Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941

Introduction: The Second Amenia Conference and Black Intellectual Genealogy

Changing Faiths in Labor Politics, Social Science, and Race Leadership

Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoned free. Not for me—I shall die in my bonds—but for fresh young souls who have not known the night and waken to the morning; a morning when men ask of the workman, not Is he white? but Can he work? When men ask artists, not Are they black? but Do they know? Some morning this may be, long, long years to come. But now there wails, on that dark shore within the Veil, the same deep voice, Thou Shalt Forego!

—W. E. B. Du Bois

In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois created a metaphor to describe the systematic separation of the races. At the symbolic level, the Veil did more than speak to the simple fact of racial segregation, it was its own commentary on the nature of the segregation. But even as the veil worked to segregate, it was also translucent and, as such, it gave blacks the gift of seeing white America while simultaneously remaining invisible to white America. As often as not, this gift was a curse. Du Bois was convinced, however, that the veil could be lifted; and he was equally convinced that black intellectuals were those most suited for the task.

Although Du Bois looms as a critical figure in the history that follows, he is not the central character. Rather, this book presents a history of Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche—three fresh young souls who, though all too familiar with night and too experienced in America’s racial ways to waken to the morning, still strove to confront the veil that rendered workers and artists black or white. Teaching at Howard University from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, Harris, Frazier, and Bunche were pioneering social scientists and worked steadily, if in different ways, to reorient America’s obsession with the Negro problem away from an answer based upon racial solutions toward one grounded in class dynamics. Their intense economic determinism struck some of their colleagues and many of the next generation of intellectuals as quixotic, but in the interwar era the three consistently attracted an audience for their ideas. Harris and Frazier, in particular, produced leading scholarship, and Bunche became an icon for the possibilities afforded by American liberalism. Harris was the most important black economist of his generation, Frazier was an influential, if at times controversial, sociologist from the start of his career until his death, and Bunche, eventually the most well known and influential of the three, was the first black to receive a doctorate in political science.¹ The trio’s social science scholarship, their political activism, and the role that the racial veil played in their lives comprise the heart of this study. The legacies they left help us understand the often contradictory and always complex demands placed upon and claimed by race leaders and intellectuals in the twentieth century.

This history also comments on how deeply intertwined race dynamics are with class dynamics. As the preface points out, race and class have always been interconnected. Their intersection, however, has been anything but stable. In fact, following World War I a bevy of new ideas emerged that demonstrated the extremely fluid nature of race and class interactions.

Domestic economic criticism of American democracy reached its high point in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1919, the Bolsheviks formed the Communist International (Comintern) with the explicit purpose of furthering a world revolution. On these shores, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) emerged as an amalgamation of smaller groups that split from the Socialist Party (SP). When it came to the issue of blacks, however, the earliest CPUSA line was remarkably like that of the SP and another early radical organization, the Industrial Workers of the World: racial discord was merely a manifestation of class inequality and antagonism.² Over the course of the 1920s, however, the CPUSA’S approach to blacks changed. With an increasing acknowledgment that racial antipathy among white workers presented a significant obstacle to organizing blacks into unions, the CPUSA pursued a variety of strategies to improve the lives of black workers. The first major attempt came in 1925 in the form of the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC), an organization openly sympathetic to black nationalism and geared to black labor.

Developed at least partly in response to the growing popularity of Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the ANLC sought to appeal to blacks’ collective culture and memory and make evident to the black masses that labor offered the best avenue to better days.³ The bourgeois values of the black leadership class and the imperialist rhetoric of the UNIA held no value for ANLC activists. Unfortunately, there never were many ANLC activists to spread their word, and the ANLC folded in 1930.⁴ Two years prior to the ANLC’S demise, however, a significant shift occurred in the Communist Party’s (CP) approach to black Americans.

