as a victim of her own
sexual promiscuity. In Du Bois's vision, the African American
patriarch, by virtue of his sexual discipline, will "save" the
sexually unbridled African American woman from herself. Du
Bois's gendered class challenge to the tenets of white
supremacism thus leaves in place one of the mainstays of its
founding sexual mythologies.
"Darwinian Development"
As Du Bois's counterarchive of middle-class African Americans

contested the conceits of biological racialists invested in "Negro
inferiority," it also challenged a popular legacy of racist
caricature that singled out the black middle classes for derision.
Throughout the late 187os and early i88os, Harper's Weekly, the
premier national weekly newspaper, ran a series of cartoons and
"Blackville" sketches that ridiculed an African American elite.
Even as it increasingly condemned the extreme white
supremacism of a violent and growing Ku Klux Klan in the post-
Reconstruction years, Harper's contentedly depicted African
Americans as incapable of effecting upward class mobility, as
inherently unable to embody and perform class and cultural
refinement.4
The white middle classes naturalized their own social positions

by lampooning the "unnatural" aspirations of "unevolved"
African Americans. A crude Harper's cartoon entitled "A Step in
the Darwinian Development" evokes the tangled connections
between socalled race science and class standing that white
supremacists drew on to distinguish themselves as "naturally
superior." A "Gentlemanly Storekeeper," marked as Southern by
the drawl of his "Wa'al," asks a "Progressive Buyer," "'Wa'al,
what do you want?'" The buyer, clad in dungarees and a
laborer's hat, replies, "'I don't want nuffin; dis yere Lady wants a
Chignon.." The "joke" is that the chignon, a knot of hair worn at
the nape of the neck, cannot be purchased; it is a sign of beauty
that begins with straight, European hair, and that of the woman
for whom the "progressive buyer" inquires stands out in relief
against the white background of the shop windows and walls in
tufted spikes. The cartoon suggests that the African American
laborers who desire the trappings of European elegance and
refinement are confused and misdirected. Evoking cultural and
class aspirations as an "evolutionary" step in the Darwinian
development, the cartoon dismisses such desires as ridiculous
and forecloses the possibility of such "improvement" by
anchoring elegance in hair type, one of the physical features
most fetishized by biological racialists as a marker of racial
difference and essential racial hierarchy. The laborers are
associated with physicality; the woman stands solidly with arms
akimbo, and the man leans nonchalantly on the counter, his
backside, with its large trap door, prominently displayed for the
viewer. Their bodies are thick and corpulent compared to the
white shopkeeper's, itself a caricature of brittle thinness, sharp
angles, and rigidity. Indeed, all of the physical features of the
African American man and woman depicted in the cartoon are
grossly distorted -huge mouths, protruding teeth, and popping
eyes make them look less than human. The cartoon intimates that
the "natural" laws of Darwinian evolution have determined that
African Americans are not yet fit to survive in the middle and
upper classes. Their physical types have not been whittled and
rigidified by (white) discipline and training. And once again, the
cartoon suggests that such efforts may not avail them in any
case, as hair texture and other physical features are marked as
inassimilable. Biology, according to the cartoon, thwarts class
"evolution."
31. Cartoon, "A Step in the Darwinian
Development," Harper's Weekly. Reproduced
courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division,
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,
the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and
Tilden Foundations.
Hamper's ran more subtle, and yet more extended, commentary

o n African American economic progress in its Blackville
sketches, drawn by noted American caricaturist Sol Eytinge
Jun.5 More complicated and detailed than the crude cartoon
discussed above, these images ridicule the exploits of well-to-do
African Americans. Eytinge consistently exaggerates facial
features and expressions in his drawings - wide eyes and
protruding lips are ever present-and he singles out
pseudoaristocratic events, such as foxhunting and a regatta, for
derision. Eytinge's "The Coaching Season in Blackville-the
Grand Start," published in Harper's Weekly on September 28,
1878, depicts horses bucking and wild, escaping the control of
their black coachmen. Blackville is spelled incorrectly on the
side of the coach, which reads, "Tally Hoo Black-vile." This
illustration, and the Blackville series as a whole, suggests that
African Americans cannot handle (literally) the accoutrements
of the wealthy; they have not been "bred" for such ratified
pursuits-they cannot even control the beasts on which such
pleasures depend. In Eytinge's Blackville, genteel practices
become "vile."6
Eytinge was not alone in caricaturing an African American

elite in the second half of the nineteenth century; in the early
186os, Harper's Weekly presented an average of sixteen
"comic" images of African Americans each year. Thomas Nast,
the best-known caricaturist in the United States, also drew racist
cartoons ridiculing African American legislators, but it is Sol
Eytinge Jun.'s work in this line that was most widely noted and
influential. Indeed, a Harper's Weekly article of 1876
proclaimed that Eytinge had made "negro character a special
study." According to Michael Harris, Eytinge's Blackville
sketches for Harper's inspired Thomas Worth's later Darktown
Comics for the famous lithograph company Currier and Ives, and
by 1884, the virulently racist Darktown Comics, numbering thirty
prints, accounted for over one-third of Currier and Ives's total
production.?
Eytinge's sketches employ mimicry to contain the aspirations of

upwardly mobile African Americans. The images suggest that
African American sophistication can only ever be mimicry-
"almost the same, but not quite," "almost the same but not white.""
The images work to naturalize a racialized class hierarchy by
fixing difference in ap proximation, by constructing African
American elegance as the "not quite" and the "almost." The
sketches confirm an absent white upper class by holding it up
implicitly as the measure of worth, as the longed for but
unreachable mark. If Du Bois's photographic portraits of an
African American elite seek to trump a racial hierarchy by
leveling it with class and cultural refinement, Eytinge's Blackville
sketches for Harper's aim to counter such claims to class
equivalence by inscribing a racial slippage whereby blackness
always already makes cultivation mere mimicry. The images
thus work to comfort white viewers anxious to maintain an
exclusive cultural privilege, encouraging them to rest assured
that despite the seeming sameness of an African American
gentility, a racial difference will remain.
In Eytinge's sketches, sexuality is constructed as the

inassimilable mark of blackness; sexuality functions as the
"missing" (middle-class) link. In a series depicting the romantic
conquests of two African American women, "the twins,"
promiscuity and sexual looseness are subtly inscribed as
characteristics that make African American class ambitions
laughable. In "Wedding Trip of the Blackville TwinsOff for
Europe," which appeared in Harper's Weekly on September 7,
1878, the twins, aboard a ship, are sent off by a large crowd of
waving and cheering men and women. In the upper left corner
of the frame, the two young women lean amorously on the
shoulders of their newly wedded husbands. Physical contact
marks their adoration; they press their bodies against the men
who stand proudly erect, with legs spread, one with his enormous
stomach thrust out at the crowd, the other with his leg firmly
planted at a suggestive angle. Men on the dock wave their hats
and strain for the elevated foursome on the boat, and two attempt
to pass more flowers to the favored four. It would appear that
the twins have had many suitors; some of the men, with heads
thrown back and mouths wide open, appear to be wailing at their
departure, and those that continue to pass flowers may assume
that the twins' marriage need not stop their courting. The twins'
apparent coyness, marked by the way they lean their heads on
their husbands' shoulders and roll their eyes up to admire them,
suggests a pleasurable submission that reconfirms their husbands'
gloating, and it may also attempt to deflect and apologize for the
rather too enthusiastic attention of the women's other suitors. A
slight aura of chaos pervades the crowd, and the startled
expression of a white sailor looking out into the throng signals
that something may be wheeling out of control. One of the well-
wishers holds a sign that reads "Bone Voage," suggesting the
approximation, the almost-but-not-quite mastery, of this
ritualized departure, and another offers a "Cure for Sea
Sickness," a gesture that intimates, perhaps, that the twins have
been suffering from a certain ailment before embarking on the
trip. Some of the young women and men in the crowd appear to
gossip among themselves, and two of the women's backward
smiles, aimed toward the viewer, indicate that they are quite
happy to have the twins removed from the scene of their own
courting.
32. Drawing by Sol Eytinge Jun., "Wedding Trip of the Twins-
Off for Europe," Harper's Weekly, September 7, 1878.
Reproduced courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division,
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New
York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
In a companion piece to this image, published one month later,

on October 26, 1878, a sketch that represents the twins'
return"After Doing Paris and the Rest of Europe, the Bridal Party
Return to Blackville"-the twins and their husbands parade
through their rural town. The twins sport tiny umbrellas, new
white gloves, new hats, and new dresses; they walk with backs
rigid and straight, chins thrust up, looking down their noses at
their neighbors. The men also wear new coats and hats; they
carry canes, and appear to swing and swivel with a little bravado
in their gait. One of the men whistles, and the other, cane
crooked inside the corner of his mouth, looks out at the viewer
through a monocle. The couples appear to be on a self-made
parade, flaunting their newfound sophistication. But they also
display the babies their nurse carries in tow, infants born,
apparently, on their wedding trip, and therefore quite a bit
earlier than mandated by the protocols of (an elite, white) sexual
propriety.9 Indeed, the babies explain the secrets and grins
shared by well-wishers at the party's send-off, as well as the
exaggerated, strutting strolling of the twins' husbands upon their
return. Neighbors stare, wide-eyed and openmouthed at this
spectacle, and one woman, hidden from the procession by a tree,
and yet clearly displayed for the viewer, laughs hysterically, her
body caught in the bend of a belly-howl. Situated outside the
centrally framed image, this woman is privileged for and placed
parallel to the viewer, who, presumably, is meant to share in her
joke, to look back at the airs of the party and laugh. For despite
their tour of Europe and their elegant clothes, the twins
apparently "needed" to get married, and sailed for Europe to
hide their progressing pregnancies. These episodes in Eytinge's
Blackville series poke fun at the pretensions of the twins,
undercutting their self-proclaimed elegance by deriding their
apparent laxity in regard to the (elite, white) social mores of
sexual behavior.
33. Drawing by Sol Eytinge Jun., "After Doing Paris and the
Rest of Europe, the Bridal Party Return to Blackville," Harper's
Weekly, October 26, 1878. Reproduced courtesy of
Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
In Eytinge's sketches, African American sexuality, construed as

loose and undisciplined, is marked as a sign of racial inferiority,
a s a racialized trait that bars African Americans from full
inclusion in the ranks of the upper crust. It is within this context,
in the shadow of this racist archive, that Du Bois collected and
presented his i9oo Georgia Negro photographs of an African
American elite. It is these representations, in addition to the
instrumental documents of biological racialists and eugenicists,
that Du Bois's images engage and contest. As Du Bois seeks to
counter a racial hierarchy by evoking class, his images must
negotiate the norms of gender and sexual conduct through which
class is racially inscribed. Gender and sexuality thus become key
issues in Du Bois's challenge to racial hierarchies and to
racialized class codes, concerns that he negotiates with
considerable ambiguity. Indeed, as we shall see, Du Bois's
antiracist class arguments depend on reconsolidating a vision of
gender hierarchy informed by problematic constructions of
African American sexuality.
Confronting "Negro Criminality"
The imagined sexual conduct of African Americans became

central to white battles over race and class hierarchies at the
turn of the century. Indeed, sexuality figured prominently in
sinister discourses showcased in Harper's Weekly, which aimed
to deter African American social and economic advancement.
The debates concerning socalled Negro criminality represented
African Americans as degenerate and unfit for "civilized"
middle-class privileges. Concomitant with the rise and
representation of the "New Negro" at the turn of the century,
white supremacists construed a "new negro crime"that of raping
white women-in order to legitimize violence on Afri can
American bodies;10 white lynch mobs called forth an image of
the black male rapist in order to justify the torture and mutilation
o f black men. Many white supremacists argued that African
American criminal behavior had increased dramatically during
the postbellum era and suggested that newly emancipated blacks
were reverting to their "natural" state of instinctive physicality
and aggressive sexuality without the guidance of their former
masters. One writer for Harper's Weekly contended: "Such
outrages are sporadic indications of a lapse of the Southern
negro into a state of barbarism or savagery, in which the
gratification of the brutish instincts is no longer subjected to the
restraints of civilization." 11 Another Harper's correspondent
concurred: "In slavery negroes learned how to obey, and
obedience means self-control." Lamenting the purported demise
o f "self-control" after emancipation, the same writer proposed
that "a substitute [for slavery] must be found" to ensure the
"mental and moral discipline" of African Americans.12 In this
way, white supremacists utilized discourses of Negro criminality
to argue for the inherent inferiority of African Americans, and
to justify increasing social surveillance, segregation, and
lynching as means of controlling the African American bodies
they posed as sexually unruly.
Du Bois mounted a two-tiered attack on dominant and extreme

white representations of Negro criminality. At the most basic
level, he challenged the depiction of criminality as an innate
characteristic posed by biological racialists, arguing that illicit
behavior was a learned, not an inborn, effect. While he himself
reiterates that crime is a "Negro problem," Du Bois suggests that
unlawful acts are the result of poverty and argues that African
Americans are no more apt to commit offenses than other
impoverished groups. As we shall see in the following section,
Du Bois also deems poverty a cause of "sexual looseness," but
his response to the highly sexualized representations of African
Americans, forwarded most viciously in the white supremacist
rhetoric of lynching, is more complicated and ambiguous than his
commentary on so-called Negro criminality generally.
Du Bois's assessment of crime is leveled at social and historical

forces, and it thus ultimately comments on American society; his
critique of so-called sexual looseness, on the other hand, is
a ime d at African Americans themselves, and especially at
African American women. While he attributes licentiousness to
historical and economic antecedents, he nevertheless condemns
what he perceives as the "sexual sins" of the African American
working classes, censuring African American women in
particular. The causes of sexual looseness may lie with society,
but African Americans themselves must effect the cures Du Bois
prescribes. For Du Bois, so-called sexual deviance must be
rooted out by controlling and containing African American
women's sexual desires within the patriarchal African American
family. Du Bois thus makes his own case for disciplining African
Americans and the African American bodies he sexualizes in a
h i g h l y gendered manner. Indirectly countering white
representations of the African American man as sexually
rampant in the discourses of lynching, Du Bois forwards an
image of patriarchal restraint, shifting the locus of sexual
aggression onto African American women. Further, Du Bois
carefully consigns sexual "aberrations" to the lower classes,
dividing and distinguishing them from his elite Talented Tenth,
the mold and model of gendered sexual respectability to which
he would discipline others. As white Americans constructed
images of Negro criminality and sexual deviance to reinforce
their claims to cultural privilege, Du Bois also distinguished his
vision of an African American elite from a sexually suspect
African American underclass.
In his edited volume Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in

Georgia (1904), Du Bois explicitly challenges the racist tenets
that "the Negro element is the most criminal in our population"
and that "the Negro is much more criminal as a free man than he
was as a slave." 13 In this Atlanta University study, Du Bois
argues that slavery was not, as many white supremacists
proclaimed, a check on inherent criminal tendencies, but instead,
an institution that encouraged illicit behavior. In other words, Du
Bois makes a case for slavery as a corrupting environment, a
social and economic condition, in order to dispute suggestions of
innate Negro criminality. In discussing the "faults of Negroes" in
the "causes of Negro crime," Du Bois cites "loose ideas of
property" and "sexual looseness," and quotes Sidney Olivier who
states, "'All these faults are real and important causes of Negro
crime. They are not racial traits but due to perfectly evident
historic causes: slavery could not survive as an institution and
teach thrift; and its great evil in the United States was its low
sexual morals; emancipation meant for the Negroes poverty and
a great stress of life due to sudden change. These and other
considerations explain Negro crime.'" 14 In delineating the
"faults of the whites" in producing Negro crime, Du Bois notes "a
double standard of justice in the courts," "enforcing a caste
system in such a way as to humiliate Negroes and kill their
selfrespect," and "peonage and debt-slavery." 15 Notes on
Negro Crime, Particularly in Georgia demonstrates how
discourses of so-called innate Negro criminality directed public
attention away from the material circumstances of extreme
poverty and racism under which many "free" African
Americans struggled to survive by sharecropping in the post-
Reconstruction South.
34 From Alphonse Bertillon, Identification anthropometrique,
instructions signaletiques, new edition (Melun, France:
Imprimerie Administrative, 1893). Reproduced courtesy of
Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington
State University Libraries, Pullman.
Within this discursive context, Du Bois's scientific mug shots of

"Negro types," compiled for the i9oo Paris Exposition, take on
new meanings. Revisited through the lens of turn-of-the-century
debates concerning Negro criminality, they recall the visually
codified signs of the criminal mug shot. Indeed, the form of
cropped and paired portraits that Du Bois's photographs
reproduce -with a difference - was utilized not only by
biological racialists but also by criminologists to construct their
own brand of social deviance at the turn of the century. The
photographic mug shot served as a site of convergence for
varied discourses claiming to describe racialized degeneracy
and depravity. As the "primitive" racial "type" was likened to an
evolutionary throwback (in the lesson of the native village so
promine nt at fairs and expositions), the criminal was also
deemed "atavistic," a biological holdover from an earlier age.
Thus racial "primitives" and criminals were categorically
collapsed into a biological category of "undeveloped" inferiors.
The so-called Negro type could be overlaid on the "criminal
type," just as a visual taxonomy of racial others could be called
on to demarcate criminal others.16
As Allan Sekula has argued, the history of the criminal mug

shot was also embedded in the history of the middle-class
photographic portrait; the mug shot marked the boundary
delimiting middle-class privilege. According to Sekula, "To the
extent that bourgeois order depends upon the systematic defense
of social relations based on private property, to the extent that
the legal basis of the self lies in the model of property rights, in
what has been termed `possessive individualism,' every proper
portrait has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the
police." 17 In many ways, the Rogues' Gallery, a showcase for
criminal offenders, functioned as a public counterexample to the
middle-class portrait gallery.
Du Bois's photographs for the 19oo Paris Exposition, as well as

his written refutations of Negro criminality, demonstrate how the
class dynamic Sekula describes was also racialized at the turn of
the century, as images of Negro criminality were evoked to
define the bounds of the white middle classes. As he would later
state, "At that time it was the rule of most white papers never to
publish a picture of a colored person except as a criminal."" By
"signifyin(g)" on the form of the criminal as well as the scientific
mug shot, Du Bois's initial photographs in Types ofA7nerican
Negroes, Georgia, U. S.A. suggest that for some (white)
viewers, the middle-class portrait of an African American was
equivalent to the mug shot of a criminal. As Du Bois's short story
"Of the Coming of John" intimates, for many whites, the image of
a successful African American always already constituted an
image of one who had stolen cultural prerogatives from their
"rightful" owners. In other words, when projected through the
eyes of white others, the image of the African American middle-
class individual often transmuted into the mug shot of an African
American criminal. It is precisely this transformation of the
black image in the eyes of white beholders (a transfiguration of
the middle-class portrait into a criminal mug shot) that Du Bois's
Georgia Negro portraits unmask.19
Du Bois made his first foray into the complicated and politically
contentious debates surrounding so-called Negro criminality in
h i s landmark sociological study, The Philadelphia Negro,
published in 1899. In this early work, Du Bois studies historically
conditioned relationships to property and condemns what he
perceives as "sexual looseness" among urban African
Americans as causes of crime. Here, Du Bois also describes the
economic conditions created by prejudice and discrimination as
forces that block African American opportunity, dulling and
frustrating African American ambition. He articulates an
environmentalist position vis-a-vis crime in The Philadelphia
Negro, arguing that crime "is a phenomenon that stands not
a lone , but rather as a symptom of countless wrong social
conditions" (242). Among the environmental forces that
encouraged crime in Philadelphia's African American
communities at the turn of the century Du Bois cites "stinging
oppression" and lack of opportunity as central causes (241). In a
detailed analysis, Du Bois notes that racial discrimination
severely limits the kinds of opportunities open to African
American men and women, their potential for advancement
within those fields, the pay they receive, and their overall job
security (32255). As Mia Bay has argued: "The facts and figures
[Du Bois] gathered in Philadelphia suggested that an interwoven
combination of racism, poverty, and the lingering aftereffects of
slavery-such as disadvantages in employment-were at the root of
black Philadelphia's social ills." 20
In many ways, Du Bois's Georgia Negro studies for the 1900

Pa r is Exposition closely resemble those he prepared for The
Philadelphia Negro, published just one year earlier; indeed, it
seems likely that Du Bois modeled the latter study after the
former. The Philadelphia Negro was the result of a fifteen-
month inquiry, spanning August 1, 1896, to December 31, 1897,
during which time Du Bois and his new wife, Nina Gomer Du
Bois, lived in the College Settlement House of Philadelphia's
Seventh Ward.21 Du Bois gathered information from some 9,000
African Americans living in this section of Philadelphia, and
included in his final publication were also the results of Isabel
Ea ton's investigation of domestic service. The aim of the
research, according to Du Bois, was to provide "the scientific
basis of further study, and of practical reform."22 Like the later
American Negro Exhibit, The Philadelphia Negro was clearly
aimed as a response to the ubiquitous, "half-named" "Negro
problem," and as Du Bois himself would later learn, it was
supported by those who believed Philadelphia "was going to the
dogs because of the crime and venality of its Negro citizens."" In
his own later estimation of this work, Du Bois would declare: "It
revealed the Negro group as a symptom, not a cause; as a
striving, palpitating group, and not an inert, sick body of crime;
as a long historic development and not a transient occurrence."
24 Although at times his argument seems conflicted, wavering
between sociological paradigms in flux, as Michael B. Katz and
Thomas J. Sugrue have argued, Du Bois "rooted his study in a
fundamental critique of biological notions of race."25
Du Bois designed his inquiry after Charles Booth's Life and

Labour of the People ofLondon (1889-1897) and Jane Addams's
Chicago Settlement House study, Hull-House Maps and Papers
(1895) 26 In The Philadelphia Negro, he provides a general
overview of African American history in Philadelphia,
investigating immigration and population patterns throughout the
nineteenth century, and then focuses on the Seventh Ward, to
describe the age, sex, conjugal condition, education,
occupations, health, family, and organized life of African
Americans living in Philadelphia in the mid-189os. His chapter
titles, "The Negro Criminal," "Pauperism and Alcoholism," "The
Environment of the Negro," "The Contact of the Races," and
"Negro Suffrage," indicate the particular attention Du Bois paid
to these subjects. In appendix B, "Legislation, etc., of
Pennsylvania in Regard to the Negro," he also offers a history of
the Pennsylvania legal code pertaining to African Americans
from 1682 to 1895, and finally, in the appendices, he reproduces
the schedules, or questionnaires, used in his house-tohouse
surveys, along with several instructions for interviewers.
Du Bois utilized many of the categories he first deployed in The

Philadelphia Negro to prepare the Georgia Negro studies for the
American Negro Exhibit at the i9oo Paris Exposition. As I noted
i n the introduction, in addition to the photograph albums, the
Georgia Negro studies also resulted in two additional exhibits for
the Paris Exposition: (i) a series of thirty-one charts and graphs
displaying social and economic facts and figures; and (2) a
description of the complete legal code of Georgia as pertaining
to African Americans. One set of graphs and charts records and
compares the African American populations of various states
and then focuses on Georgia, comparing population by county.
As in The Philadelphia Negro, age, conjugal condition, literacy,
schooling, occupations, family budgets, and land and property
ownership receive special attention. Migration, amalgamation,
slavery, freedom, mortality, and crime are also studied. Further,
the categories that divide the schedules Du Bois and his
collabora tors used in collecting data for The Philadelphia Negro
directly parallel the subjects emphasized in Du Bois's i9oo
Georgia Negro photographs, such as the individual, family,
home, house servant, street, and institution.
While it may not be obvious initially, the Georgia Negro

photographs share with The Philadelphia Negro an ideological
focus on environmental forces as the cause of social conditions.
With their many portraits, the albums suggest that individuals
stand as the foundation of social progress, but they also situate
individuals within specific social settings. As I noted in the
previous chapter, as one progresses through Du Bois's
photograph albums, it is as if the camera gradually backs up-to
locate individuals within a specific context, or at least within a
space carefully orchestrated at the level of symbolic detail. In
the portraits, this is the photographic studio, with its trappings that
suggest middle-class sitting rooms and parlors. Moving through
the portraits, the viewer arrives at images that participate in the
emerging field of social documentary photography: one finds
individuals and groups situated in the social contexts of homes,
businesses, streets, and neighborhoods. In the final album of
photographs, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A., one sees families
grouped on the steps of Victorian houses or placed in front of
shaded, whitewashed homes; men and women perched in horse-
drawn carriages; groups standing on the lawn in front of country
churches; men in the doorways of stores and pharmacies;
children in rural backyards with chickens and dogs; marching
bands and smaller musical groups; individuals seated at large
desks in spacious offices; men and boys at work delivering
blocks of ice; and men and women at work in fields (plates 14-
19, 22- 24).27 And after individuals have been situated in
specific contexts, the environment itself eventually becomes the
focus of the photographs. People fall out of scenes altogether;
the site becomes subject. Depopulated images of city streets,
country homes, and churches, and interior views of stores and
parlor rooms (plates zo and 21) work to emphasize material
settings, highlighting the environment that, as we have seen, Du
Bois depicted as a shaping force in determining individual and
social character in his sociological writings.
The Georgia Negro albums portray poverty as an

environmental force, represented by run-down houses and
unpaved streets much more frequently than by individuals. It
would appear that Du Bois is loathe to picture a less-than-perfect
African American body, or a strained and struggling African
American family. He will represent the conditions of
deprivation, the environmental forces that may encourage crime
-broken-down farm buildings and unpainted houses on unpaved
urban streets-but he is reticent to represent the men and women
who inhabit such spaces, those who may, or may not, have been
adversely affected by such places. As a point of comparison, Du
Bois's photographs of large Victorian homes, each singled out
f r om the surrounding neighborhood, often represent families
grouped on front porches, framed by the solidity and stature of
the grand houses. Conversely, his images of the urban "slums,"
such as that depicting city tenements in Atlanta,28 offer distant
views of rows of indiscriminate houses, none especially focused
on for careful perusal. Such scenes remain largely unpopulated,
or they display tiny figures at a distance, figures indiscernible as
specific individuals, trudging up sidewalks that terminate in mud.
Indeed, the thick, deep mud of unpaved streets is the subject
centrally framed in these images; for Du Bois, this mud
represents filth and lurking disease,29 and symbolically, perhaps,
a mire of poverty and destitution in which not only carriages but
also people can be trapped and submerged.
35 W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (i9oo),
no. 275. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection,
36. Negro city tenements, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B. Du Bois,
Negro Life in Georgia, U. S.A. (i9oo), no. 300. Reproduced
from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
37. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (i9oo), no.
327. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library
of Congress, Washington, D.C.
U.S.A. (i9oo), vol. 3, no. 251. Reproduced from the Daniel
In contrast to the photographs of urban poverty, a number of

the rural images focus in on decrepit farm buildings and houses,
but once again, families remain conspicuously absent from the
frames of these broken-down porches. While a couple of rural
photographs show people laboring in the fields at close range
(plate i9), many of these images depict agricultural spaces as
deserted. Despite the fact that, by Du Bois's own calculation, the
vast majority of African Americans living in the Black Belt at the
turn of the century worked as farmers, and most of them as poor
tenant farmers, Du Bois visually represents African American
agricultural workers as a small minority in his i9oo albums.30
The photographs of urban and rural poverty in the final volume
of Types ofA7nerican Negroes, Georgia, U. S.A. and in Negro
Life in Georgia, U. S.A. seem crafted to represent the
environmental forces that can crush individuals, but once again,
Du Bois seems reluctant to represent the people who might be
strained by such pressures. It is as if he fears such
representations would enable white viewers to inscribe
(environmental) causes onto black bodies, to fix the root of
deprivation, disease, and crime in the "innate inferiority"
construed by race scientists, to read the environment as a natural
outgrowth of African American individuals, rather than the
reverse, as an influencing force.
The divergence in representations of the wealthy and the

impoverished in Du Bois's albums is particularly interesting when
compared to other reform-oriented social documentary
photographs of the period. Jacob Riis, a pioneering photographer
and tenement reformer, consistently depicted large immigrant
groups crammed into tiny quarters, with notably dirty children
forced to work to help support the family. While Riis emphasized
the unhealthy living conditions of the tenements in his
photographs, he did so largely by representing the immigrant
families affected by such dire environments.31 The crowding
that Riis's photographs depict constituted a central concern to Du
Bois. In The Negro American Family, Du Bois condemned the
overpopulated Southern urban alley and the rural oneroom cabin
as sites of deprivation tantamount to the Northern urban
tenements: "So far as actual sleeping space goes, the crowding
of human beings together in the Black Belt is greater than in the
tenement district of large cities like New York." 32 Decrying the
poverty of Dougherty County, Georgia, Du Bois protests: "I met
one family of eleven eating and sleeping in one room, and thirty
families of eight or more. Why should there be such wretched
tenements in the Black Belt?" (129). According to Du Bois, the
packed throngs of these destitute living places resulted in "bad
health, poor family life, and crime" (6o), as well as "untold
[sexual] evils" (53). And yet, unlike Riis, and in contrast to his
own representation of the "better classes," Du Bois was reticent
to depict the inhabitants of such impoverished spaces.
39 W. L. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia,
In refusing to represent indigent African Americans in his i9oo

albums, Du Bois may be refusing to give (white, middle-class)
viewers what they expect. Indeed, while he argues that not
enough attention has been paid to the overcrowding of the
Southern urban alley in social reform circles, he simultaneously
suggests that overattention to the "worst and lowest type," the
inhabitant of the "alley hovel," "has gone so far today as to
obscure, almost, in the eyes of the majority of Americans, the
existence of a class of intelligent American citizens of Negro
blood who represent as good citizenship, as pure homes and as
worthy success as any class of their fellows" (65). Du Bois here
makes explicit his desire to recast a visual record, to transform
the dominant cultural image of African Americans as seen
"through the eyes of others."
Considering that attempt in the context of other documentary

images, Du Bois may also hope to distance African Americans
from the Europeans Jacob Riis depicts as "teeming immigrant
masses" by adopting the white middle-class norms of nuclear
families in distinction to the extended families and community
bonds of newcomers in order to align African Americans with
visions of (white) middleclass normalcy.33 In his 1900 albums,
Du Bois overwhelmingly represents the "best classes," those
whose "pure homes," sanitized in part by the very space they
afford, mark the "good citizenship" of their occupants. In this
sense, then, Du Bois forwards the "Americanness" of his better
classes by emphasizing their conformity to white middleclass
standards of economic success, once again invoking class to
make claims on equality, trumping the possible (white) racial
claims of poor Europeans.
In differentiating his vision of the best African American

families from the mass of European immigrants, Du Bois also
dissociates them from the majority of African Americans. He
deems the one-room home "the primitive and natural method of
dwelling of all men and races at some time," the less-than-
civilized origin of developmental progress.34 Describing the
"evolution of the Negro home" accord ing to a scale that begins
with "African huts" and ends with large houses owned by
African American professionals in The Negro American Family,
he locates the "Negro city tenements" as an intermediary step
between slave cabins and homes owned by African
Americans.35 Several of the photographs he uses to illustrate this
evolutionary scale were first presented in the 1900 albums, and
if one remembers the racial geography of the 1900 Paris
Exposition, then it would appear that Du Bois constructs his own
sliding evolutionary scale, distinguishing the homes of his better
classes from the African huts of the native village. And further,
according to Du Bois's measure, poor African Americans, those
who live in city tenements, are construed as the less-evolved,
"primitive" forebears of wealthy, "civilized" African American
home owners.
A Model Patriarchy
The American Negro Exhibit was meant to celebrate African

