Race in the making of American liberalism, 1912-1965

"Race in the Making of American Liberalism" explores the relationship between liberal ideals and liberal notions of African-American identity from the emergence of the Progressive Party to the beginnings of the War on Poverty. The dissertation argues that while liberalism took different forms after World War I, the Depression and World War II, liberals were constant in their belief that black identity was inimical to civic virtue. The first chapter examines the 1912 Progressive Party convention, which simultaneously expelled southern blacks and championed "social justice" for white workers. The second and third chapters analyze the sponsorship of and response to the Harlem Renaissance in Survey Graphic, an important liberal policy journal (directed by Paul Kellogg) that served as the venue for Alain Locke's famous "New Negro" collection. The chapters suggest that 192Os reformers carried with them a slightly altered version of Progressive anti-Negro racialism which, using the language of social science and "culture," they built into the foundation of modern reform. Chapter four examines the racialist attack by southern New Dealers (including Will Alexander, Edwin Embree and Charles Johnson) on southern poverty. Chapter five treats postwar liberal racialism in the early civil rights movement when Kenneth Clark, a prominent black psychologist, joined with the NAACP in Brown v. Board to argue that school segregation had irreparably damaged black people. Following Brown, liberals came to see African-Americans as defined by the psychic damage inflicted on them by white prejudice. Each of these episodes suggest the ways in which a negative view of black identity gave liberals a continuous point of reference for the construction of their positive reform ideals.;When African-Americans mobilized on behalf of their own civil rights in the early 1960, they exposed a divisive seam in liberal discourse between white liberals' particular racialist view of African-Americans as a damaged group and their more abstract notion of equal citizenship for all. In the 196Os, the dissertation concludes, liberal racialism, which had served as uncontested ground for a half century of reform, catalyzed a chain reaction which proved the unmaking of liberal hegemony.