This shift was in large measure advocated and then engineered in 1928 by Harry Haywood. A grandson of a former slave and a rising star in the CP, Haywood made racial issues a centerpiece of the CP agenda by convincing the Comintern to declare that blacks represented an oppressed nation within a nation. The so-called Black Belt thesis declared that blacks living in the Deep South constituted a systematically oppressed population and had a moral claim to their stolen labor and land. Furthermore, as members of a nation within a nation, southern blacks had the right to self-determination, even to the point that they could secede from the United States.⁵

This new attention to southern rural blacks went beyond a recognition of their roles as peasants in a capitalist order. Communists now openly acknowledged the unique cultural position and contribution of southern blacks. So, even before Harlem Renaissance writers like Zora Neale Hurston began to hail the folk culture of the southern rural black, communists evinced a cultural and racial fascination with this American peasant class. Black sharecropper and farmer culture was an ideal rebuttal to an oppressive and capitalist national culture. The Black Belt thesis, then, brought race and a type of cultural nationalism to the fore and wed it to the more traditional communist class thesis.⁶

As James Smethurst points out, communists’ fascination with and glorification of southern black culture came at the expense of northern urban black culture. This laboring population was, in effect, told that their culture—which, in truth, essentially migrated with them from the South in the preceding decades—did not matter and that the best way they could fight the capitalist bosses was to integrate with white workers. Going into the 1930s, then, the CPUSA race line embraced a strange mix of integration, labor politics, and cultural exceptionalism.⁷ However, it was the Black Belt thesis—the idea that there was an authentic black culture and that it was oppositional by its very nature—that captured the imagination of the CPUSA rank and file. Race and class may have been in a fluid exchange, but race and a racial essentialism were finding increased favor among communists.

For much of the late 1920s and through the 1930s, Harris, Frazier, and Bunche took a position that came very close to the early CPUSA idea that racial antagonism was a manifestation of economic forces. Maintaining this position at this time meant that they were swimming against the popular progressive tide that embraced the Black Belt thesis. This evolution in radical thought—from an unadorned class thesis to one where a romanticized notion of racial and cultural authenticity threatened to overwhelm economic analyses—made it more difficult for Harris, Frazier, and Bunche to challenge America’s orthodoxy that declared race mattered more than anything else. Complicating matters further is that although the race/class intersection was in a constant state of flux, race and class still had concrete meanings in people’s minds. As a result, Harris’s, Frazier’s, and Bunche’s class-driven ideas often ran afoul of racial codes of conduct. Different forms of racialized expectations and plain and simple racism handicapped the reception of their ideas from the start—even among populations who seemed eager to cross racial lines in search of economic justice. When these scholars interacted with political movements, fellow radical thinkers, and institutions in Washington, D.C., and beyond, they were constantly reminded of others’ absolute commitment to a racial world interpreted via racial politics. If, for some, class analyses of American society were a critical step in the march toward true democratic social progress and justice, doctrinaire race thinking always stood ready to hobble that effort.

The Second Amenia Conference

In the late spring of 1933 the final list had been drawn up and Joel E. Spingarn, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), mailed the invitations to those whom the leadership of the NAACP felt were the young leaders, or potential leaders of the race. The thirty-three individuals who accepted the invitation were to confer for three days in late August at Troutbeck, Spingarn’s estate in Amenia, New York, to discuss with perfect freedom and without publicity the present situation of the Negro race.⁸

Delegates to the Second Amenia Conference, 1933. Standing are Ralph Bunche, far left; W. E. B. Du Bois, third from left; Roy Wilkins, seventh from left; E. Franklin Frazier, eighth from left; Emmett Dorsey, center, partially obscured; James Weldon Johnson, third from right; Walter White, far right. (Library of Congress)

The twenty-two men and eleven women who comprised this next generation of race leaders were attorneys, educators, university and betterment organization administrators, and intellectuals. They were college educated and many possessed graduate and professional degrees as well. Even without the recognition afforded them by the NAACP invitation, these were people who, if they so desired, had ready access to a comfortable middle-class existence. A random sampling yields the following individuals and careers: Marion Cuthbert served as secretary for the Leadership Division of the National Board of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA); Emmett Dorsey taught political science at Howard University; Louis Redding and Edward Lovett practiced law in Delaware and Washington, D.C., respectively; Harry Greene directed the School of Education at West Virginia State College; Elmer Carter edited the National Urban League’s (NUL) journal Opportunity; Mabel Byrd worked at the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA of Washington, D.C.; Frances Williams served as secretary of the Laboratory Division of the NAACP’S National Board; Charles Houston occupied the dean’s chair at the Howard Law School; and Ira DeA. Reid directed research for the NUL.⁹ Joining this group were the three scholars whose work and activism form the nucleus of this study, economist Abram Harris, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and political scientist Ralph Bunche.