American progress since the Civil War, and as Du Bois
proclaimed in The Philadelphia Negro, he believed progress
could best be determined by the standard of a black elite. In the
"upper class" Du Bois found "the realized ideal of the group":
"As it is true that a nation must to some extent be measured by its
slums, it is also true that it can only be understood and finally
judged by its upper class." 36 How, then, does Du Bois represent
an African American upper crust in his Georgia Negro
photographs for the 1900 Paris Exposition? Beyond the props that
evoke middle-class parlors and sitting rooms, beyond the clothes
that signal wealth, beyond the standardized, massreproducible
photographic forms, how does Du Bois distinguish a middle class
in its specificity? What, in short, is Du Bois's vision of an African
American elite? First, the men and women represented in the
1900 albums are almost uniformly young. Flecks of gray hair
reveal signs of maturity on an individual or two, but with the
exception of a couple of portraits, the elderly remain absent
from Du Bois's albums. The viewer only rarely finds venerable
grandmothers and grandfathers here, and thus almost no one
appears to be old enough to have known slavery personally.
Indeed, as Laura Wexler has commented on another collection
of photographs presented in the American Negro Exhibit, these
are "the sons and daughters of `freedom's first generation,' but
nothing about their appearance reveals this fact. Instead, the
invisibility of the marks of slavery seems to be part of the point."
37 In Du Bois's 1900 photograph albums, the "New Negro"
would appear to be a generation sprung from scratch; "new"
because cut off from and entirely dissociated from the "old,"
especially from the memory and legacy of slavery.
Du Bois's New Negroes are both youthful and light-skinned. As

I noted in the previous chapter, Du Bois may have aimed to
dismantle eugenicist delineations of singular racial types with
representations of biracial and white-looking individuals. In line
with his later study, The Health and Physique of the Negro
American, he may have wished to contest eugenicist depictions
of the so-called mulatto as degenerate. In these scientific
registers, Du Bois's representations of lightskinned individuals
with aquiline noses and long, wavy hair perform important
antiracist work. And in an era of increasingly strident laws
regulating racial identities, these images contest white
supremacist attempts to erase a history of forced racial
mixing.38 Here, then, may be Du Bois's representation of the
legacy of slavery in his albums. However, taken in the context of
debates concerning African American "color-consciousness" at
the turn of the century, Du Bois's selected portraits may also
work to reinforce an intraracial color line of distinction for
African Americans. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, an African American elite increasingly faced
c ritic ism for its "blue veinism." 39 The educator Nannie
Burroughs proclaimed in 1904: "There is no denying it, Negroes
have colorphobia.."40
Condemning color elitism, Burroughs argues for social

distinctions based on character, and she anchors character
development in a gendered paradigm of protective gentlemanly
respect and feminine sexual purity. Calling out to men,
Burroughs states, "Our women need the protection and genuine
respect of our men.... Whenever the men of any race defiantly
stand for the protection of their women the women will be
strengthened morally and be saved from the hands of the most
vile."41 Addressing women, she admonishes: "It is the duty of
Negro women to rise in the pride of their womanhood and
vindicate themselves of the charge [of sexual looseness] by
teaching all men that black womanhood is as sacred as white
womanhood."42 For Burroughs, character, and, subsequently,
class distinction, should be determined according to normative,
nineteenth-century middle-class gender codes of "true"
womanhood and protective manhood.
40. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofArnerican Negroes, Georgia,
Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Du Bois belies a similar adherence to antebellum models of

gender protocol as the signs of moral strength and the standards
of "civilized" middle-class "evolution" in The Philadelphia Negro
(1899) and The Negro American Family (1908). In the earlier
text, he divides the population of Philadelphia's Seventh Ward
into four "grades": (i) the "well-to-do," which includes "families
of undoubted respectability" that adhere to patriarchal models of
domesticity and housewifery; (2) the "respectable working
class"; (3) the "poor" but "honest"; and (4) the "lowest class of
criminals, prostitutes and loafers; the 'submerged tenth."143 In
The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois's scale of social respectability
is measured by the African American patriarch's ability to keep
his wife at home, there devoted to the work of motherhood and
middle-class housewifery, and such gender roles become
ma r ke r s of "civilization" in The Negro American Family.
Denouncing illegitimacy in particular, Du Bois proclaims:
"Without doubt the point where the Negro American is furthest
behind modern civilization is in his sexual mores."44 For Du
Bois, the African American woman registers her family's moral
status, asserting its place on the scale of civilization: In her most
elevated role, she is a housewife supported by her husband; from
there she sinks to the role of coworker who must help to support
the family financially; and finally, in her most degraded role as
prostitute, her (sexual) work situates her outside the bounds of
patriarchal familial respectability altogether. In Du Bois's
estimation of social worth, "sexual deviance" is sometimes
collapsed into "Negro criminality," as it is in the logics of
lynching, but for Du Bois, sexual aggression is depicted as the
"crime" of African American women.
In Du Bois's juxtaposition of a "talented" tenth to a "submerged"

tenth, he evokes Negro criminality- "the lowest class of
criminals" - in order to distinguish members of the middle and
upper classes, individuals of "undoubted respectability," from
sexual deviants such as prostitutes. Du Bois appears to adopt a
strategy parallel to the racist ones he would critique vis-a-vis
discourses of Negro criminality, dismissing a portion of the
African American population as inherently inferior, as debased
beyond the reach of uplift. In the words of Mia Bay, Du Bois is
"very much given to moralizing about lower-class manners and
behavior" and "inclined to blame at least some area's problems
on the failings of its `bottom class' denizens."45 In making a case
for class over race as the standard of social distinction, Du Bois
also constructs a class hierarchy within a diverse racial group,
deflecting the biological arguments of race scientists and
criminologists onto a portion of the African American population
he is content to "submerge" under the expectations he rejects for
himself and others of an elite class. In some ways, it would seem
that Du Bois's Talented Tenth relies on his construction of a
"submerged tenth";46 in his own "sliding scale," a middle-class
portrait is figuratively contrasted to a criminal mug shot 47
What Du Bois calls the lowest class is the site of both

criminality and sexual "irregularity," from which he distances an
African American elite. In The Negro American Family he
celebrates "the great and most patent fact [of ] differentiation:
the emergence from the mass, of successive classes with higher
and higher sexual morals." 48 As Kevin Gaines has argued, Du
Bois depicts a black urban working class as sexually
promiscuous, and criminally inclined, in order to shore up the
cultural distinction of a Northern black bourgeoisie. In doing so,
he falls in line with racial uplift rhetoric, through which, Gaines
suggests, the black middle classes represented themselves as a
virtuous intellectual and cultural elite by evoking standards of
Victorian sexual morality rooted in a patriarchal gender
paradigm 49 In the final foot note to a chapter devoted to the
"conjugal condition" in The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois
condemns what he deems the lax sexual morals of the African
American working classes: "Sexual looseness is to-day the
prevailing sin of the mass of the Negro population." 50 He
ameliorates that statement with caveats pointing to the historical
dissolution of and disregard for African American marriage
bonds and family connections during slavery and by noting that
white men continue to disrespect and dishonor African
American womanhood. And yet, throughout this chapter, he
appears exceptionally nervous about the numbers of men and
women living together outside of wedlock in Philadelphia's
Seventh Ward. Du Bois is particularly concerned about "the
unchastity of a large number of women" - "unmarried mothers" -
and suggests that "lax moral habits" signal grave "moral
disorder." 51
In Du Bois's vision of social reform, "unmarried women," and

even women per se-that "large excess of young women"52-need
to be woven into the fold of an economically strong
patriarchy.53 Addressing the (sexual) "fall" of "the poorly
trained colored girl" in The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois states,
"Nothing but strict home life can avail in such cases." 54 For Du
Bois, a middle-class, gendered family structure is the sign and
salvation of good character: "The mass of the Negro people must
be taught sacredly to guard the home, to make it the centre of
social life and moral guardianship. This it is largely among the
best class of Negroes, but it might be made even more
conspicuously so than it is." 55 Indeed, the patriarchal family, for
Du Bois, constitutes the very mark of civilization itself. Arguing
that "sexual irregularity" "belongs to the undifferentiated mass:
some of them decent people, but behind civilization by training
and instinct," he proclaims: "Above these and out of these, are
continually rising, however, classes who must not be confounded
with them. Of the raising of the sex mores of the Negro by these
classes the fact is clear and unequivocal: they have raised them
and are raising them. There is more female purity, more male
continence, and a healthier home life today than ever before
among Negroes in America." 56 Du Bois holds up his patriarchy
of "undoubted respectability" as a disciplining and civilizing
force to curb the sexual excess of the working classes, the
impoverished, and the "criminal." He seeks to bind African
American women especially to the patriarchal structures of
middle-class family norms that reproduce direct lines of
inheritance. In contrast to the image of the sexually aggressive
black man construed in lynching discourses - those most vicious
depictions of Negro criminality-Du Bois intimates that
uncontrolled sexuality is not a characteristic of African
American men, but a failing of African American women.
Indeed, in The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois suggests that it is
only the sober African American man, the middle-class
patriarch, who, as father and husband, can reign in the wiles of
sexually loose African American women. Du Bois thus fights the
exclusive racialization of the (white) middle classes by
appealing to a model of gendered class identities upheld by the
figures of the "true" woman and the preserving patriarch.
Du Bois's preoccupation with patriarchal authority as the sign of

respectable class consolidation also surfaces in his Georgia
Ne gr o photographs for the i9oo American Negro Exhibit. A
series of group portraits of families posed in front of homes
announces a prosperous middle class founded along patriarchal
lines. In one, a rather distant view, taken as if from across the
street, a man and (presumably) his family are arranged carefully
in the garden approaching the house. The photograph is
constructed to emphasize the expanse of property; indeed, the
size of the house and the breadth of the garden veritably dwarf
the family. Individual faces are just barely discernible, and they
do not seem to be the point of this photograph. And yet the
pe ople are particularly placed in this image; the photograph
clearly has been orchestrated to emphasize their positions, if not
their individuality. A man, in suit and hat, poses at the bottom of
the steps that lead up to the garden. In order to "enter" this space,
one must move past him, up the wooden stairs, to a garden
walkway that in turn leads past immaculately groomed and
dressed children, to the steps of the house, where three women,
one sitting, two standing, introduce the viewer to the house
proper. The women are posed on the steps of the house; they are
associated with the interior space that beckons from the large,
shaded entry made by the frame of the porch. The man has one
foot rooted in the street; he is, symbolically, the liaison between
public and private realms. He is separated from his relatives by
the sharp rise of the wooden stairs and the brick wall that divides
his garden, house, and family from the street. This vertical rise
behind him visually partitions the image into two planes; the
framed and enclosed portion of the photograph, including the
family, the garden, and the house, provides a kind of backdrop
for the man in the foreground. The image appears to revolve
primarily around his identityas a middle-class man, a father and
husband; the "background" situates him and lends him his
individual and symbolic importance-the family and house
provide the scale by which the viewer is meant to measure his
worth as a middle-class man and a racial representative.57
41. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (i9oo),
no. 354 Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection,
A much closer view, a group portrait of six children, visually

recalls the former image. The white ruffled dresses of the girls,
the curly locks on one of the smallest, the boy's straw hat held in
his lap, and even the wood siding of the wall that peeks out from
behind a black backdrop resemble the former family portrait
closely enough to draw parallels. All these pretty children,
wearing all these lovely clothes, signal the wealth of parents that
can bring up so many so well. They are perfect, and yet not
perfectly still; this is a lively group, neither rigid nor nervous
before the camera. The smallest children do not look at the
photographer; one has moved, distracted by something in his or
her lap. The center child, perhaps placed too close to the
camera, is out of focus, lending her a soft, almost ethereal air, as
if she is but a sweet, ghostly projection of a future daughter for
the older girl who holds her. The boy on the left looks directly,
even curiously at the camera. He has leaned in, at the direction
of the photographer, perhaps, or out of his own interest in seeing
the camera's workings. His posture and look have spontaneity,
and it is interesting, given the portrait of his (presumed, or at
least parallel) father, that the boy is not positioned in the middle
of this image; instead, the viewer's attention is directed toward
the one child who has remained perfectly still in this encounter
with the camera. Of the six children, only the girl seated in the
middle remains eerily quiet amid the movement of her siblings.
The subsequent sharpness of her features and her steady stare
give her an uncanny presence; she rivets one's gaze. Almost
buried beneath the presence of all these babies, she represents,
perhaps, the future of this home life, its mother to be.58
42. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (i9oo),
no. 289. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection,
In another family portrait, taken by Thomas E. Askew, of a

lawyer's home in Atlanta, the camera has been placed much
closer to its subjects; it is perched in the very garden itself (plate
22).59 This image, included in Negro Life in Georgia, US. A., is
dominated by the house, which looms up large, spilling over the
edges of the photographic frame. The family, in turn, is
circumscribed by the steps that lead up to the porch, by a simple,
carved wooden railing that encloses the space, and by the
decorative corners of Victorian beams that recall the scalloped
edges of picture frames. The three women who stand, and the
single woman who sits, child in her lap, are rigidly posed in this
image. They adopt the far-off looks of nobility and striving,
ga z ing out in different directions. Their stiffness belies their
performance for the camera; it is only the small children seated
on the steps who appear actively engaged in the process. Two of
these children look back at the camera with some uncertainty,
but the girl in the middle strains and stretches her neck to look up
and over at something else, perhaps a neighbor made curious by
the camera and commotion. The single adult male represented in
this photograph is positioned just slightly behind the women and
children over whom he appears to preside. He stands with one
hand on hip and another propped against the back of the large
chair in which sit his wife (presumably) and child. His posture is
both relaxed and commanding, and he is distinguished from the
rest of the group by the relative ease of his pose (the others stand
stiffly with hands at sides). And yet his position is also carefully
crafted to reveal the wedding band on his left finger, to signal his
status as husband and father. The angle of his gaze, and the
foregrounding of his face against shadow, highlight and sharply
define his cheekbones, chin, and nose, creating an individual
portrait within the group photograph. Women and children sit
beneath him, some literally at his feet. It is almost as if they are
seated around a hearth, as if an intimate, interior family scene
has been turned momentarily inside out for the gaze of the
viewer. The intimacy of this imagined scene is juxtaposed to the
starkness of the surroundings, the bare dirt yard and unpainted
por c h railing, which suggest new ownership and, perhaps, a
quest for newly realized comfort and class standing.
The family portrait that displays wealth most conspicuously
presents a house rather removed from the viewer's gaze,
blocked to some degree by attention-grabbing horses and
carriage (plate 23). It is fenced in, but hints of a tended garden
peek through; plants weave and crawl their way up ornately
carved, decorative woodwork, painted white. The photograph
seems to project "the moral value of the well-painted house, and
the fence with every paling and nail in its place," which Booker
T. Washington upheld as the symbol of racial advance.60 The
three people seated in the carriage are David Tobias Howard,
an undertaker, and his mother and wife.61 The Howards all look
out at the camera, self-consciously acknowledging and
accepting this representation of their wealth and social standing,
and they are cleverly framed within the carriage, as Mrs.
Howard Sr. peeks out through the coach window. Howard
himself suppresses a smile that curves his cheeks and softens his
eyes, suggesting that the photograph is not meant to represent
earnest striving, but instead, the selfsatisfaction of those who
have already achieved economic success.
At first, the family appears strangely relegated to the edge of

the photographic frame. The shiny black horses that pull the
carriage dominate the center of the image, as does the African
Ame ric a n coachman, who sits high, looming over horses,
carriage, and employers all. Visually, he seems placed to preside
over this image. And yet his gaze, focused down, away from the
viewer and fixed on the horses under his charge, demonstrates
that he is not a part of this "portrait." Instead, he functions as a
prop, like the horses themselves, objectified prominently as one
of the markers of privilege his employers boast. Thus while the
portrait represents three individuals (seated in the carriage), the
photograph is also very much about the black coachman, who is,
nevertheless, rendered as object. The image reads as a kind of
response to Sol Eytinge Jun.'s caricature, "Tally Hoo Black-vile."
This photograph is about polish, control, and stillness, about the
relationship of master to servant to animal that structures class
hierarchy.
Du Bois's photographs represent both the exterior signs of

middleclass prosperity and the more intimate realms of domestic
interiors. Indeed, some of the images depict the site of social
entertaining, the contested space (as we have seen) of the
opulent parlor. One photograph, a portrait of a man and a young
woman seated at a piano, reconstructs an elegant sitting room
within the studio (or at least within the darkroom) (plate 24). The
young woman, with long wavy hair flowing down her back,
places ivory fingers on ivory keys; she is slightly hunched
forward, staring intently at the music before her eyes. A man
with a wonderful mustache sits just behind her, his eyes focused
on the music and the young woman who studies it. Placed on top
of the piano that looms in front of the girl are two photographs in
ornate frames, two vases, and a small statuette of a toga-clad
figure that resembles popular representations of Liberty, Justice,
or Virtue. The photographs that peer down at the young woman
from either side of the piano are hard to make out, but one
appears to be an image of an infant, and the other a photograph
of a young girl, with shoulderlength hair cascading down the
sides of her face. Perhaps these are photographs of the young
woman herself, images that mark various stages in her
"progression" or "development." The two images frame the girl
at the piano, and they frame the small statuette, which stands in
the middle, directly over the girl at the piano, as the symbol of an
ideal, an abstract notion of virtue or justice embodied in an ivory
white figure with long, flowing hair. The small statuette serves,
perhaps, as the mark toward which this young African American
woman is meant to strive, or as a symbol of ancient artistic (and
racial) perfection, a symbol of an honored past to which the
African American girl can lay claim and to which she can
aspire.
This photograph centrally displays the young woman's hair, as

both focus and disruptive sign. At the turn of the century, it was
most common for middle-class women to wear their hair pinned
up; indeed, containing the hair was a sign of modesty.62 Long
hair released from pins and buns and braids was seen only by
one's most intimate family members, at bedtime, or perhaps after
washing. Thus this presentation of hair may belie an intimacy
between the young woman and man (and offer a connection
between the couple and the viewer). On the other hand, it may
also signal the young woman's youth; perhaps she still enjoys a
little of the freedom of girlhood and can wear her hair loose,
even though her young counterparts, pictured in the Georgia
Negro portraits, wear their hair tied up. Or perhaps her long,
flowing hair and the whiteness of her fingers on the ivory keys
function as disruptive racial signs that communicate the very
point of the picture. These physical attributes, as much as the
young woman's place at the piano, may mark her elite class
status. Thus the image may confirm Nannie Burroughs's fears,
namely that color and class standing were conspicuously
interwoven for at least a portion of the turn-of-thecentury
African American elite.
More directly than the possible significations of the young

w oma n's hair, the piano, the undeniable center of this
photograph, signals upper-class standing. Indeed, the piano
seems to have held special weight as a symbolic object in Du
Bois's depiction of an African American elite at the turn of the
century. In the instructions given to researchers for filling out
schedules on the home in The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois notes
that for question number 26, concerning furniture, the living
room should be focused on, and one should especially "note the
presence of the following articles: piano, organ, parlor-suit,
sewing-machine, bookshelves, couch, centre-tables, rocking-
chair, etc."63 In the reports of the 19oo class in sociology at
Atlanta University, the class responsible for compiling much of
the data for the Georgia Negro Exhibit, "the best Negro homes
of Atlanta" are described, in part, as follows: "The parlors and
some of the other rooms have tiled hearths, and there is usually a
piano or organ in the home." 64 In this light, and given the
specific nature of the criticisms Booker T. Washington and W.
E. B. Du Bois launched at one another at the time, this
photograph of a piano is noteworthy. In 1896, the same year Du
Bois began his work for The Philadelphia Negro, Booker T.
Washington held up the piano, along with French grammar, as a
sign of misguided African American education and ambition.
Describing a visit to a rural cabin in the South, Washington tells
of a "young colored woman . . . who had recently returned from
a boardingschool, where she had been studying instrumental
music among other things." According to Washington, "Despite
the fact that her parents were living in a rented cabin, eating
poorly cooked food, surrounded with poverty, and having almost
none of the conveniences of life, she had persuaded them to rent
a piano for four or five dollars per month." 65 For Washington,
the piano symbolizes a wanton disregard for African American
"needs" and appropriate "remedies" to social and economic
inequity. Washington evokes the piano in the rented cabin as an
image of misdirected education and training, using it as the
starting point from which he begins to tell the story of his own
education at Hampton Institute and his subsequent work at
Tuskegee. In some ways, then, the piano becomes, for
Washington, the site from which he begins his critique of W. E.
B. Du Bois's scholastic program, and the point from which he
narrates his own educational agenda.66 He returns to the piano
as a negative counterpoint to introduce his discussion of
industrial education in a 1904 essay for the Colored American
Magazine:
One of the saddest sights I ever saw was the placing of a $3oo
rosewood piano in a country school in the South that was
located in the midst of the "Black Bclt." Am I arguing against
the teaching of instrumental music to the Negroes in that
community? Not at all; only I should have deferred those
music lessons about twenty-five years. There are numbers of
such pianos in thousands of New England homes, but behind
the piano in the New England home, there were one hundred
years of toil, sacrifice and economy.67
PLATE i. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes,
Georgia, U.S.A. (i9oo), vol. i, no. 2. Reproduced from the Daniel
PLATE 2. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmeriran Negroes,
Georgia, U.S.A. (i9oo), vol. i, no. ii. Reproduced from the Daniel
Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington,
D.C.
PLATE 4. Bazoline Estelle Usher, Atlanta University student. W.
E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia, U S.A.
(i9oo), vol. i, no. 5. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray
Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.
Types ofAmericanz Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (i9oo), vol. i, no.
59. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of
(above) PLATE 6. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American
Negroes, Georgia, US. A. (1900), vol. 2, no. 144, and (opposite)
Georgia, US. A. (igoo), vol. i, no. 63. Both reproduced from the
D.C.
Georgia, U. S.A. (i9oo), vol. i, no. 9i. Reproduced from the
C.
C.
(opposite) PLATE io. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B.
Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (i9oo),
vol. i, no. 66, and (above) PLATE II. Photograph by Thomas E.
Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia,
U.S.A. (i9oo), vol. i, no. 53. Both reproduced from the Daniel
(above) PLATE 12. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B.
vol. 3, no. 210, and (opposite) PLATE 13. Photograph by Thomas
E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes,
Georgia, U. S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 42. Both reproduced from
the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington,
D. C.
PLATE 14. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. The Summit
Avenue Ensemble. Seated: Clarence Askew, Arthur Askew,
Walter Askew. Standing: Norman Askew, Jake Sansome, Robert
Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (i9oo),
no. 356. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library
of Congress, Washington, D.C.
PLATE 15. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, US. A.

(i9oo), no. 274. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection,
(above) PLATE i6. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia,
U.S.A. (i9oo), no. 350, and (opposite) PLATE 17. Dr.
McDougald's drug store. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in
Georgia, U.S.A. (i9oo), no. 284. Both reproduced from the
D.C.
PLATE i8. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A.
PLATE i9. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes,

Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no. 247. Reproduced from the
D.C.
PLATE 20. Interior view of grocery store. W. E. B. Du Bois,
Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 3, no.
236. Reproduced from the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of
PLATE 22. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. The home of an

African American lawyer, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B. Du Bois,
Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. (igoo), no. 352. Reproduced from
the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington,
D.C.
PLATE 23. David Tobias Howard, an undertaker, his mother,
and wife, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in
Georgia, U.S.A. (i9oo), no. 283. Reproduced from the Daniel
Washington promotes an evolutionary model of slow progress,

whereby industrial education is a first step toward the economic
independence and power that will finally bring respect and
political rights to African Americans. It is a model whereby
African Americans must follow whites and in which the piano is
not only a waste of limited means, but also, perhaps, a
presumption.
Du Bois's "piano portrait" tells another story. This piano is not

juxtaposed to poor surroundings; indeed, it is set in an
extravagantly ornate, even cathedralesque room. And yet, on
closer examination, the room in which this piano resides is, in
fact, ephemeral. In looking closely, one finds that the tapestries
hanging on the wall appear to be painted, perhaps retouched.
And in looking again, one begins to discern a slight shadow
effect around the edge of the piano and the pictures that rest on
top of it, a shadow that is traced around the man sitting in his
simple chair as well. In fact, it appears that this piano scene has
been inserted into a painting. A mask has been cut around it,
enabling the photographer to place the piano and its practitioners
against a different background, within a different setting. The
actual location of the piano remains a mystery. Perhaps it stood
in a simple drawing room, or a teacher's practice room. One
cannot be absolutely certain that it was not housed in a small
cabin.
The retouching of the room in which this young woman and

man sit draws attention to the constructed nature of the narrative
Du Bois's Georgia Negro photographs set forth. Like the images
placed together in any albums, Du Bois's photographs tell a
particular story, and the tale Du Bois most wanted to tell at the
turn of the century was one of the progress of a "civilized," elite
class. Describing in The Negro American Family the elegant
houses first represented in his 19oo photograph albums, Du Bois
states:
Such homes as these are typical of the [educated,

professional] class with which we are dealing. These are, of
course, exceptional, when one considers the great mass of
Negroes of Atlanta; and yet, of over a thousand homes of all
types studied by Atlanta University students in i9oo, about
forty were placed in this select class. If among the Negroes of
the South two per cent of the homes of freedmen have
reached this type, it is a most extraordinary accomplishment
for a single generation 68
With his photographs for the i9oo Paris Exposition, Du Bois

worked to reinscribe a cultural screen dominated by white
supremacist images, encouraging viewers to participate in new
ways of looking and seeing.69 Du Bois's piano image would
seem to respond to Booker T. Washington, asking: Must an
African American elite always be depicted as the unnatural,
even irresponsible, child of the rural, dirt-floor cabin?
Finally, the piano portrait also points to the gender relations that
focus Du Bois's vision of an elite African American patriarchy.
One imagines that the young woman instructed in the refined arts
of music is being trained for an anticipated role as ornament in a
large and stately house. The woman whose "housewifery" (and
lovely piano playing) signals that her husband can fully support
her and sustain their home is confined to a limited sphere of
domestic action, as the display of her "leisure," as well as her
controlled sexuality, is required to anchor her home and family
within the classes of "undoubted respectability." 70 As the young
woman depicted in this image pursues her artistic training,
striving to meet the mark of an elite femininity, her progress is
measured and monitored by the African American man who
watches her from behind. It would appear that her talents are
perfected for his satisfaction. Crystallizing the gender dynamics
that inform Du Bois's Georgia Negro photographs, the image
suggests that an African American patriarchy establishes itself
by keeping African American women firmly fixed within its
sights.

In Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a
Race Concept (1940), W. E. B. Du Bois, at seventy, considers his
earlywork as a sociologist at Atlanta University and describes
the event that sundered his faith in "facts," eventually compelling
him to forego his academic work in i9io to help found the
NAACP. According to Du Bois:
At the very time when my studies were most successful, there

cut across this plan which I had as a scientist, a red ray which
could not be ignored. I remember when it first, as it were,
startled me to my feet: a poor Negro in central Georgia, Sam
Hose, had killed his landlord's wife. I wrote out a careful and
reasoned statement concerning the evident facts and started
down to the Atlanta Constitution office, carrying in my pocket
a letter of introduction to Joel Chandler Harris. I did not get
there. On the way news met me: Sam Hose had been lynched,
and they said that his knuckles were on exhibition at a grocery
stor e farther down on Mitchell Street, along which I was
walking.'
Du Bois proclaims: "One could not be a calm, cool, and detached

scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved.."'
"Sam Hose," whose real name was Samuel Wilkes, was

murdered near Atlanta, in Newnan, Georgia, on April 23, 1899,
lynched in a gruesome spectacle of the kind becoming prevalent
in the postReconstruction South.' More than 6,ooo white
Georgians participated as witnesses in the murder, 2,000 of them
traveling to the small town from Atlanta on special excursion
trains reserved for the event. According to Ida B. Wells, "Many
fair ladies drove out in their car riages on Sunday afternoon to
witness the torture and burning of a human being."4 The white
crowd that killed Wilkes was unmasked and included many of
the most prominent citizens of the region, such as E. D. Sharkey,
superintendent of Atlanta Bagging Mills, John Haas, president of
the Capitol Bank, W. A. Hemphill, president and business
manager of the Atlanta Constitution, and Clark Howell, editor of
the Atlanta Constitution. According to Louis P. LeVin, the white
detective Ida B. Wells sent to investigate the case, such eminent
citizens called for burning even before Wilkes was captured.'
The mob stripped Wilkes, tortured and mutilated him, burned him
alive, and then fought over his bones and organs for souvenirs.
Samuel Wilkes had been accused of killing his employer,

Alfred Cranford, in a dispute over wages; he met his murderers
without investigation or trial. Several white newspapers
embellished the story of "Hose's" alleged acts with tales of his
rape of Mrs. Cranford, and a placard left hanging on a tree near
the place of his execution proclaimed: "We Must Protect Our
Southern Women." An Atlanta newspaper upheld the "orderly
and conservative," "religious, homeloving and just" nature of the
white Georgian torturers by calling out the image of "Mrs.
Cranford outraged in the blood of her murdered husband." Later
investigations by Ida B. Wells and Louis LeVin, including
interviews with Mrs. Cranford herself, revealed that the
accusations of rape in the case were utterly unfounded and that
Hose had acted against Alfred Cranford in self-defense 6
In his recollection of this widely publicized lynching, Du Bois
ge ts the facts in the case slightly jumbled; it was Cranford
himself, not his wife, who was killed, purportedly in some kind of
altercation with Wilkes. Indeed, Du Bois's account of the
incident is much more a story about how the lynching affected
Du Bois himself than it is about the case of Samuel Wilkes. What
Du Bois remembers is the swiftness of white Southern violence,
and the futility of his own rational and reasoned efforts to stay
the fury of the mob through evidence, logic, and argument.
Further, it is the mutilated black body displayed on the street,
along the very path Du Bois is walking, that shakes him to his
core. For as it becomes utterly apparent to him that his words of
restraint remain ineffective against the fury of a white
supremacist mob, it may also become apparent to him that as an
African American man, no matter how distinguished and
superior his training, he is the embodied equivalent of Samuel
Wilkes in the eyes of white supremacist Georgians. No amount
of success or distinction will dispel the "fact" of his "blackness"
in the eyes of the white mob. As Louis LeVin would conclude in
his report on the Cranford murder and Wilkes lynching: "A
Negro's life is a very cheap thing in Georgia." 7 Walking along
Mitchell street, perhaps sporting his cane and gloves,' Du Bois
ma y have felt that the severed knuckles of Samuel Wilkes
metonymically figured the racialized social body to which Du
Bois himself also belonged.
The lynching of Samuel Wilkes functioned as a "rite of racial

passage"9 through which Du Bois experienced forcefully the
contradictions of an embodied black identity in a highly codified
white supremacist world.10 As Elizabeth Alexander has argued,
lynching and other scenes of "violence made spectacular"
vividly enforce a racialized power hierarchy, containing black
men and women, posing them as dreadfully embodied victims."
At the same time, however, such scenes of violence also provide
grounds for a collective identification that can become a
powerful "catalyst for action" for African American men and
women, undercutting victimization with agency.12 Such scenes
can generate, then, both double consciousness and second sight.
Du Bois would, in fact, continue his work in sociology at

Atlanta University for a decade after the day on which Samuel
Wilkes was lynched, but the importance of this crime in his later
recollections, the way he reconstructs it as a decisive moment, is
noteworthy. As Du Bois worked to redefine and reconstitute
racial identities at the turn of the century, lynching functioned to
reassert white supremacy through white mob violence.
According to Louis LeVin, the white perpetrators of the Samuel
Wilkes lynching cited threats to Southern racial hierarchy as the
"motives" for their crime: "Some said it was because the young
`niggers' did not know their places, others that they were getting
too much education, while others declared that it was all due to
the affluence of the Northern niggers." 11 A number of scholars
have begun to consider how whiteness has been consolidated
vis-a-vis the racialized crime of lynching. For example, Hazel
Carby has suggested that through lynching white men attempted
to reassert power and control over the black male body in the
postemancipation and post-Reconstruction period. Martha Hodes
has argued that through lynching white men attempted to reassert
control over the white female body, the imagined carrier of
white racial identity. Sandra Gunning has examined how white
mob violence, especially as represented in literary texts, created
racialized, cross-class alliances between white men. Grace
Elizabeth Hale has argued that spectacle lynchings
reconsolidated a whiteness paradoxically undermined by
segregation.14 Through the spectacle of lynching, economic,
s o c i a l , and legal relationships technically altered by
emancipation were reinscribed according to a race and gender
hierarchy that privileged a white patriarchy in the post-
Reconstruction era.
While Du Bois was certainly well aware of the ubiquitous

nature of white supremacy in the Jim Crow South, and mired in
the white supremacist logics of turn-of-the-century race science,
it may have been the lynching of Samuel Wilkes that decisively
focused his insight on the brutal nature of white supremacist self-
consolidation. It may have been this lynching that ultimately
turned Du Bois's thoughts to whiteness itself. For if Du Bois was
forced to see a (white) fantasy of blackness embodied through
the spectacle of lynching, he must also have seen a (white)
fantasy of whiteness embodied through that same spectacle. If
the severed knuckles of Samuel Wilkes figure the black body,
they also figure the brutal physicality of the white supremacist
body.
In "The Souls of White Folk" (1920), an essay written ten years

after his break with "calm, cool" science, and titled, perhaps, to
serve as a kind of inverse mirror to The Souls of Black Folk, Du
Bois explicitly assesses whiteness as a historical construction,
stating: "The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's
peoples is a very modern thing, -a nineteenth and twentieth
century matter, indeed." is And while crimes of war,
imperialism, and racial terror are committed in the name of
perpetuating the imagined goodness and rightness of the fantasy
of whiteness, that whiteness is also regarded from a different
point of view. Of the "modern white man," Du Bois says: "We
looked at him clearly, with world-old eyes, and saw simply a
human thing, weak and pitiable and cruel, even as we are and
were." 16
The second sight that Du Bois theorizes in The Souls of Black

Folk is rearticulated as the even more discerning visual power of
clairvoyance in "The Souls of White Folk." Of these white souls
Du Bois proclaims: "I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and
through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage.... I
see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the
working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know
that I know." 17 Seeing back through the Veil, Du Bois finds
whiteness hideously embodied. Denying the white body the
privilege of invisibility, Du Bois sees the white body uncloaked
and inside out-he sees the working of its entrails. In a period in
which hundreds of black bodies were literally pierced and
penetrated by white lynch mobs, Du Bois reminds those white
viewers who would close their eyes to these crimes that he sees
what they refuseand he sees them., in intimate, grotesque detail.
If, indeed, Du Bois's vision became focused on discerning the

whiteness of the white lynch mob on the day Samuel Wilkes was
murdered in Georgia in 1899, then the whiteness consolidated
a nd conveyed through that lynching, and through lynching in
general, constitutes an important political context against which
to read Du Bois's Georgia Negro photographs. Further, if Du
Bois was forced to consider his own embodied equivalence to
Samuel Wilkes (in the eyes of white supremacists) on the day
that Wilkes was lynched, how do his photograph albums,
produced just one year later, challenge the dehumanizing effects
of lynching? The elegant young men and women who look back
at viewers from Du Bois's albums testify to and reinscribe their
own embodied blackness, reclaiming an affirmative African
American identity in the face of brutally dehumanizing forces.
One might also imagine that those same men and women, looking
back out at viewers, also look back out at white supremacists,
bearing witness to the spectacle of whiteness conjured by
lynching, scrutinizing white viewers carefully "from the back
and side."
Produced within a year of the lynching of Samuel Wilkes, Du

Bois's albums present the dignified equivalent of Samuel Wilkes,
the images that white supremacists sought to efface with the
spectacles of their dehumanized victims. Du Bois's portraits
signify within and against the context of lynching, and
specifically, within and against the context of lynching
photographs, for like lynching itself, lynching photographs
proved central to the consolidation of a white supremacist vision
of whiteness at the turn of the century. According to James
Allen, "the photographic art played as significant a role in the
ritual [of lynching] as torture or souvenir grabbing."" Thus, like
the mug shots that perpetuated the discourses of "Negro
criminality" central to white supremacist "justifications" for
lynching, photographs of lynchings themselves haunt Du Bois's
Georgia Negro photographs. At the turn of the century, the
shadow image imbedded in the white middle-class portrait was
not only the criminal mug shot but also the lynching photograph.
Missives of Love and Terror

In her recent study of "the black male body as spectacle,"
Deborah McDowell has argued, "It is well known and widely
conceded that black death has made good spectacle for [white]
audiences who have relished it historically in every form from
fatal floggings to public lynchings." 19 In turnof-the- century
photographs of lynchings, black death clearly functions as a
spectacle for a white audience. But unlike the media images
McDowell studies, the photographs of lynchings do not simply
presume a later white audience-they actually represent one, for
a portion of the white audience enthralled by the spectacle of
black death it has created is represented within many of these
photographic frames. In this chapter, I focus on the spectacle of
this white audience, refusing to forget the black bodies at the
center of these images, refusing to forget the murdered African
American men and women, but also refusing to repeat and
reinforce the spectacle of black death.20 For as Saidiya
Hartman has argued concerning written texts, too often the
reproduction of tales of black agony "immure us to pain by virtue
of their familiarity" and work to "reinforce the spectacular
character of black suffering."" Further, I would argue that
Hartman's concerns become magnified when one addresses
visual texts, in which the representation and reproduction of the
violated black body can function as a kind of fetish, obscuring
from view the white torturers who also inhabit these images.
Lynching photographs present a spectacle of whiteness; they

represent a gruesome ritual of white identification that many
white scholars, like myself, would, perhaps, rather not see. But
if, as Richard Dyer has argued, whiteness has historically
secured its representational power through invisibility, by being
that which is not seen," then looking at whiteness, making white
bodies bear the burden of the gaze, can become an important
critical task. This chapter examines the spectacle of whiteness
posed in lynching photographs in order to see extreme
machinations of white consolidation, in order to see some of the
visual workings of whiteness.
In pursuing this analysis, I rely on the archive of lynching

photographs and postcards that James Allen has collected and
reproduced in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in
America, a book that corresponds to and complements an
important and controversial exhibit of the same name. Without
Sanctuary presents ninety-eight lynching photographs, many of
them postcards, ranging in date from 1870 to 1960, depicting
murdered men and women, white and black, in states across the
country. The vast majority of the images, however, were made
in the first decade of the twentieth century, in the South (many in
Georgia), and they overwhelmingly depict murdered young
black men. Allen has carefully compiled notes and historical
information concerning the alleged events surrounding the
lynchings, their aftermath, and the photographs that document
them, identifying the murdered individuals, and the dates on and
places at which the murders took place.23
Without Sanctuary provides an important and extensive record

of lynching in the United States, but it is also a disturbing book,
not only due to the devastating nature of its images but also due
to the beauty and richness of its reproduction and design. Lushly
printed on glossy paper, some of the images reproduced in soft
warm tones, photographs cropped to accentuate "artistic"
compositions, the work becomes a kind of macabre coffee-table
book. One wonders at the range of desires the book may play on,
and following Saidiya Hartman, one is compelled to ask: "What
does the exposure of the violated body yield?"24 And yet, to its
credit, Without Sanctuary does document the pervasiveness of
lynching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as
well as its spectacular nature, witnessed by hundreds and
thousands of white people (although in this task it certainly
follows the earlier efforts of Ida B. Wells and the NAACP), and
it demonstrates powerfully the central role played by
photography in the ritual of lynching and in the reproduction and
circulation of its shock waves. Indeed, the book's focus on
photography is its major contribution.
In the many articles and reviews that responded to the initial

exhibitions of "Without Sanctuary" at the Roth Horowitz gallery
(January 13-February 12, zooo) and then at the New York
Historical Society (March 14-July 9, 2000) in New York City,
writers and visitors remarked consistently on their surprise and
shock at discovering the numbers of white people that populate
these gruesome photographs. Indeed, white men and women are
present in the hundreds and thousands in these images. It would
appear that they have come to witness and to participate in these
spectacles of racial violence with family and friends: they are
dressed for an occasion; they meet the camera unabashedly,
even cheerfully. As Roberta Smith has noted: "What takes the
breath away is the sight of all the white people, maskless, milling
about, looking straight at the camera as if they had nothing to be
ashamed of, often smiling. Sometimes they line up in an orderly
fashion, as if they were at a class reunion or church picnic.
Sometimes they cluster around the victim, hoisting children on
their shoulders so that they can see too."25
43 Detail from photographic postcard. The lynching of Lige
Daniels. August 3, 1920, Center, Texas. Reproduced courtesy of
the Allen-Littlefield Collection, Special Collections Department,
Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta,
Georgia.
This chapter interrogates whiteness in relation to the spectacle

of lynching, and specifically, in relation to the mass reproduction
and mass circulation of that spectacle through photography. As I
noted earlier, Elizabeth Alexander has considered the ways in
which violence against the black body, and the reproduction and
circulation of that spectacle in photographs, literary texts, and
mass media, have functioned as terrifying sites of racial
identification for African American men and women, sites
which can finally become catalysts for antiracist action.26
However, given the numbers of white men and women who
perpetrated and participated in these acts of violence, and who
then had themselves photographed with the results of their deeds,
it is apparent that lynching, and its photographic representation,
have functioned not only as sites of African American
identification, as Alexander argues, but also as sites of white
supremacist identification. To look at whiteness in photographs
of lynching, one must begin by asking, following artist Pat Ward
Williams: How can such images exist?27
As the images collected by James Allen extensively document,

photographic postcards were prevalent in late-nineteenth- and
earlytwentieth-century lynching photography. As endlessly
reproducible documents, photographic postcards could spread
the news of lynching far and wide, claiming an ever larger
crowd of witnesses-terrorizing and symbolically empowering
ever greater numbers. But one might say this of all photographs
of lynchings after the advent of mechanical reproduction in
photography. Here it seems important that these are not just
photographs, but photographic postcards. For while as
photographs these images testify and provide evidence, as
photographic postcards, they were conceived initially as
commodities. Indeed, they bear the commercial signs of studio
emblems, functioning as advertisements for photographic
establishments and photographers. They are prepared with
forethought-perhaps, commissioned. Cumbersome cameras,
tripods, and flashes have been set up and arranged; scenes have
been composed. Reporting on a lynching scene for the June 1915
Crisis, a writer notes: "Picture card photographers installed a
portable printing plant at the bridge and reaped a harvest in
selling postcards showing a photograph of the lynched Negro.""
Postcard photographers not only capitalized on the scene of the
c r ime but also played a crucial role in producing and
reproducing the crime itself as a "scene." These photographers
designed images not simply to document or depict but to
memorialize; they created mementos and souvenirs for
participants to share with family and friends.
As items intended to be sent through the mail, postcards testify

to the complicity of legal and state structures with lynching. And,
of course, lynching itself could not occur without some form of
legal and state sanction, as men were pulled out of jails and
wrested from armed guards, as newspapers advertised
lynchings, schools closed so that children could attend, and trains
offered free or reduced fares to transport crowds to the scene of
the crime 29 The law, the courts, and public officials had to turn
a blind eye and participate in lynchings in order for them to
occur, and then the state further condoned such acts by
permitting photographic postcards of lynchings to be sent through
the mail (at least until 19o8).30
Despite the institutionalized nature of this white supremacism,

postcards also convey a terrible intimacy. In their first
incarnation, these images were viewed not only publicly but also
privately. In general, postcards function as memorial souvenirs
by which one claims "I was there." But they also serve as
mementos with which individuals mark sentimental bonds with
others -"I was there and I thought of you while I was there." The
postcard presumes a return, the return of another card, of a
shared sentiment; its circulation maps an imagined community of
senders and receivers who share feelings for one another and,
perhaps, for the scenes the postcard represents. Individuals
perform community by sending postcards, and they enlarge
community in the same act, for these images symbolically
expand a community's claim on time and space by connecting
static individuals to distant places. Postcards function as fantasy
sites of desire for distant viewers; the sender weaves family and
friends at home into a larger spatial territory by sending images
from afar.
How, then, did photographic postcards of lynching function for

a white community? What can it mean for white individuals to
reconfirm sentimental bonds, to imagine communal connections,
through images of white violence? The example provided by a
Katy Electric Studio photographic postcard included in James
Allen's collection, one that records the lynching of Jesse
Washington in Robinson, Texas, on May 16, 1916, proves
especially disturbing in this regard. A note scrawled on the back
of this particular postcard in large, looping hand reads: "This is
the barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with a
cross over it. Your sone Joe." 31 By sending the postcard, Joe
perhaps demonstrates to his mother how he participates in
upholding the mythology of pure white womanhood that fueled
so many lynchings; he "protects" white womanhood, he
"defends" his mother. As Ashraf Rushdy has argued: "One group
of white people, gathered around a burned black body, was
communicating to another group in another county: they had
done their part, asserted their place in the world."" Joe looks
directly out at the camera, perhaps anticipating the eyes of his
mother. This particular postcard, then, with sender looking out at
projected receiver, marks directly the ways in which postcards
construct community. Joe has put himself in the picture; standing
in as representative of his larger community, he connects them to
this scene. He is small in a visual frame dominated by the
grotesque figure of Jesse Washington's corpse, burnt almost
beyond recognizable human form. As his mother looks at Joe,
the corpse will hang between them. Thus, as the postcard is
offered as a link between them, so, too, is the black body. The
gap of space and time that separates white mother and son will
be sutured over the dead body of an African American man;
sentimental white familial bonds will be reinforced through black
death.
44 and 45. Details from photographic postcard, verso side. The
lynching of Jesse Washington. May 16, 1916, Robinson, Texas.
Reproduced courtesy of the Allen-Littlefield Collection, Special
Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory
University, Atlanta, Georgia.
46. and 47. Details from photographic postcard. The lynching of
Jesse Washington. May 16, 1916, Robinson, Texas. Reproduced
courtesy of the Allen-Littlefield Collection, Special Collections
Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University,
Atlanta, Georgia.
The image appears to be a "morning after" picture, in which the

crowd has repositioned its corpse for the photograph (the
wooden post from which the body is suspended does not show
the charring from the fire that destroyed the man). The crowd
has arranged itself behind and beneath its trophy. They have
buttoned the top buttons of their shirts rather formally, and one
man wears a tie. These white men and boys (and at least one
woman) face the viewer with steady, unflinching gazes, as if
daring challengers to defy them.
One of the most salient aspects of this and other lynching

photographs is that the white men, women, and even children
re pre se nte d in these images appear profoundly unafraid.
Presumably, they have been witness to the sights and sounds of
torture. Some have smelled burning flesh. Where are the stunned
and sickened faces of shock? Why are the children not confused
and overwhelmed? Why have so many people returned to the
scene of their crime, or remained there for the documentation?
Apparently those who were revolted (there must have been
some) have left the scene, or they have struggled to compose
themselves under the hard shells of smiles for the camera.
Control is the fantasy of whiteness constructed here. A look of
distress might reveal the cracks and pressure points in this image
that so many are trying to approximate.
The white men and women depicted in lynching photographs

have not had to consider the ways in which these photographs
provide evidence of their crimes, pointing to their complicity and
collaboration in murder. As Leon Litwack has argued, "The use
of the camera to memorialize lynchings testified to the openness
and to the selfrighteousness that animated the participants.""
White individuals meet the camera boldly and directly, making
explicit the ways in which the law privileges and protects them,
even as they flamboyantly disregard that law to kill a man, or
men, women, or youths. These spectators are confident in their
white privilege, confident that their exposed faces will be
sheltered by the rhetoric repeated over and over again in the
newspaper accounts of these tortures and murders-that the
victim perished "at the hands of persons unknown." 34 As Henry
McNeal Turner, an African American bishop, bitterly noted in
the late nineteenth century, a newspaper account might detail
"how the rope broke, how many balls entered the Negro's body
... how many composed the mob, the number that were masked,
whether they were prominent citizens or not ... and the whole
transaction; but still the fiendish work was done by a set of
ùnknown men.'" 15 Even as sons marked their presence in
images for their mothers to see, the profound privileges of
whiteness also enabled them to remain "unknown" for other
purposes of identification, recognizable but "unseen." This is the
paradoxical nature of white representational privilege, to be so
ever present and yet so invisible; and once again, in order to
begin to dismantle this privilege, one must continue to look at
whiteness.36
48. Detail from photographic postcard. The lynching of Lige
Daniels. August 3, 1920, Center, Texas. Reproduced courtesy of
the Allen-Littlefield Collection, Special Collections Department,
Georgia.
Figuring Whiteness
Lynching photographs capture a moment after the terrors of

torture; they are taken after the fury of the mob has quelled and
the victim of its wrath has expired. These images always
represent mastery, never resistance. They depict a (usually)
black (usually) male body violently separated from an African
American community, torn from ties of family and love and
respect. They also represent the decisive severing of interracial
communal ties: James Cameron, who survived a lynch mob in
193o, as a sixteen-year-old, "recognized familiar faces" in the
mob that came for him - "schoolmates, and customers whose
lawns he had mowed and whose shoes he had polished." 37
These photographs produce whiteness through an absolute
disavowal of blackness. The black corpse remains bound and
circumscribed by white supremacy in these images; displayed
front and center, the corpse functions as the negated other that
frames, supports, and defines a white supremacist community.
While lynching photographs record moments taken in the wake

of mob terror, providing evidence of the mob's wrath, many of
t h e s e photographs also appear strangely controlled and
composed.38 The sometimes careful arrangement of lynching
photographs marks not only macabre aesthetic considerations but
also strangely decorous sensibilities given that these images are
made to document the aftermath of torture and murder. In some
of the images, the corpse itself has been rather carefully
prepared for the camera, and presumably, for later viewers.
Rips and tears in the flesh of the victim, gaping holes, have been
covered or edited out of the image (strange white blobs partially
cover some of the bodies in the photographs in James Allen's
collection); severed fingers have been bandaged; naked hips and
le gs, first stripped by the mob, are covered with cloth (and
sometimes with Klan robes that literally wrap the black body in a
banner of white supremacy). It would seem as though the white
men and women depicted in these photographs ultimately have
hesitated to reveal the evidence of white savagery in its minutia.
As Leon Litwack has suggested, some white Southerners feared
the effects of lynching on a white social order and on white
character: "'The greater peril at this hour where outbreak and
lawlessness are at the surface,' a southern minister declared, ìs
not that the negro will lose his skin, but that the Anglo-Saxon will
lose his soul."'39 The incongruous details in some of these
photographs reveal the very contradictions on which the lynch
mob was founded. As Grace Elizabeth Hale and Gail Beder-
man have argued, lynch mobs purported to "tame" what they
deemed "black savagery" with "civilized" white male superiority.
They proclaimed the black lynch victim a depraved rapist, a
racialized emblem of manhood gone mad, the counterimage of a
disciplined, restrained (white) masculinity. Certainly, however,
the photographs of lynching, of white people taking pleasure in
torturing, mutilating, and burning, do not testify to the cerebral
control and restraint on which white supremacists prided
themselves 40 While white mobs attempted to uphold the rhetoric
of white civilization and black barbarism, photographs of
lynching provided opposing evidence of white savagery,
evidence that Ida B. Wells and the NAACP reappropriated in
order to document white atrocities 41
The production of whiteness through lynching is the focal point

of a pivotal scene in James Weldon Johnson's The
Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912), a novel roughly
contemporary to many of the photographs this chapter studies.
Johnson figures whiteness through the absolute negation of
blackness as a site of racial identification in the spectacle of
lynching, and it is a lynching that inspires Johnson's biracial
narrator to pass for white. In describing the crucial scene of this
lynching, Johnson's narrator asks: "Have you ever witnessed the
transformation of human beings into savage beasts? Nothing can
be more terrible."42 He recounts how an initially grim and
strangely orderly crowd of white men is electrified by the "rebel
yell" that excites them into burning a man alive. For Johnson's
narrator, the scene of this lynching is a "rite of racial passage"
43 through which he literally "passes" from one public racial
identification to another. Even as he sees the vicious cruelty of
the white mob, he is nevertheless overwhelmed by "a great wave
of humiliation and shame"44 at his identification with the black
victim, and his decision to pass is ultimately posed as a response
to "shame, unbearable shame"-"shame at being identified with a
people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals."
45 In this scene of a second racial identification, in which
whiteness and blackness are spectacularly constructed and
projected through a brutal performance of white supremacism,
Johnson's narrator sees white savagery, but he also sees the
white production of a dehumanized black object, and it is that
stark memory, of a man stupefied by terror, and then burned,
that he cannot reconcile with himself, that he cannot, quite
literally, incorporate. If an inverted mirror stage initially inducts
him into blackness, as we saw in chapter I, this later spectacle of
racial differentiation, this subsequent white configuration of
blackness, proves too much for him to comprehend, to recognize
in any relation to himself. In the utter dehumanizing of the
burned lynch victim, he is unable, literally, to see himself in a
disintegrating other. If an inverted mirror stage forces an
African American subject to recognize the psychic splitting of
identity formation, lynching forces an African American subject
to witness the material shattering of the black body. In other
words, the psychic white rejection of fantasized blackness that
consolidates an image of white wholeness writ large on the Veil
is manifested in a brutally embodied manner in the ritual of
lynching. Johnson's narrator's decision to identify as white is
founded in his disavowal of lynching's grotesque construction of
blackness, and for him this rejection is not only conscious but
doubly conscious.
What awaits Johnson's narrator in the white world is a white
woman -"white as a lily"-"the most dazzlingly white thing" he
had ever seen. 6 Once again, a white woman, she who first
divides and separates, she who defines and shatters social
identities in both James Weldon Johnson's and W. E. B. Du Bois's
stories of a dawning racial consciousness, functions powerfully
at the locus of racial distinction in this narrative of racial
identification. For the narrator of Johnson's Autobiography of an
Ex-colored Man, this gendered symbol of whiteness marks the
ultimate racial boundary to be passed, and it is her declaration of
love that finally weaves him firmly into the white world of a
white family. The figure of a white woman-that "dazzlingly
white thing" -serves as both initiator and subsequent arbiter of
racial identity in Johnson's text. The fetishized object of white
patriarchal discourse is the figure through which Johnson's
narrator definitively passes into whiteness.
"White womanhood" haunts lynching; it is this phantom that is

resurrected over and over again as a symbol of white racial
purity defining the limits of the white lynch mob. As noted in
chapter 3, the figure of a threatened or raped white woman,
evoked as the innocent victim of a "terrible crime," was conjured
in attempts to justify lynch ing as the "understandable" retribution
of white fathers, brothers, and lovers 47 Ida B. Wells herself
claimed to have believed this ideology at one time, before her
extensive research revealed the cry of rape to be largely myth48
What Wells discovered was that white families frequently
covered up consensual relationships between white women and
black men with the rhetoric of rape. Further, in many lynchings,
rape need not even be alluded to in order to quell public outrage,
for many people simply assumed that lynchings responded to the
crime most often evoked to justify them.49 White women thus
figured as powerful symbols of white male dominance in the
postReconstruction period. The white woman was heralded as
exclusive white patriarchal property, and also as the fount of a
white racial bloodline. Indeed, in The Autobiography of an Ex-
colored Man, Johnson's narrator runs from the scene of a
lynching into a white world that stringently polices interracial
intimacies by perpetuating the terror of lynching. Thus even as
he might seem, in part, to succumb to the logic of lynching by
rejecting blackness, Johnson's narrator also undermines white
supremacy by marrying a white woman and thereby claiming for
his own the figure upheld by lynching rhetoric as the
fundamental (white) racial barrier.
The postmortem photograph of Rubin Stacy, murdered in Fort

Lauderdale, Florida, on July 19, 1935, recalls this ideological
context; it represents a striking number of white women and
young white girls gazing on Rubin Stacy's dead body. According
to the New York Times, as recorded in James Allen's footnotes,
Stacy, a homeless tenant farmer, had approached the home of
Marion Jones to ask for food. On seeing Stacy, Jones screamed.
Stacy was then arrested, and as he was being transported to a
Miami jail by six deputies, a mob of over one hundred masked
men seized and murdered him. Finally, Stacy's corpse was hung
in sight of Marion Jones's home.5
It is plausible that the young white girls who regard Stacy's

hanging corpse in the photograph are the children of Marion
Jones. As they look at Stacy's lifeless body, the girls are
instructed in the nature of the white patriarchal power that
"protects" them, a power that will define their womanhood and
confine it to the reproduction of white supremacy. If this is a
lesson in white patriarchal protection, it is also a lesson of fatal
consequences, of the wrath of white fathers and brothers, uncles
and cousins roused by the sight of an African American man
near a white woman's house. As Martha Hodes has argued,
"Lynching not only terrorized black men and women, but it also
subordinated white women." 51
49 Detail from photograph, verso side. The charred torso
of an African American male. 1902, Georgia. Reproduced
courtesy of the Allen-Littlefield Collection, Special
Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library,
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.
The image of white womanhood that pervaded so many

lynchings worked to discipline and constrain the actions of white
women; it necessarily exceeded the grasp of those pictured as
spectators in lynching photographs. Thus when white women
asserted white supremacy through lynching, they harnessed
themselves to an image of white female purity, the keystone in a
racialized gender hierarchy that ultimately reinforced a white
patriarchy. This is not to suggest, of course, that white women
were the "victims" of lynching, but simply to highlight the ways in
which the rhetoric of white womanhood controlled and
contained white women's actions in the service of a white
patriarchy. The gendered white supremacist rhetoric of lynching
situated white women literally and symbolically at the nexus of
white reproduction. This "elevated" position celebrated them,
even as it disciplined them, a fact that can be measured by other
photographs in James Allen's collection. Ella Watson, an "errant"
white woman, is represented by her portrait, taken in "happier
days." A note scrawled under the photograph suggests that
Watson was lynched, but the announcement of this murder is
made on an image she herself partici pated in crafting, an image
that proclaims her identity, not an image representing her dead
body.52 African American women, denigrated by the same
rhetoric that revered white women, and often the victims of
rapes emphatically "overlooked" by white men, were afforded
no such delicate treatment. Indeed, the image of Laura Nelson,
murdered in Okemah, Oklahoma, on May 25, 1911, with her
fourteenyear-old son, for the "crime" of trying to protect him,
proves this point all too well. As Nelson hangs from a bridge, a
large party of white men, women, and children, including
mothers who prop tiny children up on railings, small girls in white
dresses, and women who shade themselves with parasols, regard
her body from above. Perched over the remains of Nelson and
her son, these white women face the camera of G. H. Farnum,
who will commemorate their "visit" with a picture postcard.
Farnum will also offer another postcard for sale - a close-up of
Laura Nelson's dead body.53 The white women on the bridge
will find the cornerstone of their own social elevation in the
image that records the negation of Laura Nelson's womanhood
and motherhood.
In the postmortem photograph of Rubin Stacy, Stacy's corpse is

carefully positioned in the frame, posed like those of other
murdered African American men between the viewers in the
photograph and those who will later bear witness to them. The
corpse is privileged for the camera's view. The curious girls,
with equivocal expressions, peer around the tree from which the
man hangs. Foregrounded front and center, Stacy's body appears
huge- three, even four times, that of the girls'. The size of his
body in the photographic frame heightens, perhaps, the sense of
the imagined physical "threat" he was thought to pose, while at
the same time his neck, broken in the fall of death, and his wrists,
bound by handcuffs, suggest that his physical power has been
mastered. The girls, dressed in white (their garments highlighting
yet again the symbolic whiteness of the white womanhood they
are cautioned to grow into, to uphold at all costs), display their
unease with squinted eyes and a hand raised absentmindedly to
the chin. The eldest peers around the tree to gaze at the face of
the dead man. A very young girl holds her arms tightly to her
body by the elbows. An even younger child, still pudgy-faced
and fisted, stares back eerily from the shadows at the camera.
Only one girl's face approaches a smile, an odd, in-between
expression, perhaps registering an emotion not fully under
control. Her hands, strangely crossed at the wrists, evoke the
bound hands of the manacled corpse she stands behind. One
hand awkwardly rumples her skirt in an evocative gesture. It is
inappropriate, perhaps, to sexualize this young girl gazing at the
corpse of an African American man who, even though mangled
in death, appears strong, and young, and beautiful, and it is
inappropriate to objectify this man further. And yet, what
discourses other than those of forbidden sexuality haunt the
frames of photographs of lynchings? The man asking Marion
Jones for food became her "assailant" through the power of a
discourse obsessively rehearsed, a discourse that transformed
economic, social, political, and psychological anxieties and
desires into the white patriarchal "sacred duty" of controlling the
sexuality of white women and African American men. In order
to participate in and benefit from this discourse, white women
were encouraged to see selectively when looking at photographs
of lynchings, to see the privilege of protection and their own
duties in a white patriarchy, and above all else, to refuse to see
their potentially transgressive desires.54
5o and 51. Details from photograph. The lynching of Rubin
Stacy. July ig, 1935, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Reproduced
courtesy of the AllenLittlefield Collection, Special Collections
Atlanta, Georgia.
52. Detail from photograph. The lynching of Rubin Stacy. July i9,
1935, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Reproduced courtesy of the
Allen-Littlefield Collection, Special Collections Department,
Georgia.
Inverted Sentiment
Photographs of lynchings circulated widely, suggesting that

lynching itself was and is a reproducible act, and spreading the
effects of its terror. The many different contexts in which a
photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in
Marion, Indiana, on August 7,193o, has appeared and
reappeared makes evident the extensive distribution of these
images. This photograph portrays the chaos of a white mob at
night, capturing an almost carnivalesque atmosphere, and thus
stands in contrast to the strange orderliness of stern crowds
posed in the light of day. Taken at night, the photograph is also,
presumably, taken close to the moment of death. Some in the
crowd appear excited, as if they are enjoying a rush of sadistic
emotions; others observe the scene with apparent calm. Many
are well dressed, as if for a dance, with hair slicked back and
lips painted. Two men crane their necks up to look at the corpses
hanging; one holds his pipe in contemplation. Most of the people
appear interested in locating friends and acquaintances. A
smiling young man grabs his girl's free hand; in her other hand
she holds a scrap of burnt clothing, a souvenir from one of the
victims. Another girl, holding a similar shard, taunts someone
beyond the photographic frame; she yells, perhaps, to the
photographer to take her picture. A man in the crowd also seems
to engage the photographer. His wide, round eyes and pointing
arm, frozen in the moment of the flash, direct the gaze of later
viewers toward the corpses hanging in the trees.
This photograph is included twice in Without Sanctuary.

According to James Allen's notes, Lawrence Beitler, a studio
photographer, made the image, and "for ten days and nights he
printed thousands of copies, which sold for fifty cents apiece.""
The purchase and circulation of these prints is testified to by the
display of the photograph as it was held, presumably, in
someone's private collection. Here it is framed as a memento-
matted and inscribed-and presented with a lock of curly hair.
The inscription-"Bo Pointn to his Niga"-suggests that the man
pointing claims some relationship to one of the victims. "His"?-
employee? "His"?-kill? The man's gesture functions as a threat, a
lesson, an address to the viewer. Pointing at the corpses, he
seems to proclaim: "You see what will happen if...." 56
53. and 54. Details from photograph. The lynching of Thomas
Shipp and Abram Smith. August 7, 1930, Marion, Indiana.
Reproduced courtesy of the Allen-Littlefield Collection, Special
Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory
University, Atlanta, Georgia.
Having heard about the "mementos" fought over by lynch mobs,

I still was not prepared to see the hair framed with this image. In
a brutally literal way, the hair signifies metonymically, as part
representing the whole of the victim's body. And yet, this hair
also makes one consider further the nature of the photograph it is
framed with. Is the photograph categorically distinct from this
other memento? Aren't all photographs also indexically related to
the scenes they represent - printed from negatives literally
touched by the moments they depict?57 Here photography's
relationship, however constructed, to historical occurrences, is
important. These photographs and photographic postcards are
relics of lynchings, and as such they force a disconcerting
connection, a disturbing proximity, between contemporary
viewers and the mob scenes they depict.
In a cruel and sick inversion, this photograph, framed with hair,

recalls other photographs framed with hair-those most treasured
baby pictures and lovers' portraits, enclosed in lockets with curly
snippets and silky strands. Geoffrey Batchen has suggested that
such keepsakes double "that indexicality thought to be
photography's special attribute." At the same time, however, such
relics demonstrate that "the photograph alone is not enough to
alleviate the fear of mortality" parents may have concerning
their children.58 The lynching memento sinisterly works toward
opposite ends; this hair, clipped from a battered head, reiterates
the mortality of the victim whose death the photograph
documents. Confronting this antithetical keepsake, I wonder
about the relation between the hair stolen from a corpse and the
hair this same "collector" might have clipped from his or her
child or lover. To what extent are these two practices related?
To what degree is the white supremacist's "family album"
supported by this terrible, inverted relic? Once again, I wonder
about the bonds between white mothers and sons (and other
white family members) reinforced through the spectacles of
dead black bodies, reinforced through the murder of African
American men.
This same photograph has also been reclaimed in other

contexts, for other purposes. This is the photograph that Jacquie
Jones muses on in her recent essay "How Come Nobody Told
Me about the Lynching?" It is the image that confronted Jones as
a young woman, first as it was thrust on her without warning in a
history class, and then, metaphorically, in myriad manifestations
of racial violence. Remembering her first responses to the sight
of this image, Jones asks, "Was the image, the recurrence of the
image, the proliferation of the image, an inside warning or an
outside threat?"59 Scrutinizing the clothing of the white men and
women photographed, it occurs to Jones that "these people aren't
dead yet. The man with the blur could have issued my driver's
license. That little boy could be my history teacher." 60 Lynching
and lynching photographs cannot be sealed away in the past. The
white supremacism on which such spectacles are founded still
functions; the communities they forged may still exist. These
fragmented moments from the past remain connected to
contemporary viewers, and the recent murder of James Byrd in
Texas reminds us that these crimes continue in the present.
Jones's reflections highlight the institutionalized nature of white
supremacism, the business-as-usual nature of white terrorism:
The lyncher could be the state-authorized employee of the
department of motor vehicles; the child-lyncher could grow into
a history teacher, preserving a white-authorized national record
of might and right, inflicting the image of violence on black
students to threaten and control them, or inflicting it incidentally,
without any particular plan. Jones's thoughts parallel those of
James Cameron, for this is the lynching that Cameron survived,
this is the lynching in which he recognized neighbors,
acquaintances, and employers bound and determined to kill
him.61
The photograph's metaphoric relationship to death, famously

evoked by Roland Barthes's melancholy description of lost
mome nts, of images representing people forever gone and
predicting the inevitable passing of others-his description of
photographs as memorials of the living dead-takes on terribly
literal meaning when one confronts the photographs of lynchings
62 These photographs also make brutally direct the theoretical
premise that whiteness is predicated on the violent repression of
a (black) other, an assumption now so often repeated as to make
it seem almost meaningless. And yet here one sees, in
photograph after photograph, the framing of white subjectivity
against a black corpse-whiteness founded in the spectacle of the
dead black other.
Richard Dyer has argued, quite powerfully, that whiteness

reproduces its power in normative terms by being diffuse, by
being invisible, by being everywhere and nowhere, and by
making blackness bear the burden of visibility and
embodiedness.63 In general, I have agreed with Dyer that the
black body has borne the weight of visibility and corporeality,
has become the object of an invisible, disembodied white gaze.
And yet, this argument cannot represent the entire cultural
picture, for in the photographs of lynchings, the white bodies that
are the vehicles of a devastating physical power are represented
over and over again with the victims of their wrath. As white
subjectivity is foregrounded against a black corpse, these
photographs make very clear that the power of whiteness is not
only invisible and dispersed but also particular and embodied in
U. S. culture.
As records of the lawless brutality of white supremacists,

photographs of lynchings register a different kind of power than
the mug shots discussed in the previous chapter. If the mug shot
signaled a form of institutionalized power implicitly white in a
culture of white privilege, the photograph of a lynched black
body indicated the thoroughly embodied nature of white power.
By juxtaposing the photographic mug shot to the photographs of
lynchings that circulated in the same years, one finds two
different manifestations of white power functioning
simultaneously. Lynching represents an embodiment of power
similar to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century spectacles of
ritualized torture Michel Foucault describes in Discipline and
Punish 64 Such scenes of torture demonstrated the unquestioned
authority of a monarch over his subjects, the physical power of
the state as personified by, and made visible in, one ruler. The
mug shot corresponds to a later formation of power that emerged
in the nineteenth century, the state of surveillance, in which
institutiona liz e d power is increasingly invisible, diffuse,
disembodied, and located in the minds of subjects who discipline
themselves according to a normative image. But in the
coterminous juxtaposition of photographs of lynching and
criminal mug shots at the turn of the century, one sees that while
the instrument of power, the body that aligns itself with and
enforces the bounds of normalcy and deviance, is absent from,
and therefore invisible within, the photographic mug shot, those
bodies that are the vehicles of a brutal physical power are made
visible as they are represented over and over again with the
victims of their wrath in the photographs of lynchings. In the
images that display burned and mutilated black bodies set off by
crowds of white spectators, one sees white supremacists
attempting to harness a diffuse and dispersed power to the
bounds of white bodies.65
SS Detail from photograph. The burning corpse of William
Brown. September 28, 1919, Omaha, Nebraska. Reproduced
courtesy of the AllenLittlefield Collection, Special Collections
Atlanta, Georgia.
As Martha Hodes and others have documented, the crime of

lynching grew in the postemancipation and post-Reconstruction
periods, a time when racial categories were largely in flux,
when whiteness and blackness were being defined and
differentiated in the courts, through one-drop blood laws, the
most famous being the 1896 Supreme Court case of Plessy v.
Ferguson.66 In this cultural context, in which the legal parsing of
racial identity could make race visually indiscernible, lynching
photographs work as defining images that make whiteness visible
to itself. Lynching photographs consolidate a fluid signifier; a
pale crowd enacts and fiercely embodies whiteness. These
images function as sites through which whiteness can literally be
envisioned through the representation of racialized violence.
The images function as sites through which whiteness can be
constituted and claimed, in which whiteness can be seen, both by
those represented in the photographs and by those who will later
view these images 67 Lynching photographs thus present not
simply spectacles of whiteness but whiteness itself as spectacle.
Reflecting on Whiteness, "From the Back and Side"
The spectacle of lynching enabled members of the mob to seize

whiteness, and the subsequent representation of that spectacle in
lync hing photographs further encouraged them to invest in
whiteness as their own embodied possession. But as lynchers
learned to identify with a vision of whiteness crystallized in the
faces of the photographed lynch mob, others could also study the
spectacle of that whiteness, "from the back and side." Lynching
photographs thus provided multivalenced "evidence" of
spectacle whiteness.
The dramatic increase in lynching in the late nineteenth century

brought white Americans uniquely under the scrutiny of both an
African American and a European gaze. By the early 189os, Ida
B. Wells had successfully taken her antilynching campaign to
Europe, and in the wake of her tour, she would proclaim: "The
entire American people now feel, both North and South, that
they are objects in the gaze of the civilized world and that for
every lynching humanity asks that America render its account to
civilization and itself."68 According to Wells, the whiteness
represented in lynching photographs connotes not only the men
and women actually present in the photographs, the participants
in lynching, but also those white Americans who hesitate to
condemn lynching, thereby permitting its reign of terror. As
Samuel Wilkes's dismembered body signaled for Du Bois a racist
construction of blackness under which he, too, would be
conflated, the lynch mob represented for Wells (and Du Bois) a
construction of whiteness into which other white Americans also
collapsed. Manywhite Americans could be said to share the
burden of the crimes of the lynch mob-for maintaining silence,
for remaining mystified by the rhetoric surrounding lynching, for
refusing to recognize the faces of "parties unknown."
Antilynching activists evoked this emphatic blindness to conjoin
many white Americans under the sign of the lynch mob's
whiteness.
Returning to the i9oo Paris Exposition, I would like to

reconsider the position of white American visitors to the
American Negro Exhibit. Specifically, I would like to imagine
these visitors, themselves objects under the critical scrutiny of an
African American and a European gaze, as they might have
encountered the white-looking African American men and
women in Du Bois's photograph albums. From the vantage
provided by this chapter, how can one think about the challenges
such images might pose to white American viewers in this period
of spectacular white consolidation? How do Du Bois's
photographs of white-looking "Negro types" engage the lynch
mob's spectacle of whiteness?
In chapter 2 I suggested that the white-looking individuals in Du

Bois's 1900 photograph albums contest a visual racial taxonomy
b y undermining the distinctions between imagined signs of
physical difference. In doing so, the photographs of white-
looking individuals in Du Bois's albums of "Negro types" also
trouble the authorized, surveillant position of a white spectator;
they bridge a presumed gulf of distance, suggesting that the
divide between self and other often held to secure the privilege
of scrutiny may be utterly indiscernible. Indeed, white
Americans (and white Europeans) perusing Du Bois's visual
archive at the 1900 Paris Exposition might have been surprised
by a kind of identification as they turned to face the images of
whitelooking African Americans in a "Negro" archive. If we
suppose a recognition, if only momentary, between viewer and
viewed in this case, an identification bridged by visual signs of
similarity, then the images of white-looking African Americans
might serve not only to humanize African Americans in the eyes
of white viewers69 but also to suggest that (viewing) self and
(viewed) other were very much the same.70
In order for the legally defined white viewer to identify with

the image of a white-looking African American, to see a unified
ima ge of self in this photograph of the purported other, the
viewer would have to confront a long history of white racial
violence. At the turn of the century, a superficial identification
between Euro-American and African American subjects (on the
basis of common hair color or skin tone) would have been
enabled primarily by the history of white violence and rape
perpetuated during and after slavery. As Ida B. Wells would
emphasize in her demystification of the rhetoric of white
Southern chivalry: "True chivalry respects all womanhood, and
no one who reads the record, as it is written in the faces of the
million mulattoes in the South, will for a minute conceive that the
southern white man had a very chivalrous regard for the honor
due to the women of his own race or respect for the womanhood
which circumstances placed in his power." 71 In this sense, then,
Du Bois's photographs of biracial individuals might signal both
white violence on African American bodies and an undeniable
white desire for the black body, one that whiteness nevertheless
disavows.71
The racialized power relations of desire and violence intrinsic

to slavery find a direct corollary in the lynchings this chapter has
studied. The shadow lurking behind a possible moment of visual
identification between individuals divided by the color line is the
image of white subjectivity foregrounded against a black corpse
in the photographs of lynchings. In a moment of identification,
however brief, with African Americans, an authorized white
viewer would have to confront the legacy of the racial divide
engendered by the "new white crime" of lynching.
Lynching photographs make absolutely apparent the fact that,

as Eric Lott and Kobena Mercer have suggested, whiteness is a
split identity formulated on the violent repression of the other.73
Such images represent white subjects' vehement rejection of an
inverted mirror stage for themselves by brutally transposing the
fragmentation of subjectivity onto black bodies. But if whiteness
and blackness are so utterly distinguished in turn-of-the-century
lynching photographs, how can one understand the possibility
that white American viewers may have recognized themselves
in the white-looking "other" of Du Bois's Georgia Negro
photographs? Euro-American viewers who assume themselves
to be white might experience a psychological rift in such an
identification, perhaps becoming conscious of the fundamental
split that establishes identity, as well as the subsequent racial
violence that affirms a fantasy of white wholeness. In order to
sustain a unified image of the visual signs that constitute
superficial whiteness, the white viewer could not help but see
self in other. But in this identification also lies the unraveling of
whiteness as a boundary between self and other, for the images
of these white-looking individuals are located in an archive of
"Negroes." 74 Indeed, Du Bois's albums make whiteness visible
as the repressed point in an archive of blackness. Conversely, if
the blackness produced "through the eyes of [white] others" is
itself a projection of whiteness, revealing more about those who
produce the category than about those purportedly represented
under its sign,75 then the self-identified white viewer must see in
the violence and dismembering of the lynched African
American body the very structures of white identity. For some at
least, this recognition would produce a psychological rift, a split
subjectivity imploding with the violent impact of sameness.
The shock of interracial recognition might shatter the white

viewer's self-conception of idealized wholeness sustained
through the continued, emphatic rejection of (white constructions
of) blackness as other. The white viewer might be forced to
admit the black subject into a dialectic of identification usually
profoundly denied through the machinations of the Veil and the
ritual of lynching. If the white subject maintains a sutured self-
image of wholeness by obscuring the split that founds identity
through a disavowal of blackness, then the recognition of the
black other as selfsame might disrupt the series of blind spots that
maintain an image of white ideality. In other words, the very
foundations of white identity might be ruptured, or rather,
recognized in their fragmentation. This then might constitute the
site of an inverted mirror stage for the white viewer. In perusing
Du Bois's albums, the white viewer symbolically meets a black
gaze, what Homi Bhabha calls a "counter-gaze" that "turns the
discriminatory look ... back on itself." 76 Through the black gaze
figured in Du Bois's albums, through the eyes that look out from
the Georgia Negro portraits, the white viewer might be
compelled to consider him or herself "through the eyes of
others." And in seeing self "from the back and side" through the
second sight of a black gaze, the white subject might perceive
what the projections of the Veil obscure, namely, a vision of the
fundamental split and suture that founds identity.
The violence that sustains the image of white wholeness

threatens always to tear it apart, so that white subjectivity
remains on the verge of fragmentation, on the verge of
recognizing the rupture its figurative and literal dismemberment
of (black) others works to conceal. This instability can, of
course, function powerfully to perpetuate and to reinforce the
image of (a volatile, vulnerable) whiteness in need of ever more
aggressive consolidation. An imagined white wholeness can be
recuperated, out of its own fragments, by legal, economic,
social, political, and cultural privilege. A dominant white culture
does not force the white viewer into an identification with
otherness; indeed, that culture works powerfully against such
recognition. And yet, an image of "whiteness" that is also an
image of "blackness" could effect a flash of cognizance in
which white viewers might glimpse the fantasmatic nature of
white wholeness, might recognize the split that founds identity,
might perceive the Veil as a construct that maintains an image of
white ideality only by making blackness bear a horrible burden
of visible fragmentation, might see, in short, the visual workings
of whiteness. W. E. B. Du Bois's photographs of African
Americans for the i9oo Paris Exposition work toward these ends,
denaturalizing the projected perfection and privilege of
whiteness and suggesting that the division (between "black" and
"white") by which the myth of white wholeness is maintained,
through lynching and other spectacles of white supremacist
violence, is itself the most entrenched of color lines.

Du Bois became editor of the Crisis eleven years after the
lynching of Samuel Wilkes sundered his faith in the force of
"calm, cool" reason,' and ten years after he completed work on
the Georgia Negro Exhibit. As editor of the NAACP's official
magazine, Du Bois conceived his work as that of antiracist
propaganda, and he continued to utilize photographs prominently
in his pursuit of social justice. Reinforcing his particular vision of
an elite African American patriarchy, Du Bois solicited portraits
of accomplished African Americans to serve as didactic models
of racial uplift, and he reproduced portraits of babies and
children to mark the future potential and investment of the race
in familial terms. Photographic portraits adorn the "Men of the
Month" section, as well as the smaller portion of the magazine
devoted to women's clubs. Du Bois also continued to reproduce
photographs of lynchings to depict the barbarity of extreme
white racism and lawlessness, turning the photographic evidence
of white supremacists back on itself in order to undermine white
claims to civilized, cerebral control.' In the tension between such
honorific and horrific photographs one perceives that "the crisis"
of twentiethcentury race relations was, for Du Bois, at least in
part a crisis of visual representation, a crisis of invisibility and
misperception, a crisis manifest in the visual record of violently
disparate photographs.
Despite his sustained and varied use of photographs throughout

the early twentieth century, Du Bois's struggle to articulate and
e nvision adequate forms of race representation has been
remembered and defined largely in terms of the questions he
asked of literature and posed to writers. In his discussion of Du
Bois's attempt to define a "Black Aesthetic," Darwin T. Turner
has focused his insights on Du Bois's efforts "as editor of The
Crisis to promote literary activity and to fos ter racial pride
through literature."3 In her important study of African American
women artists, Lisa Gail Collins has similarly argued that
regardless of Du Bois's evocation of "the language of visual arts"
in questioning the politics of racial representation, he
nevertheless "turned solely to the world of letters for answers." 4
In another examination of African American art, Henry Louis
Gates Jr. has declared that in spite of the overwhelming
circulation of demeaning images of African Americans in the
early twentieth century, African American intellectuals chose
not to fight back with "the tactics of visual representation," but to
"assert their self-image" through words.' And yet, while Du Bois
may never have named photography explicitly as a preeminent
form of art-as-propaganda, that is, in fact, the way he utilized
photographs and mobilized photographic evidence. As this book
has demonstrated, Du Bois employed photographs in ways that
directly and powerfully bear on the questions he wrestled with
concerning art and propaganda, the power and limitations of
representation, the politics of the "representative," and the links
between racialized gazes and racial identities. In short, this book
has shown that one of the most prominent African American
intellectuals did indeed utilize the tools of visual representation
both to problematize racist propaganda and to envision a New
Negro at the turn of the century.6 But this is not to say that visual
tactics solved the problem of a black aesthetic for Du Bois. The
very ambiguities Darwin Turner has identified in Du Bois's
struggle to delineate liberatory literary representations also
inform his use of photographs, namely, the tension between his
commitment to the "truth," to a broad range of realistic
representations of African American life, and his simultaneous
call for "beauty," which he consistently measured by the
educated elite figures of his Talented Tenth and their class-
determined mores of gender propriety and sexual restraint.
Critical studies of Du Bois's life and work have been framed

prominently by such questions concerning the politics of racial
representation, and the (in)capacity of one or of an elite few to
be representative. As the archivist of the photograph collection
this book has assessed most directly, Du Bois has been present as
editor, compiler, and selective judge of the images, his aims
made manifest in choices of inclusion, exclusion, and emphasis,
but Du Bois himself has otherwise remained physically absent
from the archive; he has not offered himself up for visual
scrutiny or placed himself in visual relation to others. As
archivist, Du Bois has constructed an archive he would appear to
stand outside of; he has exercised the power of a disembodied
gaze, turning his scrutiny, and ours as viewers, on the faces of
hundreds of nameless others, while he himself makes his
presence felt only abstractly. At precisely this historical moment,
however, an African American public was just beginning to call
on Du Bois himself to be "representative"; he was just beginning,
and indeed fighting, to bear the burden of an exemplary status,
both a rare privilege and an impossible restraint. Before ending
my thoughts here, I would like to situate Du Bois himself within a
larger visual archive, to see how his own image circulated within
turn-of-the-century debates about race and representation, to
see how he figured not only as representer but also as
represented. Briefly, then, I would like to examine Du Bois's
image as reproduced in the Voice of the Negro, an Atlanta-
ba se d monthly magazine published from 1904-6, and thus
roughly contemporary to many of the visual enterprises this book
has studied.
Throughout its rather short-lived run, the Voice of the Negro