The events that unfolded at this conference made clear that the foundations of problems previously construed as racial were now being examined for their class roots. That this approach was deliberately considered by an organization whose leadership was middle class and increasingly mainstream underscores its popularity. Furthermore, that Harris, Frazier, and Bunche emerged as leaders of this conference demonstrates their commitment to an economic understanding of racial conflict and their willingness to take a lead amongst their peers to propose class-based solutions generated by social science scholarship.

This was not the first time that Spingarn had invited black leaders to his estate. In 1916, he convened the First Amenia Conference hoping that the attendees could unite and formulate a collective plan of action regarding blacks’ social and political conditions.¹⁰ The announced purpose and the timing of this conference were very deliberate. Booker T. Washington, the famed Wizard of Tuskegee and the most influential black leader in America, had died only one year earlier, and thus the opportunity was available to forge a bond between southern race leaders and the northern-dominated NAACP. While some of the gathering’s unity was cosmetic, there was a general sense that the conference resolutions closed the era of Booker T. Washington and pointed hopefully toward cooperation in the years to come.¹¹

Seventeen years later Spingarn demonstrated the same appreciation for timing. Already occupying the bottom of the wage and social scales, black Americans were particularly hard hit by the financial devastation of the Great Depression. The economic malaise of these years only exacerbated an attenuated decline in the quality of black life since the first conference. A handful of examples underscores blacks’ crisis.

Blacks were leaving the rural South in record numbers, exhausted from the hard toil of sharecropping and tenant farming, the abiding political and social repression, the physical and psychological terror of the lynch mob, and the denial of economic opportunity. Between 1914 and 1916, a labor depression, the scourge of the boll weevil, and floods simply added to the long list of accumulating reasons for blacks to try life in the North.¹²Blacks’ problems did not disappear with this move, however. Most importantly, the migration to northern cities put further burdens on an already strained labor and housing environment. In East St. Louis in 1917, no fewer than forty blacks died at the hands of white workers who were on strike at an aluminum factory. During the Red Summer of 1919, blacks fell victim to whites in twenty-five race riots, most famously in Chicago where housing tensions made for a tinderbox of anger.¹³ In 1921, somewhere between 300 and 3,000 blacks died in Tulsa when white mobs, angry over economic competition, ransacked the black business district, destroying some 1,500 homes and buildings in the process.¹⁴

Politically, things were little better. Through the use of poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literary qualifications, white registrars of voters regularly disenfranchised southern blacks. In places like Mississippi, for example, less than one-half of one percent of eligible black men were registered to vote.¹⁵ The revival of the Ku Klux Klan and its explosive growth in the 1920s directly and indirectly limited black political participation. As John Kirby points out, the Klan was so powerful by 1924 that the National Democratic Convention failed in its attempt to curtail its influence. Calvin Coolidge, running on the Republican ticket, refused to comment on the problems raised by the Klan until he was in the White House. Even then, Coolidge made no effort to curtail the Klan’s violence toward blacks. Collectively, the Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations worried little about the state of black political affairs.¹⁶

The crash of 1929 eliminated whatever economic advances some blacks might have been able to make. Black and white unemployment skyrocketed, and the welfare rolls blossomed. Blacks found times particularly tough as job shortages and racism combined. No Jobs for Niggers Until Every White Man Has a Job, became a rallying cry for southern whites. Even in such major centers as Atlanta, 65 percent of employable blacks needed public assistance.¹⁷ Herbert Hoover’s belief in volunteerism and faith that the economic downturn was part of a larger cycle that would correct itself in time meant that federal government did little at first to address the depression. By the time Hoover realized the scope of the financial catastrophe, it was too late to fix it. Hoover’s inability to solve the country’s fiscal woes allowed Franklin Roosevelt to sweep into office with his promise of a New Deal.¹⁸

The group of young men and women Spingarn brought together at Amenia in 1933, however, concluded that there was no guarantee that Roosevelt’s New Deal program would alleviate the country’s plight, much less blacks’ troubles. Given these circumstances, this was a group that was prepared to consider new sociopolitical approaches to seemingly intractable social and economic dilemmas.¹⁹

As a result, the goal of the Second Amenia Conference was markedly different from that of the first. This time, Spingarn was not searching for a new and united leadership regarding only racial issues. Spingarn was aware that many blacks were dissatisfied with the very organization he had helped establish and now led. The NAACP, many believed, had focused too much on political liberties and civil rights and had proved unable to develop any plan to eliminate black poverty and unemployment.²⁰ Even for those who supported the NAACP’S civil rights tactics, there was a growing sense that it was losing ground to organizations that linked civil rights reform to class-oriented strategies. The Communist Party and the International Labor Defense, for example, had won the respect of many blacks for immediately defending the so-called Scottsboro Boys—nine black youths who, in 1931, were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama and then were sentenced either to life in prison or death—while the NAACP lagged behind, worried that its bourgeois image would be stained by supporting possible rapists.

It was becoming evident to the NAACP, then, that blacks’ concerns about civil rights were being eclipsed by an increasingly desperate search for economic justice. So, as stated in the memorandum sent to those invited to the conference, Spingarn sought answers not only to the ongoing Negro problem but also to the question of economic security. Spingarn wanted his guests to tell the young, educated American Negro what to do in regard to occupation and income, racial organization, and interracial cooperation. Spingarn also hoped his guests would tell him and the other association leaders how white friends and sympathizers could participate in such a plan.²¹

Spingarn’s memo is important in that it verbalizes a real concern for economic matters, thus articulating the possibility for an institutional shift in the NAACP’S focus, and also because it points to a desire on behalf of the older, more established association leaders to hear from the next generation of articulate black Americans. This call to the young leaders of the race was significant. James Young argues persuasively that the generational difference between the NAACP leaders and the Second Amenia conferees is central to understanding the critique that the attendees made of the NAACP and like-minded organizations.

Young states that the most important basis for the differences between the older and the younger generations is the fact that the older men were ‘race men.’ ²² Race men, according to Young, were those leaders like James Weldon Johnson and Walter White who came of age during the era of scientific racism, embraced nineteenth-century middle-class values, and maintained a deep faith in the curative powers of liberalism. Nothing was more important to these established blacks than their role as race spokesmen. Representing the race mattered more to them than their careers and captured their almost undivided attention. Public spokesmen, regardless of profession, these race men rarely strayed onto topics that did not relate directly to racial matters.²³

The same could not be said for the people these race men and their white counterparts invited to the Second Amenia Conference. For example, while the race men and the attendees all struggled through the early years of the depression, the new economic realities affected the worldview of the younger set in a different fashion. Unlike the race men, the younger generation found it much easier to walk away from the race-based, gradualist strategies supported by groups like the NAACP and the NUL. Shut out at the national level by the Republican and Democratic Parties and meeting resistance from organizations like the American Federation of Labor, these younger blacks turned their attention and increasingly declared their open allegiance to alternative political parties and organizations. Whether it be Cyril Briggs’s African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), Marcus Garvey’s UNIA, Father Divine’s evangelical Peace Mission movement, or the CP, the range of black political and social options was expanding.

Despite the breadth of political and social philosophies amongst these organizations, it was evident that this was an era when conceiving the world in economic terms was intellectually fashionable. When the ABB was founded in 1919, it articulated a program that was equal parts black nationalism and class radicalism. Beginning as a revolutionary nationalist organization, the ABB quickly developed close ties to the CPUSA. The UNIA’S vision of a new Africa for black Americans appealed to broad sections of the black community. Even though the romantic possibilities of Garvey’s rhetoric overwhelmed any other facet of the UNIA, it is important to remember that the organization was, at its foundation, a capitalist venture.²⁴ Although Father Divine tried to keep his interracial movement removed from 1920s political and social activism, he nonetheless paid keen attention to economic opportunities and made the best of them. When one got past Divine’s millennial sensibilities, one found an extremely efficient economic cooperative system.²⁵ The CP, of course, was committed to economically focused political theories that called for the equitable redistribution of society’s wealth. Its inconsistent attention to and theories regarding blacks occasionally made it the era’s most welcoming political home to blacks. Ultimately, the political project did not matter—race was now openly linked to class consciousness.