used photographs and sketches extensively to illustrate its covers
and articles, which addressed a wide range of national and
international topics, paying particular attention to the race
problem and to the work of African American "doers" and
"thinkers." In the illustrated monthly, the voice of the Negro was
intricately tied to the image of the Negro. At the end of its first
year of publication, the Voice employed John Henry Adams, a
professor of art and drawing at Morris Brown College, to design
its covers, section heads, and various other images included
throughout the magazine. Adams's cover for the first issue of
volume 2, published in January 19o5, presents a photographic
portrait of Du Bois in the guise of a floating head emerging from
an orientalized vase or lantern that resembles a genie's bottle,
posing Du Bois as a kind of mythological visionary, the epitome
of truth and beauty combined. The portrait, framed at the bottom
by whirls of smoke emanating from the vessel, occupies a space
of light surrounded by a starry night sky. The upper half of the
portrait is flanked by two female figures draped in flowing
robes, leaning in from their respective pillars of Humanity and
Society, to lift together an orb over Du Bois's head. Du Bois is
thus presented as oracle and emblem, as guiding light for the
race; the voice of the Negro thus emanates from a visual
beacon, materialized and typified in Du Bois's face.
Another work Adams produced for the Voice of the Negro

similarly presented Du Bois as model race man, as an example
of the best and brightest of a new generation. In a series of
illustrated articles entitled "Rough Sketches," Adams presents
thoughts and images under the following titles (in order): "A
Study of the Features of the New Negro Woman," "The New
Negro Man," and "William Edward Burghardt DuBois, Ph. D." 7
Following generic comments on the beauty of educated African
American women identified only by first name, and on the
purpose and merit of a diverse group of professional African
American men, Du Bois is singled out as the epitome of the New
Negro; his achievements, and his very person, are presented as a
representative model. Indeed, Du Bois's life is declared "the kind
that best serves as stimulus to the New Negro." 8 If Adams's
initial sketches pose the New Negro as a type-the first in general
terms, the second by a multiplicity of specific examples-the third
essay presents one individual, Du Bois himself, as ideal type
made manifest, as composite portrait uniquely embodied, as New
Negro exemplar.
56. Cover art by John Henry Adams, Voice of the
Negro, January 19o5. Reproduced courtesy of General
Research Division, Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor,
Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Adams's short narration of Du Bois's life begins with a

condemnation of slavery as the "dead" "past," as a history that
should be left behind, that will not serve as origin point for the
New Negro (176). As it celebrates Du Bois, the essay thus subtly
rejects the elder Booker T. Washington, himself born into
slavery, as adequate model for a new generation. For Adams,
the New Negro's life story begins with a birth family unmarred
by slavery and with the racialized character traits the child is
imagined to inherit from his parents' ancestors. In Adams's
narrative, Du Bois's story then continues through school to
marriage and professional life. Declared "the strongest evidence
of the capabilities and possibilities of his people," Du Bois is then
described by physical appearance-his body and the imagined
marks of his superior character are inscribed in a visual archive:
"In appearance Du Bois is clean and neat. In height he is a little
below the average, and weighs about one hundred and forty-five
pounds. His body is symmetrical and well developed. A look into
his face betrays the deep import of his cultivated mind. The face
is oval, tapering towerd [sic] the chin, and the richness of its
brown color, together with the evenness of his features makes
him rather handsome and attractive" (178). A slight depression
of height would seem to be the only flaw in this otherwise
perfect emblem of "good breeding" and "race culture" (179), this
physically, mentally, culturally- eugenically- perfect patriarch.
In this presentation, Du Bois, it would seem, is the embodied
evidence that tells the lie of the eugenicist's racial hierarchy.
The images that illustrate this short narration of Du Bois's life

include sketches Adams made after two now well-known
photographs, the first of Du Bois as an infant held by his mother,
Mary Silvina Burghardt Du Bois, and the second a portrait of the
child Du Bois regally dressed as a young aristocrat. In this visual
progression, the next two images are photographic
reproductions, one showing Du Bois in his graduating high school
class, the other showing him in a group of featured speakers at
his Harvard commencement. Another drawing made after a
photograph presents a portrait of Du Bois as a young man, and it
is followed by three sketches "from life," one showing Du Bois
reclining in a chair, relaxed and contemplative, one a large head
portrait in profile, and the last an image of Du Bois walking,
"bracing a stiff breeze."
The biographical moments represented in the images

correspond to those highlighted in the brief narration of Du Bois's
life, and also to the formative moments emphasized in Adams's
general sketch of the New Negro man. According to Adams, "to
find the new Negro man," one must begin in infancy, "long
before he knows of the `Veil' of which Mr. Du Bois speaks so
touchingly in his `Souls of Black Folk"': "Here, drawn near the
bosom of his good black mother ... is the bouncing, laughing, little
creature whose future days are as dark as his skin.... Look into
his face and then into the mother's face. Observe that interlacing
of love and prospect and adventure as it weavens [sic] about the
two, the life long singleness of heartbeats and sorrows and
sufferings."9 In the photographic portrait of the baby Du Bois
and Mary Silvina Burghardt Du Bois, and in Adams's sketch after
this image, the intimate relationship between mother and son is
opened out to the viewer. It is a representation of Du Bois before
his own recognition of the Veil, but long after his mother's
extended negotiation of that racist screen. For her, perhaps, the
image constitutes a kind of intervention in the circuit of gazes
that creates and maintains the Veil. The mother's steady gaze out
toward the viewer draws one into the intimate sphere of mother
and child; it asks the viewer to share the regard of mother for
son, or asks one simply to look at them, to see woman and child,
and not the fabrications of the Veil. It is a photograph made,
perhaps, to preserve some part of the infant's first idealized self-
image. Here, instead of looking into the mirror to confirm the
infant's illusory self-image of wholeness, mother and son look out
into the camera, anticipating the photograph that will hold them
in this relationship of loving mutual (mis)recognition and that
will, perhaps, remind the child of that moment long after the Veil
has racialized his sight, compelling him to see the split and suture
tha t founds identity. In this portrait of mother and child, the
photograph, and later the sketch, replaces and stands in for the
mirror, capturing and recording its glimpse of psychic projection
and idealized mis recognition, mapping a tiny hold in the cultural
screen that would erase and efface a vision of black ideality and
wholeness.10
57. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois at
Seventeen Months Old, and His Mother, Voice
of the Negro, March 19o5. Reproduced
courtesy of General Research Division,
Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor,
Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Read through the images in Adams's rough sketch, the visual

narrative of Du Bois's life begins with his mother as pillar and
foundation, as literal, physical ballast, as well as emotional and
psychological support. As the child grows, he appears to become
self-sustaining, his straight, regal back defying the soft
plumpness of his still small body. As a young man, his intellect is
highlighted as the force that carries him through high school and
secures him a seat among the speakers at his second college
graduation. In the final series of sketches, Du Bois, a man of
purpose and action, is always represented alone. While the
written narrative tells readers of his wife, a "domestician" of
"excel lent form and pleasing carriage," and of his "beautiful"
baby,I" these two are not visually depicted as essential features
of the adult man. The visual narrative poses the mother as the
first and only support, holding him just until he can hold himself,
and then the man becomes an independent force of intellect and
will, his wife and child lovely asides that simply reconfirm his
role as model patriarch.
58. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois at Six Years ofAge,

and below, 59. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois at
Seventeen, both from Voice of the Negro, March i9o5.
Reproduced courtesy of General Research Division, Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public
Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
6o. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Du Bois Spending a Quiet
Half Hour, Voice of the Negro, March 1905. Reproduced
courtesy of General Research Division, Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
With its verbal and visual narratives, Adams's sketch employs

Du Bois's image to perform the kind of work Du Bois's Georgia
Negro photographs effect on a larger scale. Du Bois's physical
features, superior intellect, and character are described to defy
the circumscription of racist eugenic typing. The New Negro
man emblematizes eugenic perfection; according to the very
terms of the eugenicist's archive, the New Negro man bests a
racialized hierarchy with his superior mind and bearing, as well
as his handsome physique. Du Bois is an elite intellectual, figured
in princely attire as a child and then in scholarly robes and
formal suits as a young man and an adult. He is a patriarch,
providing for wife and child so that they can in turn dedicate
themselves to the "proper" tasks of gendered domesticity. But
most of all, Du Bois is devoted fully to the grave race work that
confronts him. The final image of Du Bois walking, "bracing a
stiff breeze," recalls to mind another image of Du Bois in transit-
that of him walking down Main Street in Atlanta on the day
Samuel Wilkes was murdered, turning back in the instant he
realized the futility of his case for justice and rational thought in
the face of the white mob, turning back at the moment he
recognized, perhaps, how his own cultivated and disciplined
body signified in relation to the mutilated parts of Samuel
Wilkes's body in the eyes of that mob. In Adams's sketch, Du
Bois walks with determination, fortifying himself against the
elements; he will not be turned back from his work. Du Bois
embodies the resolve Adams calls for at the end of "The New
Negro Man," itself an echo of the final words of Du Bois's Souls
of Black Folk: "Gird up your loins, young man, and hurry." 12 Du
Bois has already begun to lead the way.
Situating Du Bois's own image within a larger cultural context

enables one to see the extent to which Du Bois's photographs for
the American Negro Exhibit participated in a broader project of
African American archive building, a more extensive endeavor
to envision a New Negro at the turn of the century. As early
documents in the production of that imagery, Du Bois's i9oo
photographs helped to shape that vision, one that would in turn
circumscribe the circulation of Du Bois's own image as exemplar
at the time. As Du Bois construed an archive of "typical Negro
faces,"" he also created a visual record according to which his
own image, as well as his capacity to serve as "representative,"
would be measured. Designing his archive to make an incursion
into the representation of blackness, Du Bois himself, posed as
emblematic New Negro man, would also be called on to perform
that impossible task, to embody a contested racial abstraction. A
visual genealogy of Du Bois's image demonstrates in a
fundamental way that the archivist always inhabits the archive,
as both a determining and a determined force. Even as the
conventions of collection would seem to relegate him or her to
invisibility, the archivist is always present as both producer and
product of the archive, as the shaper also contained by the
ideology he or she inscribes for future memory.
In deeming the imagery of the New Negro a visual archive,

a n d even in designating Du Bois's Georgia Negro albums
themselves a counterarchive throughout this book, I may seem to
be expanding the defining limits of the archive beyond their
signifying capacities. Scholars have generally considered the
archive according to its insti tutional, authorized, state-
sanctioned forms, and while I would argue that it is important to
distinguish between the very different claims such diverse
cultural sites can make on political, legal, and cultural meaning,
to call Du Bois's albums simply a collection of photographs, or
the imagery of the New Negro simply a cultural discourse,
would be to miss some of the important signifying structures and
ambitions of these particular bodies of visual work. By
designating seemingly amorphous cultural images an archive, as
in the case of the New Negro, I aim to highlight the historical
specificity of a particular kind of imagery, and to underline the
unity of its purpose. The images of the New Negro authored by
an African American elite intervened in a long-standing legacy
of popular misrepresentations that informed a dominant white
culture's expectations about African American ambition and
upward mobility. Together, they created a kind of
counterarchive, a group of images that by definition occupied a
contested cultural space on the margins of official archives.
6i. Sketch by John Henry Adams, Head Picture of the Du Bois of
Today at His Desk, and below, 62. Sketch by John Henry
Adams, Du Bois Bracing a Stiff Breeze, both from Voice of the
Negro, March 19o5. Reproduced courtesy of General Research
Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the
New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
In the case of Du Bois's i9oo Georgia Negro photographs,

whic h were sanctioned for display by national and regional
boards as part of the traveling American Negro Exhibit, and
which were eventually housed in the Library of Congress, the
collection of images is more readily deemed an archive. And yet
clearly, despite its ambitions, this remains a small-scale archive.
Nevertheless, it is important to consider the photographs
compiled in Du Bois's albums an archive in order to recognize
counterarchives, in order to open up a space for contestatory
signifying practices, in order to realize antiracist visual
documents as evidence from which a different cultural history
can be imagined. As Jacques Derrida has argued, "There is no
political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.
Effective democratization can always be measured by this
essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive,
its constitution, and its interpretation." 14 In a cultural moment in
which legal segregation and illegal rituals of racial terror
violently thwarted full democratization, in which official
archives worked to create and maintain a vision of African
American inferiority, depravity, and criminality, one must turn to
other sites for visions of antiracist resistance. One must look to
emergent counterarchives for work toward full democratization.
Given the contestatory nature of Du Bois's i9oo Georgia Negro

photographs as counterarchive, one cannot understand the
images without reading them in relation to those other visual
archives whose assumptions and representations the photographs
challenge. And I would argue that all photographic archives
require such comparative analysis, precisely because all
archives are political. Du Bois's 1900 photograph albums and the
cultural work they perform as counterarchive make apparent a
more general characteristic of the photographic archive, and of
our ability to decipher its meanings and ideological
underpinnings. For if the full import of a counterarchive can only
be understood in relation to the visual archives it contests,
certainly the reverse is also true-the "official" archive can only
be denaturalized by reading it in relation to the imaging options
that challenge its authority, to the cultural sites that contest its
delineations of evidence, truth, and history's
Du Bois's 19oo Georgia Negro photographs create visual

dissonance, signifying in critical relation to the authorized
scientific archives, popular commercial caricatures, and
gruesome lynching spectacles that attempted to envision African
American inferiority at the turn of the century. Du Bois's archive
intervenes in a legacy of violent misrepresentations to make a
new claim on the future, and in this forward promise lies both its
expansive, as well as its limiting, or delimiting, contribution. As
Derrida has argued, everyarchive is future- oriented,16 and
"every archive ... is at once institutive and conservative.
Revolutionary and traditional." 17 What Derrida has called the
archive's promise to the future is not simply a pledge to
remember the past in a time to come but a shaping of the future
itself, a molding of coming events for the archive. Thus it is
important to recognize not only the radical work against
effacement and erasure that Du Bois's photographs performed,
the hope of a new future emblematized by the image of the New
Negro, but also the strictures of any new model as it becomes
measure and circumscribing device.
This is the complicated cultural work that Du Bois's i9oo

Georgia Negro photographs perform. As an archive, they are
both "traditional" and "revolutionary," producing a restrictive
model of patriarchy in their fight against the annihilation of
African American manhood. But while the disciplinary nature of
the Georgia Negro photographs' class and gender limitations is
apparent, especially today, nevertheless, as a counterarchive,
the images performed radical contestatory work in the moment
of their inception, work that opened up and claimed a
fundamentally new signifying space. This counterarchive's
promise to the future is that of an antiracist visual culture. Both in
the moment of its conception and looking forward from today,
Du Bois's counterarchive offers new tools, new evidence, for
envisioning national history; it inscribes a distinct perception into
cultural memory. Its promise to the future is thus also that of a
transformed national record, of a transfigured national vision.
This critical signifying function is what this book has endeavored
to make apparent, and it is this kind of contestatory meaning that
a comparative analysis of visual archives can illuminate. The
work of uncovering and learning to read an otherwise obscure
counterarchive brings into view an alternative visual genealogy,
an alternative basis for a critical cultural vision. Du Bois's
particular counterarchive demands that one attend to the
interanimation of race and visual culture, to the ways in which
race has been circumscribed by images and racial identification
has been figured and challenged through racialized gazes.
Looking back over the previous century through the lens of Du
Bois's 1900 Georgia Negro photographs, one can literally begin
to see the conundrum of race and representation-"the problem of
the color-line"anew.

Introduction
1 W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the

Part which Africa Has Played in World History (1946), end.
ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 2.
2 There is surprisingly little documentation regarding Du Bois's

trip to the 19oo Paris Exposition and the work he prepared for
the American Negro Exhibit. David Levering Lewis notes:
"The letters written to Nina during his two months abroad have
not survived, making it difficult to track his movements." David
Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, vol. i, Biography of a Race,
1868-1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 247. An
announcement in the Bulletin of Atlanta University, October
1900, notes: "Prof. DuBois, Miss Ellis and Mrs. Hendon went
abroad. All attended the Paris Exposition.... Prof. DuBois was
absent the longest time, and at present writing has not returned
to his work here, although expected soon."
3 While other photographs produced for the some exhibit, such

as Frances Benjamin Johnston's Hampton images, have been
discussed rather extensively, Du Bois's collection of
photographs has remained largely unknown and unexamined.
For analyses of Johnston's Hampton photographs, see Judith
Fryer Davidov, Women's Camera Work: Self/Body/ Other
inAmerican Visual Culture (Durham, N. C.: Duke University
Press, 1998); James Guimond, American Photography and the
American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1991); Jeannene M. Przyblyski, "American Visions at the
Paris Exposition, 19oo: Another Look at Frances Benjamin
Johnston's Hampton Photographs," Artjour na157, 3 (1998): 6o-
68; Wilfred D. Samuels, "Their Own Progress and Prospect:
African Americans and l'Exposition Universelle de 1900,"
Heath Anthology of American Literature Newsletter (spring
1999): http://
college.hmco.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/instructors/newsletter/
spring99/Samuels.html; Shawn Michelle Smith, American
Archives: Gender Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton Univer sity Press, 1999), 157-86; Laura Wexler,
Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S.
Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2000), 15-51
q. The Georgia Negro Exhibit, composed primarily of

sociological studies of African Americans in Georgia, was Du
Bois's second contribution to the American Negro Exhibit at the
i9oo Paris Exposition. His first was a study of Atlanta
University itself, consisting of thirty-one charts "illustrating the
advance along educational lines made by the colored people of
Georgia." "Atlanta University Exhibit at Paris," Atlanta Journal,
February 22, i9oo. Horace Bumstead Records, 1876-i9i9, box
23, folder 6, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University
Center, Atlanta, Georgia.
5 William Andrew Rogers, a graduate of Atlanta University in

1899, from Marietta, Georgia, worked with Du Bois on the
American Negro Exhibit for the 19oo Paris Exposition.
Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Atlanta University,
1899-1900 through 1906-1907 (Atlanta: Atlanta University
Press), 37. Thomas J. Calloway notes that the sociological
exhibit from Atlanta University that he commissioned would be
prepared by "a class of colored students under a colored
graduate of Harvard College [Du Bois]." "Negro Education
and Progress Made," American (Nashville, Tenn.), December
12, 1899. Bumstead Records, 1876-1919, box 23, folder 6. The
Georgia Negro Exhibit was completed and sent to Paris on
April 21, 1900, as was widely publicized: Announcements
were carried by such prominent newspapers as the New York
Sun, Tribune, and Evening Post, as well as by over thirty
newspapers representing states across the country, including
Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut,
Indiana, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Colorado, Mississippi,
Tennessee, Kansas, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, and Georgia.
These announcements typically followed an Atlanta University
press release, which described "the second Negro exhibit for
the Paris exposition from Atlanta University" as follows: "This
is an exhaustive social study of the Georgia Negro-Georgia, as
having the largest Negro population of any state, being taken as
a fair representative for the Negro-and is illustrated by maps,
colored charts and other devices." The press release pays
special attention to the studies that demonstrate an increase in
the African American population of Georgia, an increase in
African American land ownership and taxable property, and a
dramatic decrease in illiteracy since emancipation. It also notes
statistics pertaining to migration and racial mixing. The press
release concludes that "the facts shown are on the whole
decidedly encouraging, not only in regard to the material
progress of the Negro but his intellectual progress as well."
Sixteen of the thirty-odd newspaper articles noting the
completion of the Georgia Negro studies make specific
mention of the photograph albums I am concerned with here,
describing them as follows: "Three other volumes give pictures
of 200 typical negro faces. The other two volumes show
pictures of street scenes in negro life." The Atlanta University
Press release, as well as a large selection of newspaper
clippings announcing Du Bois's second exhibit for the 1900
Paris Exposition, can be found in Bumstead Records, 1876-
1919, box 23, folder 6. See especially "Negro Exhibit for
Paris," Sun (New York), April 22, 1900.
6 The wall space devoted to the Georgia Negro Exhibit was
merely six by three feet. "Negro Exhibit for Paris," Sun (New
York), April 22, 1900.
7 The thirty-one charts and graphs document the African

American population of Georgia, African American
occupations, migration patterns, degrees of racial
amalgamation, and literacy and education statistics. They also
outline the age and conjugal condition of African Americans as
compared with whites in Georgia, and document the land and
property ownership, income and expenditure of African
American families. See LOT 11931, Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Divi- sion."Statistics of 150 negro
families in Atlanta and some 2,000 families in country districts
in south Georgia" were used in compiling the thirtyone charts.
"Negro Exhibit for Paris," Sun (New York), April 22, 1900.
The charts were drawn and colored by William Andrew
Rogers, a recent Atlanta University graduate. "Atlanta
University Exhibit at Paris," Atlanta Journal, February 22, 1900.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study
(1899; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
8 There were five demographic maps included in the exhibit, as

well as an unusual electric clock presented in a carved frame,
showing the acres of land owned byAfrican Americans in
Georgia at different moments since 1870. Report of the
Commissioner-General for the United States to the
International Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900 (Washington, D.
C.: Government Printing Office, 1901) 2:381, 408-9, 463-67.
"Negro Exhibit for Paris," Sun (New York), April 22, 1900.
9 See Thomas J. Calloway to Dr. Albert Shaw, October 9, 19oo,

W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Correspondence, 1877-1910, series 1,
reel 1, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In his essay "The
American Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exposition," Calloway also
notes that Du Bois's sociological charts "attracted wide
attention" at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Calloway suggests that
the American Negro Exhibit as a whole "received a great
amount of attention abroad," for it was "something entirely new
to most people." In total, the American Negro Exhibit received
seventeen medals from the International Jury of Awards,
including a "Grand Prix." According to Calloway, European
economists, in particular, found the American Negro Exhibit
intriguing and valuable. Calloway, "The American Negro
Exhibit at the Paris Exposition," Against the Odds: African
American Artists and the Harmon Foundation, 1991, Newark
Museum Archives, set i, box i, file i, Newark, New Jersey,
75,79- Many thanks to Amy Mooney for giving me a copy of
this essay.
According to Jeannene Przyblyski, the largely French jury

for the 1900 Paris Exposition awarded the American Negro
Exhibit as a whole a Grand Prize in recognition of its interest
to "'la grande famille humaine [the great human family],'" and
its support for equality among all men " `sans distinction de
couleur et d'origine [without distinction of color or origin].'"
Jeannene M. Przyblyski, "Visions of Race and Nation at the
Paris Exposition, i9oo: A French Context for the American
Negro Exhibit," in National Stereotypes in Perspective:
Americans in France, Frenchmen in America, ed. William L.
Chew III (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001), 21617. Przyblyski cites
Emile Worms, Rapports du jury international: Classe 1fo:
Initiative publique ouprivee en vue du bien-etre des citoyens
(Paris, 1901), 99-100.
io The albums measure approximately seventeen and three-

quarters by fourteen inches. Each album is composed of fifty
stiff, cardlike pages, and each page has one or two
photographs pasted onto it. Volumes i and 2 present one
hundred images each; volume 3 contains ninety images, and
volume 4 holds seventy-three images.
While albums posed some hurdles at expositions, requiring

physical handling and a more prolonged viewing than images
displayed on walls, photograph albums were not uncommon at
nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century fairs. See Julie K.
Brown, Making Culture Visible: The Public Display of
Photography at Fairs, Expositions, and Exhibitions in the
United States, 1847-1900 (Amsterdam: Harwood, 2001).
ii Two hundred and twenty-two of the 363 photographs are

portraits, and they are printed in the uniform size of cabinet
card images, measuring approximately four by five and a half
inches. The portraits fill volumes i and 2, as well as the first
portion of volume 3-
12 Some of these latter photographs are printed large, measuring

nine and a quarter by seven and a quarter inches, and are
presented individually on a page.
13 The albums are currently housed in the Library of Congress,

Prints and Photographs Division.
14 Seated are Clarence Askew, Arthur Askew, and Walter

Askew. Standing are Norman Askew, Jake Sansome (a
neighbor), and Robert Askew. Askew Sr. apprenticed as a
printer for the white photographer Columbus W. Motes in a
studio on Whitehall Street beginning in 1866, and in 1896 he
opened his own studio inside his home at 114 Summit Avenue
in Atlanta. Unfortunately, little else is known about Askew
because his home and studio, including all of his photographic
equipment and plates, were burned in Atlanta's Great Fire of
1917, three years after Askew's death. The best sources of
information about Thomas E. Askew are Herman "Skip"
Mason Jr., Hidden Treasures: African American
Photographers in Atlanta, -1870--1970 (Atlanta: African
American Family History Association, i99i), and Deborah
Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers
-1840 to the Present (New York: Norton, 2000). See also
Askew's advertisement in the Voice of the Negro of
December 1904,637-
Photographs by Askew can be found in the Auburn Avenue

Re se a r c h Center, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, Atlanta,
Georgia; the Atlanta History Center Archives, Atlanta,
Georgia; and the Atlanta University Center, Robert W.
Woodruff Library, Atlanta, Georgia.
15 This image can be identified by cross-referencing with a

photograph in Mason, Hidden Treasures.
16 This image can be identified in the Matthews Collection of the

A ubur n Avenue Research Center, Atlanta-Fulton Public
Library, Atlanta, Georgia. Henry Hugh Proctor gave the
service at the funeral of W. E. B. Du Bois's son, Burghardt.
17 Ernestine Bell was the daughter of an Atlanta mail clerk.

These photographs can be identified in the Long-Rucker-
Aiken Family Photographs Collection (1859-1970s), series 2,
box 2, and series 3, box 2, folder 1, respectively, Atlanta
History Center Archives, Atlanta, Georgia.
18 These images represent the homes of a minister in Decatur

and a lawyer in Atlanta. They can be identified in W. E. B. Du
Bois, ed., The Negro American Family (Atlanta: Atlanta
University Press, 19o8). The latter image, a family portrait
taken on the front steps of the house, will be discussed further
in chapter 3. It closely resembles other photographs in the
albums, and thus it is likely that Thomas E. Askew made many
of the family portraits included in the Georgia Negro
collection.
i g The Mount Olive Baptist Church and the First Congregational

Church.
20 These photographs can be identified bycross-referencing

with images in Herman "Skip" Mason Jr., ed., Going against
the Wind: A Pictorial History of African-Americans in Atlanta
(Atlanta: APEX Museum, 1992), 44-46. The photograph of
David Tobias Howard will be discussed further in chapter 3.
21 This image can be identified in the Long-Rucker-Aiken

Family Photographs Collection, series i, box i. According to the
collection's description, Henry Allen Rucker (1889 [sic;
1859?]-1924), was born a slave in Athens, Georgia.
"Following the Civil War, Rucker opened a barber shop on
Decatur Street in Atlanta; attended Atlanta University; was a
delegate to the Republican National Convention, Chicago IL
(188o); was a clerk in the internal revenue collector's office in
Atlanta (1880-5, 1889-93); and was appointed Collector of
Internal Revenue for the District of Georgia (1896-1910), the
only African American to receive this appointment. Rucker
was active in the Niagara Movement and the NAACP. Rucker
and Annie Eunice Long had eight children: Henry, Jr.,
Elizabeth (Bessie), Lucy Lorene, Jefferson, Neddie, Hazel,
Alice, and Ann L. The family lived on Piedmont Avenue."
One of the photographs of a young girl in the Du Bois albums
is very likely a portrait of Neddie Rucker, taken by Thomas
Askew.
22 This image can be identified in the Atlanta University

Photographs Collection, box 13. Bazoline Estelle Usher is
listed as a student in the Catalogue of the Officers and
Students ofAtlanta University, 1899-19oo through 1906-1907.
23 W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Talented Tenth" (1903), in W. E. B.

Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of
America, 1986), 855-
24 W. E. B. Du Bois, "The American Negro at Paris," in Writings

by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others, comp.
and ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Thomson
Organization, 1982), 1:88. The essay was first published in
American Monthly Review of Reviews, November 1900,575-
77
25 Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39

(1986): 56.
26 Ibid., 7.
27 In later chapters, I will be adapting Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s

the ory of "signifyin(g)," an African American tradition of
verbal subversion, to an analysis of Du Bois's Georgia Negro
photographs. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifyin(g) Monkey:
A Theory ofAfrican-American Literary Criticism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988).
28 bell hooks, "In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life," in

Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photogr-aphy, ed.
Deborah Willis (New York: New Press, 1994), 48.
29 Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography,

History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 56-8o.
3o Du Bois's albums might profitably be discussed in relation to

the family photograph album, whose form they share to some
degree. Indeed, the albums might be read as a sort of
extended family album, even though some of the specific
kinds of photographs they include, especially the paired
portraits and documentary images, are not usually to be found
in the family photograph album.
Recently, scholars have begun the important work of

assessing the ideological function of the family photograph
album, as well as various artists' challenge to what Marianne
Hirsch has called "the familial gaze." Much of that work has
focused on the ways in which artists and subjects have worked
to contest the confines of a normative family gaze and
normative family structures. I would suggest that Du Bois's
albums take such critical strategies a step further. While Du
Bois's albums promote a particular vision of the African
American family, one that is well-todo and patriarchal, as I
will argue in chapter 3, the albums deploy that image of the
African American family not only to challenge the white ness
of the dominant familial gaze but also to challenge the
structures of segregation and violent racial discrimination. In
other words, if Du Bois's albums invest in a reconfigured
African American familial gaze, they do so in order to use
that vision as a tool in challenging racialized social structures
not exclusively familial. See the essays collected in Marianne
Hirsch, The Familial Gaze (Hanover, N.H.: University Press
of New England, 1999), especially Deborah Willis, "A Search
for Self: The Photograph and Black Family Life," 107-23;
Elizabeth Abel, "Domestic Borders, Cultural Boundaries:
Black Feminists Re-view the Family," 124-52; and Laura
Wexler, "Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the
Innocent Eye," 248-75. See also Hirsch, Family Frames:
Photography, Narrative, and Postmemoiy (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1997); Shawn Michelle Smith,
"'Baby's Picture Is Always Treasured': Eugenics and the
Reproduction of Whiteness in the Family Photograph Album,"
Yale Journal of Criticism 11, 1 (1998): 197-220; and, again,
hooks, "In Our Glory."
31 Irit Rogoff, "Studying Visual Culture," in The Visual Culture

Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 1998),
20.
32 According to Lisa Bloom, "the disengaged look of universal

man" has been "a continuing cultural investment in traditional
art historical narratives." Lisa Bloom, ed., With Other Eyes:
Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 5-
33 Walter Benjamin noted this with some chagrin in his famous

essay on art and mechanical reproduction. Walter Benjamin,
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New
York: Schocken, 1969), 217-52.
34 Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at

American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984), 80-82.
35 Booker T. Washington gave his famous "Atlanta

Compromise" speech at the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and
International Exposition.
36 Report of the Commissioner-General for the United States,

2:381. Thomas J. Calloway graduated from Fisk University in
1889, and from the law school at Howard University in 1893.
He served as assistant professor of a high school in Evansville,
Indiana, a clerk in the War Department in Washington, D. C.,
a manager of the Colored Teachers' Agency, the president of
Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in West Side,
Mississippi, a spokesperson for Tuskegee, and a president of a
normal school in Helena, Arkansas. "Paris Exposition Edition,"
New York Age, January 4, 1900, 1.
Apparently, no American Negro exhibit nor Negro

department was created for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase
Exposition in St. Louis, due in part to the U.S. Commission's
discrimination, and in part to African American resistance to
being segregated in a U.S. exposition. Accord ing to Emmett J.
Scott, some African Americans argued: "Wasn't this to be a
National, an International Exposition? Were we not citizens of
the United States? Why should the Negro people have a
separate department? Why should we be segregated?"
Emmett J. Scott, "The Louisiana Purchase Exposition," Voice
of the Negro 1, 8 (1904): 310. Critiquing this position, Scott
notes, "As at Chicago where the African Dahomey Village,
with its exquisite inhabitants, was the sole representation of the
Negro people, so at St. Louis, a `Pike' concession, À Southern
Plantation,' showing Negro life before the War of the
Rebellion, is all there is to let the world know we are in
existence, aside from a small exhibit from a Mississippi
College, and one or two other exhibits of no very particular
moment" (310).
37 See Thomas J. Calloway to Dr. Albert Shaw, October 9, i9oo.
38 According to Thomas J. Calloway, the American Negro

Exhibit was displayed at the Paris Exposition from April 15 to
November 11, 1900, at the Pan-American Exposition in
Buffalo, New York, from May i to November I, 1901, and at
the South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition in
Charleston, South Carolina, from December 1, 19011 to May
31, 1902. Calloway, "The American Negro Exhibit," Against
the Odds: African American Artists and the Harmon
Foundation, 1991, Newark Museum Archives, set 1, box 1, file
1, Newark, New Jersey. I am grateful to Amy Mooney for
giving me a copy of this essay as well. See also James A. Ross,
"Buffalo and the Pan-American Exposition," Colored
American Magazine, March 1901, 324; "The South Carolina
Interstate and West Indian Exposition," Colored American
Magazine, September 1901, 333, 378 (image); William D.
Crum, "The Negro at the Charleston Exposition," Voice of the
Negro 1, 8 (1904): 333; Thomas J. Calloway to W. E. B. Du
Bois, January 18, 1909, Du Bois Papers, Correspondence,
1877-1910, series 1, reel 1.
39 According to the Harper-'s Guide to Paris, the Palace of

Social Economy resembled "an elegant and distinguished
palace of the eighteenth century." The structure was built
entirely by workmen's associations. "The dimensions are 328
feet by iio feet; the height being 69 feet above the level of the
quay and 85 feet above the level of the Seine. The Palace is
divided into two parts: on the ground floor are rooms in which
the Social Economy exhibits are placed; the first floor is
entirely reserved for the congresses. The building contains an
enormous hall, 328 feet long and 39 feet wide, which
precedes the meeting rooms, and which has its entire facade
on the Seine. There are five halls for the congresses, one
holding Boo persons, two smaller ones accommodating 25o
each, and two others having a seating capacity of 150
persons." Harper's Guide to Paris and the Exposition ofi9oo
(New York: Harper, i9oo), 163. The Palace of Social
Economy was located next to the Palace of Horticulture. A
ma p showing the layout of the buildings of the i9oo Paris
Exposition can be found in Barrett Eastman, Paris ... i9oo: The
American Guide to City and Exposition (New York: Baldwin
and Eastman, 19oo).
40 Morris Lewis (attache to the U.S. Commission to the Paris

Exposition), "Paris and the International Exposition," Colored
American Magazine, October 1900, 295-
41 Report of the Commissioner General, 381, 4o8-9, 463-67; and

Robert W. Rydell, "Gateway to the Àmerican Century': The
American Representation at the Paris Universal Exposition of
19oo," in Paris, i9oo: The Àmerican School" at the Universal
Exposition, ed. Diane P. Fischer (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1999), 141-42.
42 Du Bois, "The American Negro at Paris," 575-
43 Ibid.
44 Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du

Bois (1976; New York: Schocken, 1990), 27-
45 Ibid., 23-
46 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York:

Library of America, 1990), 12.
47 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions

Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World's Fairs, -185-1-
i939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 82.
See also Rydell, All the World's a Fair, and Eric Breitbart, A
World on Display: Photographs from the St. Louis World's
Fair, -1904 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1997)-
48 Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 82.
49 Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and

Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, N. C.: Duke University
Press, 1996), 36-43
50 See Thomas J. Schlereth, "The Material Universe of the
American World Expositions, 1876-1915," in Cultural History
and Material Culture: Everyday Life, Landscapes, Museums
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 284-85, and
Rydell, All the World's a Fair, 64-65.
51 Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 84.
52 Rydell, All the World's u Fair, roi.
53 According to Fatimah Tobing Rony, such temporal dislocation

is the defining structure of the ethnographic gaze. Rony, The
Third L+'ye. See also Joseph Masco, "Competitive Displays:
Negotiating Genealogical Rights to the Potlatch at the
American Museum of Natural History," American
Anthropologist 98, 4 (1996): 837-52. On the evolutionary
narrative of progress that informed nineteenth-century
exhibitions as well as museum displays, see Tony Bennett, The
Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London:
Routledge, 1995), especially chapter 7, "Museums and
Progress: Narrative, Ideology, Performance," 177-208. The
second chapter in Du Bois's The World andAfrica is entitled
"The White Masters of the World."
Jeannene Przyblyski suggests an alternative reading of the

possible function and effect of the native village exhibits, in
which the exhibits also exemplify "the threat" whereby "the
carefully constructed hierarchy of civilized and `not yet
arrived' meant to produce the compliant colonized subject
might collapse into babel." Przyblyski, "Visions of Race and
Nation at the Paris Exposition," 219-20.
54 This figure is cited in John Allwood, The Great Exhibitions

(London: Studio Vista, 1977), 182.
SS Eastman, Paris ... -1900, 55-56. Richard D. Mandell, Paris -
19oo: The Great World's Fair (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1967), 66.
56 Jean Schopfer, "Amusements of the Paris Exposition, 2:

Theaters, Panoramas, and other Spectacles," Century
Magazine, September 1900, 651. For further discussion of the
Dahomeyan native village exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition,
see Przyblyski, "Visions of Race and Nation at the Paris
Exposition."
57 Frederick Douglass, introduction to The Reason Why the

ColoredAmerican Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition
(1892), by Douglass and Ida B. Wells, in The Life and
Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner (New
York: International Publishers, 1955) 4:475-
58 Frederick Douglass, "Why Is the Negro Lynched?," in The

Lesson of the Hour (1894), in Foner, The Life and Writings of
Frederick Douglass, 4:508-
59 Timothy Mitchell examines the objectification of Middle

Easterners in the so-called native exhibits at the 1889 Paris
Exposition as a salient example of nineteenth-century
Europeans' propensity to engage the "world-as-exhibition."
According to Mitchell, such visual objectification proves
fundamental to a European colonial worldview. Timothy
Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California
Pre ss, 1991), and Timothy Mitchell, "Orientalism and the
Exhibitionary Order," in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas
B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992),
289-317. According to Tony Bennett, the "exhibitionary
complex" of world's fairs (and museums) "perfected a self-
monitoring system of looks in which the subject and object
positions can be exchanged," in which the viewer is also
viewed and as part of a crowd becomes a spectacle under
self-surveillance. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 69.
6o Rydell, "Gateway to the Àmerican Century,"' 141. Booker T.

Washington reproduced his 1895 Atlanta Exposition address in
Up From Slavery. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery
(1901; New York: Penguin, 1986).
61 Rydell, "Gateway to the Àmerican Century,"' 141.
62 "The Negro Exhibit: Mr. Calloway, in Charge of Its

Preparation, Talks," Star (Washington, D. C.), December 14,
1899. Bumstead Records, 18761919, box 23, folder 6.
63 Thomas J. Calloway quoted in ibid.
64 Thomas J. Calloway quoted in ibid. Filipino soldiers distributed

leaflets to African American soldiers, citing the lynching of
Sam Hose and ask ing how they could fight a war of
imperialism against other men of color when their own
country lynched them. The links between the American Negro
Exhibit and U. S. imperialism are varied. The Hampton
Institute, Booker T. Washington's alma mater, hired Frances
Benjamin Johnston to produce photographs of the industrial
school for the 19oo Paris Exposition soon after Johnston made
herself famous photographing Admiral Dewey, hero of the
Philippine War, aboard the flagship Olympia. See Laura
Wexler's important analysis of Frances Benjamin Johnston's
work in Tender Violence, 15-51-
65 Rydell, "Gateway to the Àmerican Century,'" 124-
66 Indeed, what Jeannene Przyblyski has said of Frances

Benjamin Johnston's Hampton photographs, displayed in the
American Negro Exhibit, might be said of the exhibit as a
whole, namely, that it was meant, at least in part, "to reassure
an international community that the United States had its
`Negro problem' firmly in hand." Przyblyski, "American
Visions at the Paris Exposition," 68.
67 Thomas J. Calloway quoted in "The Negro Exhibit."
68 Calloway offers a different, and much more progressive,

African American-oriented vision of the value of the
American Negro Exhibit in his essay entitled "The American
Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exposition": "Whatever other
message the exhibit may convey the one which seems to me
most important is that we should avail ourselves of every
opportunity to put before the public statistics and other
evidences of our progress. This effort is demanded, not so
much to afford larger opportunities for adva[n]cement, but to
render more certain the courage and faith of our young men
and women to fully make use of the opportunities open to them
to get an education, property and a basic character. By
occasional exhibits of what the Negro under difficulties has
accomplished up to the present will tend [sic] to overcome that
sordid pessimism which sees no hope for racial assimilation or
adjustment." Calloway, "The American Negro Exhibit at the
Paris Exposition," 79-80-
69 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 9.
7o Rydell, "Gateway to the Àmerican Century,"' 142-44
71 Du Bois, The World and Africa, 20.
72 See chart 1, LOT 11931, Library of Congress, Prints and

Photographs Division.
73 David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Biography of a

Race, 251. According to Du Bois, the 1900 Pan-African
Congress in London was the conference that "put the word
`Pan-African' in the dictionaries for the first time." Du Bois,
The World and Africa, 7-
74 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 3-
75 Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (New

York: Routledge, 1999), 3-4; Rogoff, "Studying Visual
Culture," 20.
76 In his response to October's "Visual Culture Questionnaire,"

Jonathan Crary states that in his work he has "tried to show
how vision is never separable from the larger historical
questions about the construction of subjectivity." Crary,
response to the "Visual Culture Questionnaire," October77
(1996): 33 See also Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the
Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 199o), and Jonathan Crary,
Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern
Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).
77 In addition to the work of bell hooks, I have found that of

Laura Wexler, Fatimah Tobing Rony, and Elizabeth Edwards
particularly useful for thinking along these lines. See
especially hooks, "In Our Glory"; bell hooks, "The
Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators," in Black Looks:
Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1992), 115-31;
b e ll hooks, "Representations of Whiteness in the Black
Imagination," in Black Looks, 165-78; Wexler, Tender
Violence; Rony, The Third Eye; Elizabeth Edwards, ed.,
Anthropology and Photography, i86o-1920 (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); and Elizabeth Edwards,
R a w Histories: Photographs, Anthropology, and Museums
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
i. Envisioning Race
1 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York:

Library of America, 199o), 8; emphasis added. Du Bois first
discussed double consciousness in "Strivings of the Negro
People," published in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1897. The
essay would be renamed "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" as it
became the first chapter in the 1903 The Souls ofBlack Folk.
2 Ibid.
3 bell hooks, "In Our Glory: Photography and Block Life," in

Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, ed.
Deborah Willis (New York: New Press, 1994),50-
4 David Marriott, Maurice O. Wallace, and Gwen Bergner have

recently begun to theorize gendered racial representations as
particularly visual constructs. While the images and figures
these scholars assess in their fascinating works range across a
wide historical spectrum, the authors they draw on in order to
articulate the links between racial identification and visual
culture are primarily mid- to late-twentieth-century writers,
such as Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Roland
Barthes, Homi Bhabha, and Frantz Fanon. In this chapter, I
argue that Du Bois was positing the interanimation of race and
visual culture, of race and representation, of racial
identification and racialized gazes, in powerful terms almost
half a century earlier than the thinkers Marriott, Wallace, and
Bergner evoke to theorize such connections. See David
Marriott, On Black Men (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000); Maurice O. Wallace, Constructing the Black
Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's
Literature and Culture, -1775--1995 (Durham, N. C.: Duke
University Press, 2002); and Gwen Bergner, "Who Is That
Masked Woman? Or, The Role of Gender in Fanon's Black
Skin, White Masks," PMLA 110, 1 (1995): 75-88-
S Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double

Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1993) offers a salient example.
6 Dickson D. Bruce finds predecessors to Du Bois's later, and

distinctively racialized, evocation of double consciousness in
the nineteenth-century discourses of European Romanticism,
American Transcendentalism, and the emerging field of
psychology. Following Arnold Rampersad, Bruce has
suggested that William James may have introduced Du Bois to
psychological understandings of the term. See Dickson D.
Bruce Jr., "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double
Consciousness," American Literature 64,2 (1992): 299-309;
and Arnold Rampersad, TheArtandlmagi- nation of W. E. B.
Du Bois (1976; New York: Schocken, 199o). Bernard W. Bell
has deemed double consciousness "a dynamic epistemological
mode of critical inquiry for African Americans." Bernard W.
Bell, "Genealogical Shifts in Du Bois's Discourse on Double
Consciousness as the Sign of African American Difference,"
in W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics,
and Poetics, ed. Bell, Emily R. Grosholz, and James B. Stewart
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 96. In his provocative
explanation of Du Boisian double consciousness, Adolph Reed
rejects a lineage of ideas stemming from Ralph Waldo
Emerson's Transcendentalist notions to William James to Du
Bois, arguing that Du Bois's use of the term resonates with
Lamarckian concepts prevalent in turn-of-the-century
sociological discourses. In this sense, Du Boisian double
consciousness would appear as the struggle between an
"evolved" and a "primitive" self. Given Du Bois's explicit work
to dismantle an essentialized racial hierarchy at the turn of the
century, I find Reed's thesis, while well-argued, ultimately
untenable. Adolph L. Reed Jr., W. L. B. Du Bois andAmerican
Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 91-125
7 Fatimah Tobing Rony briefly notes the visual nature of Du

Bois's description of double consciousness in The Third Eye:
Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1996), 4-
8 Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices: W. F. B. Du Bois and American

Thought, -1888--1903 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995) 117, ,6o.
9 Ibid., 114.
1o Ibid., 118. Zamir notes that Du Bois owned James's Principles

of Psychology and kept it in his library (249 n. io). Zamir also
explicitly concedes that "what James's psychology does
provide (in terms of ideas useful to Du Bois's psychology) is ...
an idea of the self as it is formed through its being in the eyes
of others" (153). If, as Zamir posits, Du Bois reworks Hegel's
"master-and-slave dialectic in terms of a quotidian drama of
seeing and being seen" (136), then, I would argue, Du Bois is
adapting and transforming both Hegel and James. For surely
James's rejection of Hegel need not have secured Du Bois's
complete dismissal of James for Hegel. Certainly, Du Bois was
capable of adapting Hegel via James, integrating and
transforming the theories of two philosophers in his own
unique thought.
ii David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois, vol. i, Biography of a

Race, 18681919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 96.
12 Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and

Narrative Form (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1995)
172-236.
14 James himself does not use the term double consciousness in

his text, but in discussing the case of Felida X., he cites Dr.
Azam's 1887 book, entitled Hypnotisme, double conscience, et
alterations de la personnalite (Paris, 1887). While he does not
give the full citation, he also notes a May 186o Harper's essay
in his discussion of Mary Reynolds, which was entitled, as
noted by Dickson D. Bruce, "Mary Reynolds: A Case of
Double Consciousness." See William James, The Principles of
Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), notes on 1:380
and 1:381. See also Bruce, "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of
Double Consciousness," 308 n. 9, and William S. Plumer,
"Mary Reynolds: A Case of Double Consciousness," Harper's,
May 186o, 807-12, cited in Bruce.
15 James, The Principles of Psychology, 1:379-80.
16 Ibid., 1:381-84.
17 Ibid., 1399
1g William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course (1892), ed.

Gordon Allport (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 43-
zo As Priscilla Wald has argued, Du Bois's "analysis extends the

sociological and psychological theories that held that any `self'
knows itself at least partly as the object of perception, in
relation to-through the eyes ofothers." Wald, Constituting
Americans, 177. Through an insightful reading of The Souls of
Black Folk, Wald suggests that Du Bois invents new narrative
strategies to tell an "untold story." I am especially interested in
the new visual tactics Du Bois employs to show an unseen
image.
21 Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the

Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,"
in Zcrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Norton, 1977),1-7-
22 I have found Jane Gallop's reading of Lacan's mirror stage

particularly useful. See Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 74-92. As Homi
Bhabha, through a reading of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin,
White Masks, has argued, "For identification, identity is never
an a priori, nor a finished product; it is only ever the
problematic process of access to an image of totality." Homi
K. Bhabha, "Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the
Postcolonial Prerogative," in The Location of Culture (New
York: Routledge, i994), 51-
23 Lacan, "The Mirror Stage," 1, 2.
24 Ibid., i.
25 Ibid., 2.
26 As Jacqueline Rose has argued, the child's "first sense of a

coherent identity in which it can recognise itself," the effect of
the mirror stage, "only has meaning in relation to the presence
and the look of the mother who guarantees its reality for the
child." Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision
(London: Verso, 1986),53-
27 DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 7-8-

28 Ibid., 8.
29 As Diana Fuss has argued in her reading of Frantz Fanon's

Black Skin, White Masks, "Claiming for itself the exalted
position of transcendental signifier, `white' is never a `not
black.' As a self-identical, selfreproducing term, white draws
its ideological power from its proclaimed transparency, from
its self-elevation over the very category of `race..' " Diana
Fuss, "Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of
Identification," in Identification Papers (New York:
Routledge, 1995),144-
3o Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam

Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 116.
31 Ibid., 112. As Gwen Bergner has argued, "The white man's

gaze produces a psychic splitting that shatters the black man's
experience of bodily integrity." Bergner, "Who Is That
Masked Woman," 78-
Paul Gilroy discusses Du Bois's double consciousness as a

triple phenomenon: "Double consciousness emerges from the
unhappy symbiosis between three modes of thinking, being,
and seeing. The first is racially particularistic, the second
nationalistic in that it derives from the nation state in which the
ex-slaves but not-yet-citizens find themselves, rather than
from their aspiration towards a nation state of their own. The
thir d is diasporic or hemispheric, sometimes global and
occasionally universalist." Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 127.
32 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112.
33 Ibid., 35-
34 Ibid., 113-
35 Rony, The Third L+'ye, 6.
36 Ibid., 17.
37 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112. According to Fatimah

Tobing Rony, "The predicament described by Frantz Fanon" is
one "of the viewer who, recognizing that he or she is racially
aligned with the ethnographic Other yet unable to identify
fully with the image, is left in uncomfortable suspension."
Rony, The Third L+'ye, 17. Kaja Silverman similarly suggests
that Fanon poses "the psychic dilemma faced by the subject
when obliged to identify with an image which provides neither
idealization nor pleasure, and which is inimical to the
formation of a `coherent' identity." Kaja Silverman, The
Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996),
27-
38 Fuss, "Interior Colonies," 143. As David Marriott has stated it,

the problem for Fanon is phrased thus: "What do you do with
an unconscious which appears to hate you?" According to
Marriott, "For Fanon, blackness is already intruded upon,
displaced by, an invasive whiteness which, as it were, gets
there first"; and, "to be black is to be already interfered with,
violated by, a whiteness which comes from the inside out."
Marriott, On Black Men, 90, 79.
39 According to Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon similarly appropriates

and racializes Lacan in his long footnote on the mirror stage.
Stuart Hall, "The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon?
Why Now? Why Black Skin White Masks?," in The Fact of
Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan
Read (Seattle: Bay, 1996), 26. See also Fanon, Black Skin,
White Masks, 161 n. 25.
4o Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 8.

41 Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1998), 32-33 Carby suggests that Du Bois's
subsequent articulation of double consciousness is gendered
masculine, as is Du Bois's vision of healing that psychological
rift through self-conscious manhood. Carby argues that "for
Du Bois, the gaining of the `true self-consciousness' of a
racialized and national subject position is dependent upon first
gaining a gendered self-consciousness" (37)-
42 Claudia Tate reads Du Bois's description of this scene in a

very similar manner. According to Tate, the white girl's
rejection of the young Du Bois's visiting card is "a traumatic
event that disrupts his admirable selfimage ... because it
contests the perfect image of himself his mother seems to have
reflected for him." Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black
Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 185-86.
43 As the white girl rejects an idealized image of blackness, she

also reinforces her own fantasy of white wholeness.
44 It might prove interesting to compare the roles of the white

girl and black boy (Du Bois himself) in Du Bois's gendered
racial episode to that of the white women and black men in the
racial fantasies of "masculinized" white women that Jean
Walton studies in her reading of Joan Riviere's 1929 essay
"Womanliness as a Masquerade," J. H. W. van Ophuijsen's
1917 "Contributions to the Masculinity Complex in Women,"
and Melanie Klein's 1929 "Infantile Anxiety-Situations
Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse." In
discussing the racial fantasy of Riviere's white female patient,
Walton explains, "As a white woman, her appearing to have
the phallus is culturally permitted when it is a question of her
relation to a black man." Returning to Du Bois's scene of
gendered racial trauma, we might suppose that part of the
shock for the young Du Bois lies in recognizing, through the
rejection of the white girl (racially empowered in relation to
him, despite her gendered position), the disavowal of his
gender privilege as a black male in a white patriarchal world.
Jean Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams: Race, Psychoanalysis,
Sexual Difference (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press,
2001), 22. See also her whole chapter entitled "Masquerade
and Reparation: (White) Womanliness in Riviere and Klein,"
17-4o.
45 W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Damnation of Women" (1920), in W.

E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York:
Library of America, 1986),954-
46 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 150, 152.
47 Du Bois seeks to dismantle the "unendurable paradox" that

determines that "only at the sacrifice of intelligence and the
chance to do their best work can the majority of modern
women bear children." His solution to this paradox is to
celebrate "woman's freedom and married motherhood
inextricably wed." Ultimately, then, it is only through "married
motherhood" that Du Bois fully sanctions "woman's
[intellectual and economic] freedom." Du Bois, "The
Damnation of Women," 952, 953, 967. Nellie McKay offers a
more positive reading of Du Bois's representations of women,
and in discussing his fictional female characters suggests that
"it is the gift of clarity of vision that Du Bois gives to his
imagined women." Nellie McKay, "W. E. B. Du Bois: The
Black Women in His Writings -Selected Fictional and
Autobiographical Portraits," in Critical Essays on W. E. B. Du
Bois, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 249-
48 James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored

Man (1912), ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Penguin,
1990), 11-12.
49 Ibid., 14. The echoes of Du Bois that one finds in these

passages of The Autobiography are not surprising given that
Johnson's narrator singles out The Souls ofBlack Folk as a
"remarkable book," and a forerunner in African American
literature, at a later point in the text (123). See also Robert B.
Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study ofAfro-American
Narrative, 2d ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991),
95-127-
50 Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, 149-
51 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 47-48
52 Ibid., 47-
53 Lola Young, "Missing Persons: Fantasising Black Women in

Black Skin, White Masks," in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz
Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (Seattle: Bay,
1996), 92.
54 Gwen Bergner similarly reads Fanon's "scathing

condemnation of black women's desire" as expressing Fanon's
"own desire to circumscribe black women's sexuality and
economic autonomy in order to ensure the patriarchal
authority of black men." Bergner, "Who Is That Masked
Woman?," 81.
55 Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, 34-
56 Further work remains to be done reading Lacan through the

lens of Du Bois's racial categories. One might productively
map the child's emergence into the Lacanian symbolic (from
the semiotic) as not only an entrance into the realm of the
phallus but also an entrance into the realm of the color line.
57 Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois, 89.

Manning Marable suggests that "the veil of racial segregation
made blacks virtually invisible to white America." Manning
Marable, W. E. B. DuBois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston:
Twayne, 1986), 48-
58 The Veil is the site of what Maurice O. Wallace has called

"spe c tr a - graphia," "a chronic syndrome of inscripted
misrepresentation," in which "the spectragraphic gaze" serves
a "willful blindness." Wallace, Constructing the Black
Masculine, 30-31-
59 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 140-
6o Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 7-8.
61 My analysis of Du Bois's adaptation of Wordsworth's prison-

house to describe the Veil accords with Dickson Bruce's
argument that Du Bois drew on British Romantic and
American Transcendental ideas to theorize double
consciousness. See Dickson D. Bruce, "W. E. B. Du Bois and
the Idea of Double Consciousness."
62 In the final chapters of The Souls ofBlack Folk, Du Bois has

"left the world of the white man," and "stepped deeper within
the Veil." He has fulfilled his initial promise to raise the Veil,
so that readers "may view faintly its deeper recesses, -the
meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and
the struggle of its greater souls." As Houston Baker has
argued, "One of the most important aspects of The Souls
ofBlack Folk.... is its delineation of the black man of culture
(Du Bois himself) as mediator between opposing sides of the
American veil." Du Bois, The Souls ofBlack Folk, 3. Houston
A. Baker Jr., "The Black Man of Culture: W. E. B. Du Bois
and The Souls of Black Folk," in Critical Essays on W. E. B.
Du Bois, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985),
132. The Veil section of The Souls ofBlack Folk also enabled
African American readers to study an image of African
American life and culture as seen by an African American,
an image not projected through the eyes of white others.
According to Arnold Rampersad, therein lies the power of the
text: "Du Bois held up to Afro-America a portrait of the
people drawn by one of their own." Rampersad, The Art and
Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois, 88-89.
63 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 8; emphasis added.
64 Even in its most blinding capacity as a white screen, the Veil

can also function as a black mask, as an array of false images
to be manipu lated strategically. Charles Chesnutt provides one
outstanding example in "The Passing of Grandison" (1899), in
which Grandison, an enslaved man, so successfully
manipulates the "happy darky" image his master wants to see,
so utterly downplays his own desires and intellect, and so
adeptly passes as a "carefree" slave, that his master
unwittingly enables him to walk away free. In The
Autobiography (fan Ex-colored Man, James Weldon Johnson
also discusses the masking of African American men "under
cover of broad grins and minstrel antics ... in the presence of
white men." Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored
Man, 14-
65 Fuss, "Interior Colonies," 146.
66 W. E. B. Du Bois, "Criteria of Negro Art" (1926), in W. E. B.