In addition to new political choices, there were new academic choices as well. To a significant extent, the blacks of this new generation completed their schooling when the scientific justification for racial categorization was being assaulted by advocates of cultural relativism and when new opportunities for employment were being found in higher education (although only at historically black colleges).²⁶ When coupled together, the new political options and new intellectual approaches made the older leaders’ insistence upon racially constructed solutions to social problems seem provincial to the younger crowd.²⁷

Despite the fact that both generations shared the same sort of professional possibilities and class standing, it is clear that the different approaches the two generations embraced for securing social justice overwhelmed their similarities. Yet at the Second Amenia conference, young and old were uniformly engaged in their effort to solve blacks’ abiding social problems, regardless of whether they were a function of race or class dynamics. They understood, for example, that the goal of the meeting was ambitious and that the stakes were high. W. E. B. Du Bois, the director of research and publicity for the NAACP and the editor of its journal, Crisis, had raised the idea of such a gathering the previous summer and hoped that nothing less than "a new vision of the Negro’s future, and a new programme [sic], will arise out of this independent discussion."²⁸

Despite the attendees’ sincerity and Du Bois’s hope, one can only consider the meeting a mixed success, at best. Afterward, Du Bois glumly reported that a critical appraisal of the Negro’s existing situation would not be forthcoming from the conference.²⁹ But though the Amenia delegates did not develop a concrete plan, they did enunciate a vision for the future of the race.

This vision was created within the context of an economically driven worldview that was shared by so many of the invited guests. The Amenia delegates acknowledged the older generation and the contributions that it had made in the struggle for equality but declared nonetheless the need for fresh ideas. The new vision for blacks’ future, they argued, should not be limited solely to intraracial organization and civil rights liberalism. Instead, the conferees felt that in an era when economic, political, and social values are rapidly shifting, and the very structure of organized society is being revamped, they offered the kind of leadership that was required to integrate the special problems of the Negro within the larger issues facing the nation.³⁰

These special problems involved more than race. Believing that leaders had overlooked the exploitation of black labor for too long, the attendees argued that the persistent economic problems facing the most oppressed must be addressed. Low wages, long hours, and job insecurity plagued black laborers. Deprived of the ability to gain financial security in a country that increasingly worshipped consumerism virtually guaranteed black economic, social, and psychological depression. The key to solving this problem, the conferees argued, was to unite black and white labor.

The delegates urged this approach because they believed that one could not afford to continue to divide the interests of the working class along racial lines. It was recognized, however, that achieving working-class interracial unity could not be accomplished overnight. The young intellectuals understood that their objectives could only be met by convincing white laborers that they shared many of the same concerns as black workers and that if the two groups organized into a politically active, industrially based labor force, they would be able to affect such social legislation as old age pensions, unemployment insurance, child and female labor, etc.³¹ In this regard, the Amenia delegates implicitly acknowledged the early Socialist and Communist Party platforms that insisted American social problems would be solved on workers’ terms rather than racialized workers’ terms. This was a platform, however, that by 1933 had fallen out of favor with a number of prominent black radicals due in large measure to the articulation of the Black Belt thesis, which, in itself, was an acknowledgement of the popularity of black nationalist sentiment developed by the UNIA.³² The Amenia delegates, despite their dedication to a class thesis that acknowledged racial groups while simultaneously trying to transcend them, were not prepared to embrace a stance that emphasized race so strongly.

Labor movements, of course, do not exist in a vacuum. In order for them to flourish, a social, economic, or political culture must provide a sufficiently ripe environment for success. The Amenia delegates recognized this, and in articulating their desire for a new movement, they also hoped to increase pressure on the government to expand programs friendly to social welfare concerns. But when it came to developing labor-friendly social and economic programs, what was the ideal form of government? The conferees considered three possibilities: fascism, communism, and reformed democracy. They ruled out fascism immediately as it would only solidify blacks’ position at the bottom of the social order. The attendees also dismissed communism, as they felt it would require too great a fundamental transformation in the psychology and the attitude in this country regarding race and labor. Reformed democracy, the conferees concluded, was the only political system that merited some attention.³³

Although Franklin Roosevelt had been in office less than six months, the delegates were aware that under his direction the federal government was attempting to redefine its relationship with labor and business. The attendees were giving Roosevelt a chance when they declared their willingness to accept a democracy that is attempting to reform itself. However, the delegates made clear that in the process of reform the interests of the Negro cannot be adequately safeguarded by white paternalism in government. Black interests in agriculture and industry, to cite two examples, had to be safeguarded by black representation on government boards and field staffs.³⁴

While these comments were part of a Findings statement that had no literal policy influence, the Amenia delegates were confident that a reformed democracy and their involvement in it would fix the problems left unsolved by the incomplete liberalism of the previous generation. The conferees found inadequate their elders’ stress on universalist values and social mobility. Here, the young activists reflected a modern sensibility that called attention to the imperfection of social systems and the failed promise of Victorian era ideologies. Instead, the young critics advocated direct intervention into workers’ lives. Like their older hosts, the young Amenia activists were motivated by noblesse oblige, but their notion of how this obligation would be fulfilled manifested itself differently. Where previous generations of black leaders and intellectuals believed that their visible hand would uplift the lower classes, the delegates’ morality was imbued with an explicit sympathy for solving the workers’ plight in workers’ terms. In a sense, they replaced civility toward workers with sensitivity to workers’ lives, even if this sensitivity developed out of an overwhelming sense of economic desperation.

The Second Amenia delegates’ willingness to call for a new interventionist federal approach, to urge new strategies for the most prominent betterment organizations, to recommend the creation of a new labor movement, and to emphasize the critical role they could play in these spheres underlines the tenor of the times and their own sense of self. They felt that a critical moment had arrived for the nation and believed in the role that they, as self-anointed leaders, could and should play in restructuring society. Clearly, this was a group that was confident in its abilities because the vision they presented regarding an energized, racially aware, and yet transcendent, interracial labor movement would be close to impossible to implement. First, competition was fierce for those jobs that were available, and employers fostered racial enmity among their workers to prevent interracial alliances. Secondly, even if factories hired without regard to race, one had to convince white and black workers to discard their mutual suspicions.³⁵ The Amenia delegates never offered a specific plan to address these concerns, but their words suggested that they thought themselves the leaders who, in time, would be able to develop such a plan.

Post-conference correspondence between Spingarn and a number of Amenia delegates reveals the extent to which the guests felt prepared to accept the mantle of leadership for the race. Two examples are worth noting. In the first letter, Mabel Byrd of the Wheatley YWCA wrote, It seems to me that in attacking together the problems of such importance that there emerged a new understanding and comprehension of the responsibilities that are ours. Marion Cuthbert, a member of the YWCA’S National Board, added, the experience ... will be an impetus toward personal achievement and the definite acceptances of group responsibility which will have a compounding effect upon the way the racial group will develop in the next ten years.³⁶

While noting the delegates’ earnestness and eagerness, there is little if anything to suggest that NAACP leadership ever entertained the idea of relinquishing its role as the guardian of black America. Although Du Bois conceded that, given time, the conference—and by implication, the guests—might amount to something, he noted that the delegates were hobbled by the difficulty of youth, moving too quickly to understand the past or to study the present.³⁷ Five years after the conference, Du Bois would reiterate his sense that the delegates’ ideas were a manifestation of youthful zeal. He faulted them for letting communistic dogma—ideally right, and practically unworkable invade their minds. If the workers of the world, Du Bois continued, "would unite in unselfish cooperation to uplift the laboring mass, the millenium [sic] would be in sight. But we cannot expect of the age-long under-privileged worker, that which the educated and advanced have not envisaged; namely, the ignoring of race prejudice at just the era when it is being artificially stimulated by every human device.³⁸ Concluding his thoughts on the topic, Du Bois faulted the young delegates for rushing down steep places into the sea of communistic dogma, without stopping to ask how far this dogma applied to [blacks’] situation."³⁹