America, 1986), 993- In The Autobiography (fan Ex-colored
Man, Johnson's narrator similarly states, "I believe it to be a
fact that the colored people of this country know and
understand the white people better than the white people know
and understand them." Johnson, The Autobiography (fan Ex-
colored Man, 14-15-
67 Wald, Constituting Americans, 184. Wald is actually referring

to Thomas Jefferson's discussion of the veil in Notes on the
State of Virginia here, but her assessment also applies to her
treatment of the Du Boisian Veil.
68 Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence

of Colonial Discourse," in The Location of Culture (New
York: Routledge, 1994), 89-
2. Art of Scientific Propaganda
1 W. E. B. Du Bois, "Criteria of Negro Art" (1926), in W. E. B.

America, 1986), 999.
2 Henry Louis Gates Jr., "The Face and Voice of Blackness," in

Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940,
by Guy C. McElroy (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 199o), xxix.
3 Ibid. In a fascinating essay, Daylanne English notes that Du

Bois's call for representative images in "Criteria of Negro Art"
appeared in the October 1926 "Children's Number" of the Crisis,
the same issue in which Du Bois decried the failure of an
African American elite to reproduce. According to English, "In
DuBois's uplift project of the 192os, cultural production and
reproduction could not be linked more clearly." For English, Du
Bois's anxiety about racial reproduction is part of what she calls
the "increasingly intraracial and eugenic" model of Du Bois's
uplift ideology of the 19205 and 1930s, marking the
transformation of his 1903 vision of a culturally elite Talented
Tenth into a claim on "explicitly biological superiority."
Daylanne English, "W. E. B. DuBois's Family Crisis," American
Literature 72, 2 (2000): 311, 308, 297. Du Bois's conjoined
anxieties concerning representation and reproduction in 1926
provide an interesting vantage from which to look back on his
earlier photographs for the 1900 Paris Exposition, for here we
also find Du Bois's interest in African American representation
intertwined with the logics of eugenicist racial science. But if,
as English argues, Du Bois increasingly adopted a form of
"positive" eugenics to encourage the careful breeding of a "fit"
African American elite in the 192os and 1930s (297), in 1900,
his visual tactics are focused on countering the negative
eugenics of white supremacists, on responding to and
supplanting a scientific image of "Negro inferiority." In other
words, in 1900, Du Bois seems most concerned with
reproducing representation itself. Indeed, in 1900, Du Bois's
work was still very much informed by the logic of his 1897
essay "The Talented Tenth," in which his exceptional men are
"college-bred" (856). The Talented Tenth is culturally molded
by education, not biologically created through controlled
reproduction. For Du Bois, the Talented Tenth proves "the
capability of Negro blood" in general (847), not only for those
of its own class, and its role is to proffer men and women who
will be "leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among
their people" (861). W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Talented Tenth"
(1903), in W. L. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins
(New York: Library of America, 1986).
4 W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the

Part which Africa Has Played in World History (1946), enl. ed.
(New York: International Publishers, 1965), 20.
5 While clearly a forerunner in developing cultural definitions of

race to combat the sciences of biological racialism, Du Bois
was not alone in this pursuit. For an examination of the
important similarities and crosspollination of ideas between Du
Bois's turn-of-the-century antiracist thought and that of the
American anthropologist Franz Boas, see Julia E. Liss,
"Diasporic Identities: The Science and Politics of Race in the
Wor k of Franz Boas and W. E. B. Du Bois, 1894-1919,"
Cultural Anthropology 13, 2 (1998): 127-66. In her unpublished
manuscript, "Cultures Relative and Plural: Folklore as a
Unifying Force in the Development of Cultural Pluralism,"
Kimberly J. Lau discusses the work of several early twentieth-
century Africanist and African Americanist anthropologists
who trained with Franz Boas and, like him, argued for "cultural
pluralism" to contest the claims of biological racialists. These
scholars include Melville Herskovits, Elsie Clews Parsons, and
Zora Neale Hurston. Lau also notes an exchange of ideas
between Boas and Alain Locke, philosopher of the Harlem
Renaissance. Attempts to de-essentialize race can be found as
early as the mid-nineteenth century. According to Carla
Peterson, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, editor of the Canadian
newspaper the Provincial Freeman from 1853 to 1855, "insisted
that racial difference must be viewed not as a fundamental
biological difference that separates peoples hierarchically but
simply as a superficial difference of complexion." Carla L.
Peterson, "Doers of the Word": African-American Women
Speakers and Writers in the North (43o-sSSo) (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 99.
6 Du Bois, "Criteria of Negro Art," iooo. See Keith Byerman's

reading of Du Bois's use of "propaganda" in "Criteria of Negro
Art." According to Byerman, in Du Bois's view, "black art, if it
tells the truth and raises ethical questions based on that truth,
will consistently be seen by readers from the dominant culture
as propaganda, since it will be a repudiation of the racial
ideology of that culture." Keith E. Byerman, Seizing the Word:
History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1994), 105. Ross Posnock argues
that Du Bois's "Criteria of Negro Art" "turns the aesthetic into a
militant part of a political, economic, and cultural movement."
While I agree with this statement, I find less convincing
Posnock's larger claims, namely, that as a cosmopolitan
intellectual seeking to be recognized as a "co-worker in the
kingdom of culture," Du Bois was invested in a conception of
culture that transcended racial particularities. I would argue
that Du Bois evokes culture as an antiracist political tool. He
continues to celebrate as distinct the cultural "gifts" of African
Americans. Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers
and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1998), 144-
7 Repetition with a difference and direction by indirection are

two of the important ways that "signifyin(g)" works, according
to Gates. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A
Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988), esp. 51, 63-68, 74-79, 81, 85-
86. Coco Fusco has also used the concept of "signifyin(g)" in
her discussion of Lorna Simpson's photographic art in
"Uncanny Dissonance: The Work of Lorna Simpson," in
English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the
Americas (New York: New Press, 1995),97-102.
8 For analyses of these images, see Lisa Gail Collins, "Historic

Re tr ie v a ls : Confronting Visual Evidence and the
Documentation of Truth," Chicago ArtJournal 8,10998): 5-17,
and Brian Wallis, "Black Bodies, White Science: Louis
Agassiz's Slave Daguerreotypes," American Art 9 (summer
1995): 39-61. As Collins suggests, Agassiz was intellectual heir
to a European scientific tradition particularly interested in
objectifying and mapping the black female body as a visible
sign of racial difference and inferiority. Agassiz was the
prodigy of French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier, who
commissioned illustrations of Saartjie Baartman, fully nude, and
then, after her death, dissected and studied her genitalia.
Collins, "Historic Retrievals," 5-7
9 Wallis, "Black Bodies, White Science," 40. Wallis also suggests

that in a more general sense, Agassiz may have been
responding to "calls in contemporary European scientific
journals for the creation of a photographic archive of human
specimens, or types" (45)-
io Ibid., 45-46.
i i Lisa Gail Collins ends her discussion of these daguerreotypes

by assessing the work of contemporary African American
photographers Carla Williams, Carrie Mae Weems, and Lorna
Simpson (as well as the work of conceptual artist Renee
Green). Collins argues that these artists reclaim and
recontextualize the black body, both exposing and challenging
t h e ways in which scientists historically have utilized
photography to provide visual "evidence" of racial difference
and inferiority. Collins, "Historic Retrievals," io-i6.
1 2 See Frank Spencer, "Some Notes on the Attempt to Apply

Photography to Anthropometry during the Second Half of the
Nineteenth Century," in Anthropology and Photography, i86o-
19zo, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1992), 99-107
13 Elizabeth Edwards, introduction to Anthropology and

Photography, i86o- i92o, ed. Edwards (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1992), 7. See also Elizabeth Edwards,
"'Photographic Types': The Pursuit of Method," Visual
Anthropology 3 (1992) 235-58.
14 Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion, intro.

Robert Taft (New York: Dover, 1955). This volume contains a
selection of plates from Eadweard Muybridge's Animal
Locomotion, originally published in 1878.
15 Francis Galton, The Life History Album (London: Macmillan,

1884).
16 Francis Galton, "The Comparative Worth of Different

Races," in Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and
Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1892), 392-404-
17 Du Bois, The World and Africa, 20.
18 Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its

Development, 2d ed. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1907), 10,
222.
19 In the i88os, Galton's composite photography was adopted at

the U.S. Army Medical Museum in Washington, D. C., by the
craniologist John S. Billing, who created composite
photographs of skulls. Spencer, "Some Notes," io6.
zo According to Paul Gilroy, at the turn of the century Du Bois

increasingly sought to challenge "the logic of racial eugenics,"
which he "identified as `the silent growing assumption of the
age..' " Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1993), 130. Gilroy is quoting W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of
Black Folk (1903; New York: Library of America, 199o), 188.
21 Albert Edward Wiggam, The Fruit of the Family Tree

(London: T. Werner Laurie, 1924).
22 Marouf Arif Hasian Jr., The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-
Ame ric a n Thought (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1996), 37
23 Ibid., 43-44; Kenneth M. Ludmerer, Genetics and American

Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1972), 90-113-
24 For studies of the impact of eugenics on U. S. culture, see

Elazar Barkin, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing
Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the
World Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
Mark Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American
Thought (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1963); Hasian, The Rhetoric of Eugenics; Richard Hofstadter,
Social Darwinism in American Thought, i86o-1915, rev. ed.
(Boston: Beacon, 1944); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of
Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New
York: Knopf, 1985); Ludmerer, Genetics andAmerican
Society; Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives
(Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968); Philip R.
Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary
Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1991); and Nicole Hahn Rafter, White
Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877-1919 (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1988).
25 Evelynn M. Hammonds also assesses these images in "New

Technologies of Race," in Processed Lives: Gender and
Technology in Everyday Life, ed. Jennifer Terry and Melodie
Calvert (New York: Routledge, 1997), esp. ro9-11.
26 W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., The Health and Physique of the Negro

Ame ric a n (19o6), in The Atlanta University Publications
(New York: Arno and The New York Times, 1968), 36, 37-
27 Ibid., 37. Du Bois is quoting Jas Bryce, The Relations of the
Advanced and Backward Races of Mankind (Oxford, 1892).
28 Du Bois, The Health and Physique of the Negro American,

30-31. Du Bois divides these four types as follows: Negro
types, mulatto types, quadroon types, and white types with
Negro blood.
29 There is further overlap in that four pairs of images included

in the 1900 Paris Exposition albums are split, with one
reproduced in the Atlanta University collection, the other in
The Health and Physique of the Negro American.
3o Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library,

Atlanta University Photographs Collection, box 13; Catalogue
of the Officers and Students of Atlanta University, 1899-1900
through 1906-1907 (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press). In
19o6, Usher graduated second in her class. David Levering
Lewis notes her academic accomplishments in W. E. B. Du
Bois, vol. 1, Biography of a Race, i868-i9r9 (New York:
Henry Holt, 1993), 211.
31 David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a

Race, 211.
32 W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Conservation of Races" (1897), inA

W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Andrew G. Paschal (New York:
Macmillan, 1970,19-31-
33 W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward the

Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940), in W. E. B. Du
Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of
America, 1986), 627. According to Arnold Rampersad, in
discussing his own racial identity and ancestry, Du Bois
"would not accept the white racist convention that denied the
truth of his mixed genealogy." Arnold Rampersad, The Art
and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (1976; New York:
Schocken, 199o), 17-
34 According to Susan Gillman, "the legal fraction defining

blackness was still one thirty-second `Negro blood"' as late as
1970 in Louisiana. Susan Gillman, "'Sure Identifiers': Race,
Science, and the Law in Twain's Puddn'head Wilson," South
Atlantic Quarterly 87, 2 (1988): 205. Barbara Fields has
argued that "the very diversity and arbitrariness of the
physical rules governing racial classification prove that the
physical emblems which symbolize race are not the
foundation upon which race arises as a category of social
thought." Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race in American
History," in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in
Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and
James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press,
1982),151-
35 Mary Anne Doane, "Dark Continents: Epistemologies of

Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the
Cinema," in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory,
Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 235-
36 In her work on passing, Samira Kawash describes "the color

line" as "a social system of classification and identification that
insisted on absolute difference between white and black, even
as it warily acknowledged the existence of certain bodies that
seemed to violate the very possibility of distinction." Samira
Kawash, Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, My- bridity, and
Singularity in African-American Narrative (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1997),124- In her analysis of the
photographs in The Health and Physique of the Negro
American, Evelynn Hammonds similarly argues, "Along with
sociological data Du Bois used the then new technology,
photography, to make visible the evidence of race mixing that
white society denied. Du Bois' photographic evidence,
re nde re d in the style of turn-of-the-century ethnographic
studies of race, was deployed to show that race mixing was a
fact of American life and that the dependence upon visual
evidence to determine who was `black' or `white' was
specious at best." Hammonds, "New Technologies of Race,"
110.
37 Susan Gubar has argued that "the secret the biracial infant
holds" is "the lie commingled bloodlines put to the historical
accounts of a segregated culture." Susan Gubar, "What Will
the Mixed Child Deliver? Conceiving Color without Race," in
Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 207-
38 Hazel V. Corby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The

Emergence of the AfroAmerican Woman Novelist (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 89.
39 Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory,

Culture, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995),180-81-
4o This is the fourth "Negro type" as defined by Du Bois in The

Health and Physique of the Negro American. It is interesting
to note that Du Bois refuses to pose whiteness as a monolithic
racial category, without internal distinctions, instead
distinguishing four different "white types": Latin, Celtic,
English, and Germanic (31). See also Amy M. Mooney's
discussion of the painter Archibald J. Motley Jr.'s
manipulations of a racial typology in "Representing Race:
Disjunctions in the Work of Archibald J. Motley, Jr.," The Art
Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 24, 2 (1999): 162265.
41 See Herman "Skip" Mason Jr., Hidden Treasures: African
American Pho- toganphers inAtlanta,1870-1970 (Atlanta:
African American Family History Association, 1991). Also
see Askew's advertisement in the Voice of the Negro of
December 1904-
42 Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A. A. E. Disderi and the Carte de

Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1985), 30-
43 According to Brian Coe, the wet collodion process was

invented in 1851 by Frederick Scott Archer. Brian Coe,
"Techniques of Victorian Studio Photography," in Victorian
Studio Photographs: From the Collections of Studio Bassano
and Elliot and Fay, London, by Bevis Hillier (Boston: David R.
Godine, 1976),25-
44 McCauley, A. A. E. Disderi, 82.
45 Ibid., 149-
46 Coe, "Techniques of Victorian Studio Photography," 26.
47 McCauley, A. A. E. Disderi, 137-38-
48 Ibid., 149-
49 Ibid., 137-38.
50 Coe, "Techniques of Victorian Studio Photography," 26.
51 According to Brian Coe, the gelatin dry-plate process was

first described by Dr. R. L. Maddox in 1871, but did not come
into general use until 188o. Ibid.
52 Bruce W. Chambers, "American Identities: Cabinet Card
Portra its, 1870-1910," inAmericanIdentities: Cabinet Card
Portraits1870-rgro: From the Doan Family Collection
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Art Museum, 1985), 6.
53 See Alan Trachtenberg's discussion of posing "illustrious

Americans" in Reading American Photographs: Images as
Histoa y, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1989), 46-48.
54 According to the American Heritage Dictionary, deluxe

edition, 1994, by jingo is an interjection "used for emphasis or
to express surprise." It is originally from "the refrain of a
bellicose 19th-century English musichall song, from alteration
of JESUS."
55 According to Kobena Mercer, such reinscription of African

American bodies within the traditions of classical Western art
can be seen as a "deconstructive strategy" that "throws the
spectator into uncer tainty and unfixity" by disrupting the
viewer's "normative expectations" and thereby "reveal[ing]
the political unconscious of white ethnicity" whereby
whiteness is constituted as an identity only through processes
of othering. Mercer makes this argument in his discussion of
Ro b e r t Mapplethorpe's African American male nudes.
Kobena Mercer, "Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs
of Robert Mapplethorpe," in Welcome to the Jungle: New
Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge,
1994), 199, 201.
56 Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire, 126-33; Gilroy, The

Black Atlantic, 59-60. See also my discussion of Pauline
Hopkins's Of One Blood; Or; the Hidden Self (1902-3) in
Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Lender Race, and
Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1999), 187-205. In "The Negro in Literature and Art,"
Du Bois states: "The Negro blood which flowed in the veins of
many of the mightiest of the Pharaohs accounts for much
Egyptian art, and indeed, Egyptian civilization owes much of
its origins to the development of the large strain of Negro
blood which manifested itself in every grade of Egyptian
society." W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Negro in Literature and Art"
(1913), in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins
(New York: Library of America, 1986), 862.
57 Du Bois, "Criteria of Negro Art," 1002.
58 Pearl Cleage Lomax, "... Take My Picture, Mr. Polk...," in P.

H. Polk: Photographs (Atlanta: Nexus, 1980),107-
3. "Undoubted Respectability"
W. E. B. Du Bois, "Of the Coming of John," in The Souls of

Black Folk (19o3; New York: Library of America, 199o), 165-
79
2 Ibid., 175-
3 Ida B. Wells's antilynching work is documented in Crusade

forJustice, A Red Record, and Southern Horrors. A Red Record
(1895) and Southern Hor rors: Lynch Law in All its Phases
(1892) have been collected in Ida B. Wells, Selected Works of
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, comp. Trudier Harris (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991), 138-252, 14-45, and in Ida B.
WellsBarnett, On Lynchings (New York: Arno, 1969). Vron
Ware, Hazel Carby, and Paula Giddings follow Ida B. Wells in
assessing lynching as a form of economic terrorism. Vron
Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, andHistoiy
(New York: Verso,1992),167-224; Paula Giddings, When and
WhereI Enter: The Impact ofBlack Women on Race and Sex
inAmerica (New York: Morrow, 1984), 26; Hazel V. Carby,
Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-
American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987), 115; and Hazel V. Carby, "'On the Threshold of
Woman's Era': Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black
Feminist Theory," in "Race," Writing, and Difference, ed.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986), 301-16. For additional analyses of Ida B. Wells's radical
work, see Gail Bederman, "'Civilization,' the Decline of Middle-
Class Manliness, and Ida B. Wells's Antilynching Campaign
(1892-94)," Radical History Review 52 (1992): 5-30; Sandra
Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of
A me r ic a n Literature, 1890-1912 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996). For a broader examination of lynching
and representations of lynching, as well as more extensive
citations, see chapter 4 of this book.
4 Harpers Weekly provides a good measure of white America's

resistance to African American social, economic, and cultural
gains, as it was a moderate, and very popular, national
newspaper (claiming a subscription of 300,000 in 1871) and
was purportedly devoted to social reforms of various kinds,
including black civil rights, throughout the late nineteenth
century.
5 Sol Eytinge Jun. was a prominent contributor of illustrations to

Harper's, as well as to Scribners and Vanity Fair (1860-63),
and he also served as illustrator for a number of books,
including Gilbert A. Pierce's The Dickens Dictionary (1872).
He seems to have specialized particularly in caricatures of
African Americans. In Caricature and Other Comic Art: In all
Times and Many Lands (New York: Harper, 1878), James
Parton describes Eytinge, among others, as one of "the old
favorites of the public," and reproduces one of his racist
caricatures in the book. Despite Parton's appraisal, Eytinge's
popularity was not universal. In a January 1878 editorial
review of Parton's book for The Atlantic Monthly, one writer
declares: "We resent the intrusion of even one of the revolting
vulgarities of Mr. Sol Eytinge." See also Cornell University's
"Making of America" Web site for further information on Sol
Eytinge Jun.: http://cdl.library. cornell.edu/moa.
6 The following illustrations are all by Sol Eytinge Jun., and all
w e r e published in Harper's Weekly: "The `Fourth' in
Blackville-`Hold on to Sumfen, She's Goin' off Dis Time'" (July
14,1877); "The Great Blackville Regatta-Grand Spurt at the
Finish" (August 1877); "The Coaching Season in Blackville-the
Grand Start" (September 28, 1878); "FoxHunting in Blackville"
(May 24, 1879); "The Blackville Billiard Club" (March 31,
1883); and "A Blackville Serenade" (June 16,1883)-
7 Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual

Representation (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press, 2003), 55-65. In compiling this important historical
information, Harris quotes "'76," Harper's Weekly, July 15,
1876, 574, as well as Karen C. C. Dalton, "Currier and Ives's
Darktown Comics: Ridicule and Race," paper presented at the
"Democratic Vistas: The Prints of Currier and Ives"
symposium, Museum of the City of New York, May 2, 1992.
8 Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of

Colo nial Discourse," in The Location of Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1994), 86, 89.
9 I'd like to thank Carolyn Adenaike and Beth Freeman for

suggesting this interpretation.
io Editorials and letters to the editor published in Harper's

Weekly in the first years of the twentieth century deem the
rape of white women a "new negro crime." In an editorial
entitled "The Negro Problem and the New Negro Crime," for
the June 20, 1903 issue of Harpers Weekly, a writer discusses
"the so-called `new' negro crime, by which is meant the crime
against white women" (1050). Similarly, in "Some Fresh
Suggestions about the New Negro Crime," in the Harper's
Weekly of January 23, 1904, the editor proclaims, "The
assault of white women by colored men may fairly be
described as the `new' negro crime" (120). See also letters to
the editor from George B. Winton and Mrs. W. H. Felton.
George B. Winton, "The Negro Criminal," Harper's Weekly,
August 29, 1903, 1414; Mrs. W. H. Felton, "From a Southern
Woman," Harper's Weekly, November 14, 1903, 1830-
ii "The Negro Problem and the New Negro Crime," 1050. In her
important work on lynching and white supremacism, Sandra
Gunning notes the 1889 work of historian Philip A. Bruce, The
Plantation Negro as Freeman, in which Bruce "alleged a
dangerous moral (and by later implications, physical)
regression among postemancipation African Americans,
evidenced in what he saw as a sharp increase in the number
of white women raped by black men." Gunning, Race, Rape,
and Lynching, 21.
12 Winton, "The Negro Criminal." According to Jeannene

Pr z yblyski, turn-of-the-century French newspapers also
perpetuated the myth of African American men as the rapists
of white women, African American celebrations of French
"color blindness" notwithstanding. Thus as Du Bois's antiracist
work in the Georgia Negro Exhibit challenged representations
of the African American man as savage in U.S. lynching
discourses, it also contested the proliferation of such
representations in Europe, and particularly in France, the first
country in which the exhibit was displayed for an international
audience. Jeannene M. Przyblyski, "Visions of Race and
Nation at the Paris Exposition, 19oo: A French Context for the
American Negro Exhibit," in National Stereotypes in
Perspective: Americans in France, Frenchmen in America, ed.
William L. Chew III (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001), 211-12.
13 W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in

Georgia (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1904), 9.
14 Ibid., 55-56. Apparently Olivier made these comments first in

the British Friend of December 1904-
15 Du Bois, Notes on Negro Crime, 56-57.
16 For a more extensive analysis along these lines, see Shawn

Michelle Smith, "'Looking at One's Self through the Eyes of
Others': W. E. B. Du Bois's Photographs for the 19oo Paris
Exposition," African American Review 34, 4 (2000): 581-99-
17 Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39

(1986): 7.
18 W. E. B. Du Bois, "Editing The Crisis" (1951), in The Crisis

Reader: Stories, Poetry, andEssays from the N.A.A. c.P's
"Crisis"Magazine, ed. Sondra Kathryn Wilson (New York:
Modern Library, 1999) xxix.
1g In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois states: "Nothing more

exasperates the better class of Negroes than this tendency to
ignore utterly their existence. The law-abiding hard-working
inhabitants of the Thirtieth Ward are aroused to righteous
indignation when they see that the word Negro carries most
Philadelphians' minds to the alleys of the Fifth Ward or the
police courts." W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A
Social Study (1899; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1996), 310-
20 Mia Bay, "'The World Was Thinking Wrong about Race': The
Philadelphia Negro and Nineteenth-Century Science," in W.
E. B. DuBois, Race, and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and
Its Legacy, ed. Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 52.
David Levering Lewis similarly suggests that The Philadelphia
Negro study was founded on "the novel triad of race-class-
economics." David Levering Lewis, W. L. B. Du Bois, vol. 1,
Biography ofa Race,1868- i919 (New York: Henry Holt,
1993), 208.
21 Having completed his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1895, and having

taught for two years at Wilberforce University, Du Bois was
then hired by the University of Pennsylvania as an assistant in
sociology to complete a study of Philadelphia's growing
African American population.
22 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 4-
23 WE. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward the

Autobiography o fa Race Concept (1940), in W. E. B. Du
Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of
America, 1986), 596.
24 Ibid.
25 Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue, "Introduction: The

Context of The Philadelphia Negro: The City, the Settlement
House Movement, and the Rise of the Social Sciences," in W.
Its Legacy, ed. Katz and Sugrue (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 24. In her compelling reading of
The Philadelphia Negro as an antiracist sociological study
struggling to find methodological form, Mia Bay argues that
Du Bois, like other African American intellectuals of the late-
nineteenth century, had to craft his own version of ethnology,
rejecting the tenets of Social Darwinism that placed blacks at
the primitive end of an evolutionary scale threatened by the
encroachments of "fitter," stronger races. According to Bay,
"the Darwinian laws governing race development heralded
nothing short of the extinction of American blacks, a
prediction not uncommon in 189os social science." In order to
challenge an essentialized rendition of the Negro's "primitive"
status, African American intellectuals throughout the
nineteenth century often turned to Christian theories of
monogenesis, which upheld the creation of all mankind from a
single genesis, in order to counter racialist views of
polygenesis, which argued for the separate creation of the
races. To account for racial distinctions, the proponents of
monogenesis turned to environmental influence, as opposed to
racialists, who claimed that such differences were biologically
determined, innate, and immutable. How then, could the
scientifically minded Du Bois simultaneously challenge
biological racialism without resorting to the religious
arguments of many of his African American colleagues?
According to Bay, "DuBois's empiricism in The Philadelphia
Negro shows him opposing both the biblically based ethnology
of his African American contemporaries and the `fantastic
theories' of his white colleagues." His empiricism also situated
Du Bois at the forefront of new sociological study. Bay, "'The
World Was Thinking Wrong about Race."' 45,44,48-
26 Bay, "'The World Was Thinking Wrong about Race,' " 49; and
Katz and Sugrue, "Introduction," 13-
27 Following from the instructions Du Bois includes in appendix

A of The Philadelphia Negro, in which he advises researchers
that the category for institutions "includes all institutions
conducted by Negroes wholly or partially, or wholly or
partially in the interest of the Negroes; as e.g., churches,
missions, clubs, shops, stands, stores, agencies, societies,
associations, halls, newspapers, etc.," one can surmise that in
his slightly later study, all such institutions are similarly
African American-owned and operated. Du Bois, The
Philadelphia Negro, 410-
28 This photograph can be identified by cross-referencing it with

number 13 in The Negro American Family. In that text, it is
attributed to A. J. Williams and dated i9o9. The photograph is
identical to number 300 in Du Bois's i9oo album, Negro Life in
Georgia, U. S.A., and thus I am fairly certain that it has been
misdated in the later text. This leaves the photographer
somewhat in question, but it would appear that A. J. Williams
also took at least two of the photographs included in the i9oo
albums. Number 332 in Negro Life in Georgia, U. S.A. is
identified as number ii, depicting Negro city tenements in
Atlanta, in The Negro American Family, and it is also
attributed to A. J. Williams and dated i9o9. W. E. B. Du Bois,
ed., The Negro American Family (Atlanta: Atlanta University
Press, 19o8 ).
29 In The Negro American Family, Du Bois notes, "The poor

drainage of many of the hollows between the hills where these
alleys lie gives rise to much stagnant water, pools and the like,
and the unfinished sewer system often leaves masses of filthy
sediment near these homes." Ibid., 59-
30 See chapters 7 and 8, "Of the Black Belt" and "Of the Quest
of the Golden Fleece" in Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 83-
99, 100-18- See also Du Bois, The Negro American Family.
31 Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Dover,
1971). Lewis Hine, a later photographer working for labor
reform, also depicted children "ruined" by the strains of
industrial labor.
32 Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 53. Du Bois again

makes the comparison explicit: "Attention has lately been
directed to the tenementhouse abominations, but little has been
said of the equally pestilential and dangerous alley" (58).
33 Thanks to Beth Freeman, whose insightful comments helped

point my thoughts in this direction.
34 Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 52.
35 Ibid., 8o-8i.
36 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 7. Du Bois would reiterate

these sentiments, almost verbatim, in The Negro Ames ican
Family. Describing members of a wealthy elite, Du Bois states:
"As representing the best, there is good argument for calling
these at least as characteristic of the race, as the alley hovels.
A race has a right to be judged by its best." Du Bois, The
Negro American Family, 65.
37 Laura Wexler, "Black and White and Color: American

Photographs at the Turn of the Century," Prospects 13 (winter
1988): 369.
38 Joel Williamson studies these laws in New People:

Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York:
Free Press, 1980). See especially chapter 2, "Changeover,
1850-1915," 61-io9.
39 See Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black

Elite 1880-5920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
199o), esp. 149-181-
4o Nannie H. Burroughs, "Not Color but Character," Voice of

the Negro 1, 6 (1904): 277. Citing Howard Rabinowitz's study
of the late nineteenth century, Joel Williamson states: "In
Nashville there was a formally organized `Blue Vein Society'
whose members were required to be light enough to make
visible the blueness of the veins beneath their skins."
Williamson, New People, 82.
41 Burroughs, "Not Color but Character," 279-
42 Ibid.
43 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 310-11-
44 Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 37. Du Bois proclaims:

"The truth remains: sexual immorality is probably the greatest
single plague spot among Negro Americans, and its greatest
cause is slaveryand the present utter disregard of a black
woman's virtue and self-respect, both in law court and custom
in the South" (41).
45 Bay, "'The World Was Thinking Wrong about Race,' " 52.
46 As Mia Bay has suggested of The Philadelphia Negro, "Some

of the book's most striking internal contradictions arise from its
author's unsuccessful struggle to blend his study's empirical
results with his own Victorian outlook and elitism." Ibid., 53
47 Making utterly apparent his familiarity with the Rogues'

Gallery of criminal mug shots, Du Bois suggests of "grade
four": "Their nucleus consists of a class of professional
criminals, who do not work, figure in the rogues' galleries of a
half-dozen cities, and migrate here and there." Du Bois, The
Philadelphia Negro, 312.
48 Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 37-
49 Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership,

Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
5o Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 72 n. 5-
51 Ibid., 67-71, 72 n. 5.
52 Ibid., 70. In The Negro American Family, Du Bois quotes

Kelly Miller's discussion of the disproportionate number of
African American women to men in the cities as a factor
leading to sexual immorality. Du Bois, The Negro American
Family, 36-37-
53 As Kevin Gaines has said of Du Bois's early work, his image

of a black middle class is fundamentally patriarchal:
"Patriarchal authority remained the crucial criterion of black
bourgeois stability." Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 169.
54 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 72 n. 5-
55 Ibid., 195-96.
56 Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 38-
57 In her analysis of Du Bois's use of photographs in the Crisis,

Da yla nne English suggests that the middle-class African
American man functioned for Du Bois as "visual
confirmation" of racial uplift, an ideology that, English argues,
was increasingly inflected bythe logics of positive eugenics in
the 192os and 1930s. Daylanne English, "W. E. B. DuBois's
Family Crisis," American Literature 72, 2 (2000): 303-4, 297,
308-
58 In A Voice from the South (1892), Anna Julia Cooper would

proclaim: "The atmosphere of homes is not rarer and purer
and sweeter than are the mothers in those homes. A race is but
a total of families. The nation is the aggregate of its homes."
Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892; New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 29.
59 The photograph can be identified by comparing it to a slightly

different view of the family and home in The Negro
American Family. Here the photograph is identified as "No.
37-Residence of a Negro lawyer, Atlanta (photo. by Askew)."
The photograph of a house identified as "No. 36-Residence

of a Negro minister, Decatur (photo. by Askew)" in The
Negro American Family is also included in Du Bois's Negro
Life in Georgia, U.S.A. As several other photographs in Du
Bois's 1900 collection closely resemble these two images, I
think it is quite likely that Askew made many of the
photographs of well-to-do homes and families included in the
1900 albums. Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 8o.
6o Booker T. Washington, "The Awakening of the Negro,"

Atlantic Monthly, September 1896, 328.
61 This photograph can be identified by crossreferencing with

an image in Herman "Skip" Mason Jr., ed., Going against the
Wind: A Pictorial History ofAfrican-Americans in Atlanta
(Atlanta: APEX Museum, 1992).
62 According to Carol Mavor, "For the Victorians, who saw to it

that a woman restrained the sexuality of her hair through
chignons and other elaborate (pinned-up) styles of the period,
the brushing out of a woman's hair meant letting her sexuality
out." Carol Mavor, Pleasures Taken: Per formances of
Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Durham, N. C.:
Duke University Press, 1995), io9. While Mavor argues that
hair was "an overdetermined sign in the Victorian sexual
imagination" (57), one might also add that hair similarly
functioned as an overdetermined sign in Victorian racial
taxonomies, and hair continues to be a political sign in
contemporary acts of identification and identity. To briefly
note one example, see Lorna Simpson's contemporary
photographic works with braids, and Deborah Willis's
discussion of those pieces, in Deborah Willis, Untitled54:
Lorna Simpson (San Francisco: Friends of Photography 1992).
63 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 406.
64 Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 65. In the detailed

descriptions of three such homes that follow this general
categorization, it is noted that each of the homes has a piano in
the parlor (65-66).
65 Washington, "The Awakening of the Negro," 322.
66 In "The Talented Tenth," Du Bois counters that Washington

has at his "right hand helping him in a noble work" many
college-trained men and women who are not "studying French
grammars in the midst of weeds, or buying pianos for dirty
cabins." W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Talented Tenth" (1903), in W.
E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York:
Library of America, 1986), 86o.
67 Booker T. Washington, "Industrial Education; Will It Solve

the Negro Problem (Answered Each Month by the Greatest
Thinkers of the Black Race)," Colored American Magazine,
February 1904, 87-88-
68 Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 66.
69 As I noted in chapter i, Kaja Silverman discusses the racially

and culturally laden contexts of the "screen" in Jacques
Lacan's rendition of the visual. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold
of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996). See
especially chapter 6, "The Screen," 195-227-
7o Even as the so-called New Woman emerged as a figure

marking white women's newfound independence outside the
bounds of marriage, family, and home, Du Bois held up for the
"New Negro Woman" the patriarchal sphere of domesticity as
the acme of success. Carroll SmithRosenberg, Disorderly
Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 245-96. While Du Bois was not
alone in challenging racial hierarchies by reinscribing
antebellum, class-based gender norms at the turn of the
century-Anna Julia Cooper and Pauline Hopkins pursued
similar antiracist political strategies -African American women
writers did not celebrate the "purity" of the "New ["true"]
Negro" woman by first denigrating her sexuality and then
harnessing it to African American patriarchal discipline.
Coope r, A Voice from the South; Pauline Hopkins, The
Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988). For assessments of the political work
of these writers, see Corby, Reconstructing Womanhood, and
Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The
Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992). See also my discussion of
Anna Julia Cooper and Pauline Hopkins in Shawn Michelle
Smith, American Archives: Gender; Race, and Class in Visual
Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999),142-
44,150-56,187-205-
4- Spectacles of Whiteness

Autobiography o fa Race Concept (1940), in W. E. B. Du Bois:
Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America,
1986), 602-3.
2 Ibid., 603-
3 According to Grace Elizabeth Hale, the lynching of Sam Hose

consolidated "a new and horrifying pattern" of modern
lynching as public spectacle. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making
Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940
(New York: Pantheon, 1998), 209.
4 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mob Rule in New Orleans (19oo),

reprinted in Ida B. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings: "Southern
Horrors," À Red Record," "Mob Rule in New Orleans" (New
York: Arno, 1969), 45-
S Louis P. LeVin, "The Detective's Report," Richmond Planet,

October 14, 1899, 1.
6 This account of the lynching of Samuel Wilkes is taken from

Leon F. Litwack, "Hellhounds," in Without Sanctuary:
Lynching Photography in America, by James Allen et al. (Santa
Fe, N.M.: Twin Palms, 2000), 10. The lynching of Samuel
Wilkes was widely publicized. Filipino independence fighters
evoked it as an emblem of U.S. racism. According to the
Richmond Planet, "A placard written in Spanish, was
discovered nailed to a tree a few miles north of Angeles,
Philippine Islands. The placard was sent by Colonel Smith to
Major General MacArthur, and the following is a literal
translation of it: `To the Colored American Soldier: It is without
honour that you are spilling your costly blood. Your masters
have thrown you in the most iniquitous fight with double
purposes. In order to be you the instrument of their ambition.
And also your hard work will make soon the extinction of your
race. Your friends the Filipinos give you this good warning.
You must consider your situation and your history. And take
charge that the blood of your brothers Sam Hose and Gray
proclaim vengeance..' " Richmond Planet, November 1899, 8.
7 LeVin, "The Detective's Report."
8 According to Clarence Bacote, Du Bois "was held in awe by

stude nts [at Atlanta University] because of his cane and
gloves, which he had acquired the habit of using during his
student days in Germany." Clarence A. Bacote, The Story
ofAtlanta University: A Century of Service, ,f865- -1965
(Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1969), 132.
9 Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the

Age ofjim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), 12.
1o The lynching of Samuel Wilkes functions, for Du Bois, as an

exponential magnification of the discord of black embodiment
under a white supremacist gaze that he first felt as the object
of a young white girl's scornful glance.
ii Elizabeth Alexander, "'Can You Be BLACK and Look at

This?': Reading the Rodney King Video(s)," in Black Male:
Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American
Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of
American Art, 1994), 105-6.
12 Ibid.
13 LeVin, "The Detective's Report."

14 Hazel V. Corby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The
Emergence of the AfroAmerican Woman Novelist (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 112; Martha Hodes,
White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the
NineteenthCentury South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1997), 200202; Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape,
and Lynching: The Red Record ofAmerican Literature, 5890-
1952 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 26, 38-39;
Hale, Making Whiteness, 199-239
15 W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Souls of White Folk" (1920), in W. E.

B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library
of America, 1986), 923-
16 Ibid., 927.
17 Ibid., 923
18 James Allen, afterword to Without Sanctuary: Lynching

Photography in America, by Allen et al. (Santa Fe, N.M.: Twin
Palms, 2000), 204-
19 Deborah E. McDowell, "Viewing the Remains: A Polemic on

Death, Spectacle, and the [Black] Family," in The Familial
Gaze, ed. Marianne Hirsch (Hanover, N.H.: University Press
of New England, 1999), 154, 168.
20 In this chapter, I will not attempt to offer a complete analysis

of lynching or of antilynching crusades; indeed, I can
undertake this investigation only because other necessary and
important studies have examined and are examining the
historical rise of lynching, its social and economic effects, its
psychological consequences, and African American
resistance to its reign of terror.
Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century reports and essays
on lynching include Ida B. Wells, Selected Works of Ida B.
Wells-Barnett, comp. Trudier Harris (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991), which includes Southern Horrors:
Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), The Reason Why the
ColoredAmericanIs Not in the World's Columbian Exposition
( 1893) , and A Red Record (1895); Wells-Barnett, On
Lynchings, which includes Southern Horrors (1892),A Red
Record (1895), and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900); Jane
Addams and Ida B. Wells, Lynching and Rape: An Exchange
of Views, ed. Bettina Aptheker (New York: American
Institute for Marxist Studies, 1977); Frederick Douglass, "Why
Is the Negro Lynched?," in The Lesson of the Hour (1894), in
The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S.
Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1955) 4:491-523;
and Henry McNeal Turner, "An Emigration Convention"
(1893), in Respect Black: The Writings and Speeches ofHenry
McNeal Turner, comp. and ed. Edwin S. Redkey(NewYork:
Arno, 1971),145-6o. Recent analyses of lynching, antilynching
campaigns, representations of lynching, and gender and
lynching include Alexander, "'Can You Be BLACK and Look
at This?' "; James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching
Photography in America (Santa Fe, N.M.: Twin Palms, 2000);
Gail Beder- man, " `Civilization,' the Decline of Middle-Class
Manliness, and Ida B. Wells's Antilynching Campaign (1892-
94)," Radical History Review 52 (1992): 5-30; Hazel V.
Carby, "'On the Threshold of Woman's Era': Lynching,
Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory," in "Race,"
Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986), 301-16; Carby,
Reconstructing Womanhood; Donald L. Grant, The Anti-
lynching Movement, 1883-1932 (San Francisco: R and E
Research Associates, 1975); Gunning, Race, Rape, and
Lynching; Hale, Making Whiteness; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall,
Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's
Campaign against Lynching, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993); Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness:
Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Hodes, White
Women, Black Men; Litwack, "Hellhounds"; Litwack, Trouble
in Mind; Ashraf Rushdy, "Exquisite Corpse," Transition 83
(2000): 7o-77; Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women,
Racism, and Histoi y (New York: Verso, 1992); Robyn
Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and
Gender (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), esp.
81-113; and Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade
against Lynching, _19o9-i95o (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1980).
21 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror Slavery, and

Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997),3-
22 Richard Dyer, "White," Screen 29, 4 (1988): 44-64-
23 Allen et al., Without Sanctuary.
24 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 3. Rushdy suggests that it is, in

fact, important to represent the violated black body. Disturbed
by the absence of photographs in the reporting on the recent
lynching of James Byrd in Texas, Rushdy cites the powerful
effects produced by the published images of Emmet Till's
mutilated body in 1955, arguing: "The past teaches us that
images of terror-used responsibly-can foster a climate in
which terror is no longer tolerated." Bushdy, "Exquisite
Corpse," 77-
25 Roberta Smith, "An Ugly Legacy Lives On, Its Glare

Unsoftened by Age," New York Times, January 13, 2000, 8.
26 Alexander, "'Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?"'
27 See Pat Ward Williams's photographic work

Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock (1987), reproduced in Lucy R.
Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America
(New York: Pantheon, 1990), 37-
28 Crisis so, 2 (1915): 71. The Crisis cites Bishop Gailor, writing
in a Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper. See also Litwack,
"Hellhounds," 11.
29 According to Grace Elizabeth Hale, such "blatantly public,

actively promoted lynching" defined a new era of "spectacle
lynching" in the United States from 1890 to 1940. Hale,
Making Whiteness, 2o6-7-
3o Lynching postcards fell under section 3893 of the Revised

Statutes which forbid "lewd, obscene, and lascivious"
materials to be sent through the mail.
31 According to James Allen's notes for Without Sanctuary, Joe

Meyers was an oiler at the Bellmead car department and a
resident of Waco, Texas. Allen et al., Without Sanctuary, 174
n. 25-
32 Rushdy, "Exquisite Corpse," 70.
33 Litwack, "Hellhounds," ro-ii.
34 Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 177-
35 Henry McNeal Turner, "An Emigration Convention," 153.

See also Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 177-
36 The privilege of the gaze, of looking and seeing, was a highly

regulated racial privilege, one heightened by gender; eye
contact with a white woman could be enough to evoke the
fury of a lynch mob against an African American man. See
Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 36.
37 James Cameron, A Time of Terror: A Survivor's Story (Black

Classic Press, 1994), quoted in Allen et al., Without Sanctuary,
176 n. 31-
38 As James Allen has said, "I believe the photographer was

more than a perceptive spectator at lynchings. Too often they
compulsively composed silvery tableaux (natures mortes)
positioning and lighting corpses as if they were game birds
shot on the wing." Allen et al., Without Sanctuary, 204.
39 John E. White, "The Need of a Southern Program on the

Negro," South Atlantic Quarterly 6 (1907):184-85, quoted in
Litwack, "Hellhounds," 22.
4o As Grace Elizabeth Hale has recently argued, in lynchings

and representations of lynchings "civilization became savagery
to defeat savages": "In the process of giving its readers the
sensationalized details of the spectacle, the papers blurred if not
obliterated the fine distinction between a ritual of civilization
taming savagery and actual savagery itself." Hale, Making
Whiteness, 230, 214. See also Bederman, "'Civilization.'"
41 Ida B. Wells reproduced a lynching postcard, made by W. R.

Martin, "Traveling Photographer," front and back, depicting a
lynching in Clanton, Alabama, August 1891, inA Red Record:
Tabulated Statistics andAlleged Causes of Lynchings in the
United States, 1892-1893-i894 (1895), reprinted in Wells-
Barnett, On Lynchings, 55-56. In an article that presents
portions of an address on lynching given by John Haynes
Holmes, the Crisis also reproduced a postcard of a lynching in
Alabama sent to Holmes as a threat. In his speech, Holmes
describes yet another photograph of a lynching: "Take the
Oklahoma lynching. The only thing that I could think of as I
glanced at this picture was a photograph I had seen of
huntsmen returning with the animal which had been shot,
proud of the achievement of their marksmenship. I believe
that the some spirit which makes possible the photograph of
the men gathered around the moose or the deer which has
been shot makes possible the photograph of the Negro shot to
death in Oklahoma. In both cases the huntsmen are proud that
they have shot an animal, and therefore they stand before the
camera in order that the evidence of the story maybe sure. In
other words, this is another expression of the lawlessness of
the American people." "Holmes on Lynching," Crisis 3, 3
(1912): io9; postcard reproduced on iro.
42 James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored

Man (1912), ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Penguin,
1990), 136.
43 I am borrowing this term from Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 12.
44 Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, 137.
45 Ibid., 139-
46 Ibid., 144-
47 As Ida B. Wells and others after her have demonstrated,

however, a white woman need not be anywhere present for
the specter of white womanhood to function powerfully to
incite mob fury against an African American man, to haunt
the spectacle of racial violence.
48 Wells, Crusade forJustice.
49 Wells, Southern Horrors, 14, in Selected Works, 30. Canby,

"'On the Threshold of Woman's Era,'" 3o8; Hale, Making
Whiteness, 234; Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 205.
5o Allen et al., Without Sanctuary, 185 n. 57-
51 Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 200.
52 See figures 89 and 9o in Allen et al., Without Sanctuary.
53 Ibid., 178-79 n.37,179-8o n.38.
54 See Laura Wexler's fascinating analysis of the white woman's

"innocent eye," a culturally encoded "averted gaze" through
which white middleclass women at the turn of the century could
reenvision scenes of violence, imperialism, and white supremacy
through a lens of white middleclass domestic sentiment. Laura
Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S.
Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2000).
55 Allen et al., Without Sanctuary, 176 n. 31-
56 "Bo," or the image's bearer, was apparently a member of the

KKK, for the inscription also reads, "Klan 4th, Joplin, Mo. 33-
"
57 1 am thinking of Roland Barthes's evocative statements about

the nature of photography in Camera Lucida: "The photograph
is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body,
which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch
me, who am here." Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida:
Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 8o.
58 Geoffrey Batchen, "Vernacular Photographies," History of

Photography 24, 2 (2000): 6.
59 Jacquie Jones, "How Come Nobody Told Me about the

Lynching?" in Picturing Us: AfiicanAmerican Identity in
Photography, ed. Deborah Willis (New York: New Press,
1994) 156.
6o Ibid., 154-
61 Once again, see Cameron, A Time of Terror, quoted in Allen

et al., Without Sanctuary, 176 n. 31. David Marriott also
discusses this photograph, as well as James Cameron's
experience of this lynching, in On Black Men. David Marriott,
On Black Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000),
1-6.
62 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96.
63 Dyer, "White," 44-46.
64 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the

Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979)-
65 For a compelling reading of the convergence of "specular"

and "panoptic" power in both antebellum slavery and
postbellum lynching, see Wiegman, American Anatomies, 35-
42. One refinement I would make to Wiegman's fascinating
analysis is simply to note that in most of the photographs of
lynch mobs and their victims, white spectators are,
remarkably, not veiled or masked. Thus I would suggest that it
was not only a "homogenized, known-but-never-individuated"
form of white power that lynching reproduced (Wiegman,
American Anatomies, 39) but also an explicitly embodied
form of white power that marked white men and women as
the particular bearers of an otherwise diffuse power.
66 Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 176-208.
67 David Marriott has similarly argued that lynching photographs

provide both "a consolidation of racist community and a
posture of whiteness." Marriott, On Black Men, 6.
68 Wells-Barnett, A Red Record, in On Lynchings, 72.
69 According to literary scholar Ann duCille, the image of a

biracial individual could enable an author "to insinuate into the
consciousness of white readers the humanity of a people they
otherwise constructed as subhuman-beyond the pale of white
comprehension." Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex,
Text, and Tradition in Black Womens Fiction (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), 7-8-
7o The album form itself may encourage such identification,

especially if the viewer reads the Du Bois albums as
(extended) family albums. As Ann Burlein has argued, "The
family album and the power of the conventions that shape
family photography engender an affiliative look," a look that
encourages "identification," and even identification with an
"ideological point of view," regardless of whether or not the
viewer's own "family arrangements really do look like this
family." Ann Burlein, "Focusing on the Family: Family Pictures
and the Politics of the Religious Right," in The Familial Gaze,
ed. Marianne Hirsch (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of
New England, 1999), 316.
71 Wells-Barnett, A Red Record, in On Lynchings, 13.
72 As Robert Young describes it, colonial desire is constructed

precisely around the dynamic of the colonist's simultaneous
repulsion from and attraction to the other. Robert J. C. Young,
Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New
York: Routledge, 1995), 149-52.
73 Eric Lott, "Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of

Blackface Minstrelsy," Representations 39 (summer 1992):
36-37. According to Kobena Mercer, whiteness is "a
culturally constructed ethnic identity historically contingent
upon the violent denial and disavowal of `difference..' "
Kobena Mercer, "Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs
of Robert Mapplethorpe," in Welcome to the Jungle: New
Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge,
1994) 215-
74 This dynamic resembles the "shock effect" described by

Kobena Mercer: "The affective displacement of the fixed
boundaries that necessarily anchor ego in ideology." Mercer,
"Reading Racial Fetishism," 200-201.
75 This is how Hortense Spillers describes the function of racist

categories and expletives. See Hortense J. Spillers, "Notes on
an Alternative Model -Neither/Nor," in The Difference
Within: Feminism and Critical Theory, ed. Elizabeth Meese
and Alice Parker (Philadelphia: J. Benjamins,1989), 166-67-
76 Homi K. Bhabha, "Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and

the Postcolonial Prerogative," in The Location of Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1994),47-
Epilogue: The Archivist in the Archive

Autobiography o fa Race Concept (1940), in W. E. B. Du Bois:
Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America,
1986), 603.
2 As noted previously, in the January 1912 issue of the Crisis, Du

Bois reproduced a photographic lynching postcard with part of
an essay by John Haynes Holmes on lynching. The photograph
shows a large group of white men, carefully arranged in a
semicircle, some seated, but most standing around an African
American man's corpse stretched across the ground at their
feet. The white men look directly out into the camera, some
leaning into the semicircle slightly to make their faces visible.
The verso side of the card is stamped and postmarked, and
addressed to "Rev. John H. Holmes, Pastor Unitarian Church,
New York City." The typed message reads: "This is the way we
do them down here. The last lynching has not been put on card
yet. Will put you on our regular mailing list. Expect one a
month on the average." According to Holmes, the initial
recipient of this threatening envoy, the photographic lynching
postcard demonstrates white America's continued incapacity to
see the African American man as a man. See "Holmes on
Lynching," Crisis 3, 3 (1912): 109-12.
3 Darwin T. Turner, "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Theory of a

Black Aesthetic," in The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined,
ed. Victor A. Kramer (New York: AMS, 1987), 11.
4 Lisa Gail Collins, The Art of History: African American

Women Artists Engage the Past (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 2002), 3-4
5 Henry Louis Gates Jr., "The Face and Voice of Blackness," in

Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 171o-194o,
by Guy C. McElroy (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 199o), xliv.
Another important strand of scholarship emphasizes music and
sound as Du Bois's chosen tools of African American self-
articulation. See Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the
Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987), and Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the
Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap,
1993)
6 Du Bois himself says as much in Dusk of Dawn. Looking back

over his years as editor of the Crisis, he states, "I sought to
encourage the graphic arts not only by magazine covers with
Negro themes and faces, but as often as I could afford, I
portrayed the faces and features of colored folk. One cannot
realize today how rare that was in 1910. The colored papers
carried few or no illustrations; the white papers none. In many
great periodicals, it was the standing rule that no Negro portrait
was to appear and that rule still holds in some American
periodicals. Through our `Men of the Month,' our children's
edition and our education edition, we published large numbers
of most interesting and intriguing portraits" (752).
7 John Henry Adams, "Rough Sketches: A Study of the Features

of the New Negro Woman," Voice of the Negro 1, 8 (1904):
323-41; John Henry Adams, "Rough Sketches: `The New
Negro Man,"' Voice of the Negro i, 10 (19(4): 447-52; and
John Henry Adams, "Rough Sketches: William Edward
Burghardt DuBois, Ph. D.," Voice of the Negro 2, 3 (1905):
176-81.
8 Adams, "Rough Sketches: William Edward Burghardt DuBois,

Ph. D.," 176.
9 Adams, "Rough Sketches: `The New Negro Man,'" 447, 448-
1o See also Claudia Tate's provocative reading of this

photograph in her conclusion, "Plenitude in Black Textuality,"
to Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols
of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 186-88.
i i Adams, "Rough Sketches: William Edward Burghardt DuBois,

Ph. D.," 179-
12 Adams, "Rough Sketches: `The New Negro Man,'" 452.
13 WE. B. Du Bois, "The American Negro at Paris" (1900), in

Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others,
comp. and ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus
Thomson Organization, 1982), 1:88.
14 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,

trans. Eric Preno- witz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), 4 n. 1.
15 Elizabeth Edwards suggests that we also look for images that

resist a unifying narrative within institutional archives
themselves. See her "Observations from the Coal-Face," in
Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology, and Museums
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1-23-
16 Derrida, Archive Fever, 16-17, 18, 36. Tony Bennett has also
argued that "more than history is at stake in how the past is
represented. The shape of the thinkable future depends on
how the past is portrayed and on how its relations to the
present are depicted." Tony Bennett, The Birth of the
Museum: Histoiy, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995),
162.
17 Derrida, Archive Fever, 7.

ARCHIVAL SOURCES
Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, Georgia
Long-Rucker-Aiken Family Photographs Collection
Auburn Avenue Research Center, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library,

Atlanta, Georgia
Matthews Collection
Library of Congress, Washington, D. C., Prints and Photographs

Division
Daniel Murray Collection
General Collection
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution,

Washington, D. C.
Photographic History Collection
Newark Museum Archives, Newark, New Jersey
Against the Odds: African American Artists and the

Harmon Foundation
Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge,

Massachusetts
Robert W. WoodruffLibrary, Atlanta University Center
Atlanta, Georgia
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Georgia
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Royal Anthropological Institute, London
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New

York Public Libr nz y
General Research Division
Photographs and Prints Division
Skip Mason's Archives, Ellenwood, Georgia
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University of Massachusetts, Amherst
W. E. B. Du Bois Papers
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A

John Hope Franklin Center Book

Photography on the Color Line i

The Art of Scientific Propaganda 43

"Families of Undoubted Respectability" 77

Spectacles of Whiteness: The Photography of Lynching

The Archivist in the Archive 147

PLATE i. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes,

PLATE 2. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes,

PLATE 3. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes,

PLATE 4. Bazoline Estelle Usher, Atlanta University student. W.

PLATE 5. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois,

PLATE 6. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes,

PLATE 7. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes,

PLATE 8. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes,

PLATE 9. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes,

PLATE io. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois,

PLATE ii. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois,

PLATE 12. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois,

PLATE 13. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. W. E. B. Du Bois,

PLATE 14. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. The Summit

PLATE 15. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U. S.A.

PLATE 16. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A.

PLATE 17. Dr. McDougald's drug store. W. E. B. Du Bois,

PLATE 18. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A.

PLATE r9. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes,

PLATE 20. Interior view of grocery store. W. E. B. Du Bois,

PLATE 21. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, U. S.A.

PLATE 22. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. The home of an

PLATE 23. David Tobias Howard, an undertaker, his mother,

PLATE 24. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Life in Georgia, US.A.

i. Thomas E. Askew, photographer, Atlanta, Georgia. W. E. B.

2. Henry A. Rucker, internal revenue collector, Atlanta,

3. The American Negro Exhibit at the i9oo Paris Exposition ......

4. Stereograph, Keystone View Company. Trocadero entrance

6. Stereograph, Underwood and Underwood. Natives of

7. Cartoon, "Darkies' Day at the Fair," Worlds Fair Puck ...... 18

8. W. E. B. Du Bois at the i9oo Paris Exposition ...... i9

9. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.

io. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia,

11. Daguerreotype by Joseph T. Zealy, for Louis Agassiz.

12. Daguerreotype by Joseph T. Zealy, for Louis Agassiz.

13. Photograph by John Lamprey. Frontal view of a Malayan

14. Photograph by John Lamprey. Profile view of a Malayan

15. Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, vol. r, plate 62

16. Francis Galton's "standard photograph" of himself ...... 52

17. Composite portraits by Francis Galton. "The Jewish Type"

i8. Portraits of young African American men and women ...... 56

i9. Portraits of young African American men and women ...... 58

20. Portraits of young African American men and women ...... 59

21. Bazoline Estelle Usher, Atlanta University student. W. E. B.

22. Bazoline Estelle Usher, Atlanta University student. W. E. B.

23. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia,

24. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia,

25. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types ofAmerican Negroes, Georgia,

26. W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.

27. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. Henry Hugh Proctor,

28. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. Henry Hugh Proctor,

29. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. Mamie Westmorland,

30. Photograph by Thomas E. Askew. Thomas E. Askew

31. Cartoon, "A Step in the Darwinian Development," Harper's

32. Drawing by Sol Eytinge Jun., "Wedding Trip of the TwinsOff