Other senior race leaders shared Du Bois’s sentiments. Kelly Miller, a Howard professor and syndicated columnist, was among them. Even though he was not invited to the conference (he was of Du Bois’s generation and even attended the First Amenia Conference but in 1933 was no longer a young leader of the race), Miller reported in the Washington Tribune that The leadership of the elders was waved aside with condescending deference and accorded the respect of a decent burial. Miller faulted this impudent new leadership because it emphasized class problems and solutions and thus made an appeal to the stomach instead of to the conscience. The gospel of benevolence is supplanted by the gospel of guts.⁴⁰ Whereas Du Bois expressed his disappointment with the Amenia delegates for their insensitivity to entrenched racial thinking and their headlong rush into communist dogma, Miller was concerned that the Amenia radicals paid no attention to religious morality.

Despite these and other critiques, the NAACP leaders wanted to hear more from the delegates.⁴¹ To that end, they asked Abram Harris to convene a committee to examine the structure of the association and develop a plan to equip the group to relate better to the growing numbers of disaffected black Americans. Harris accepted the association’s offer and, asking E. Franklin Frazier and Ralph Bunche to provide the committee with supplementary assistance, set out to produce the Future Plan and Program of the NAACP. While Harris’s efforts and the way in which they illuminate some of the social and political tensions of the era are explored in Chapter 2, it is worth considering for a moment why he was selected from the Amenia cohort. Most likely, the NAACP saw Harris as particularly fitted to the task at hand. He was a specialist in labor and race policy and had already published widely in the field. He was, far and away, the most influential black economist of his era and was absolutely committed to the idea that, properly applied, social science expertise could solve political, social, and even institutional problems. Furthermore, because the NAACP officials knew Harris as a social scientist, they probably expected he would bring a distanced and balanced approach to the topic. They quickly learned, however, that a social science expert did not necessarily assume a neutral political orientation in his work.

Little else remains to be told about the actual events of the Amenia Conference of 1933. Aside from a small amount of post-conference correspondence and the one picture featured here, there is a striking dearth of historical sources regarding the weekend meeting. That said, the Second Amenia Conference remains significant. As far as this book is concerned, Amenia serves two purposes. The first is that it marks the early intellectual careers of Harris, Frazier, and Bunche and their clear entry into a cadre of young leadership for black America. The Second Amenia Conference also serves as a metaphor for understanding the era and the roles these new leaders thought they could play in it. In their writings and speeches throughout the 1930s, Harris, Frazier, and Bunche remained true to what one might say for interwar era black intellectuals was the Amenia ideal: that class had to be considered at least as strongly as race as a causative factor in blacks’ degraded position in American life; that social science provided the foundation for developing innovative ideas to solve social problems; and that intellectual activists were the individuals best prepared to uplift black and white laborers alike.

The Amenia ideal, it should be noted, was not without its problems. Most fundamentally, Harris, Frazier, and Bunche advocated a class line that, as Du Bois would note in 1938, ignored long-standing racial animosity between and among social classes and was too removed from other social realities. Although they sought interracial worker unity, the Amenia radicals had no clear plan about how they could facilitate such unity apart from general worker education projects. Whites as well as blacks had good cause to remain invested in racial politics. Du Bois, for one, openly acknowledged that even though the biological foundation of race had been proven a myth there remained social and political utility in racial categorization. For example, conceiving of and talking about blacks as a cultural group was important because they could then be seen as units of social uplift.⁴²

Despite the salience of Du Bois’s critique, the Amenia ideal embodies meanings that resonate beyond the historical era around which this book revolves. While the Amenia ideal declared a faith in economic solutions to long-standing race problems it also operated as an idea expressed along a particular methodological trajectory. It was a manifestation of a growing faith in the powers of social science and its practitioners to solve negative processes that manifested themselves as political, social, or racial problems. However, even when methodological issues