| Throughout the nineteenth century, African Americans battled for civil rights broadly and manhood rights specifically. Near the turn-of-the-twentieth-century, a small vocal cadre of black intellectuals entered into this struggle as social scientists and waged their fight for racial and manhood rights on scientific terrain. Examining the production of knowledge about black manhood in the context of United States, gender, African-American, and social-science history, I argue that African-American social scientists' preoccupation with the project of examining, critiquing, and uplifting black manhood is rooted in the gendered nature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial debates. Throughout the nineteenth century, both racial conservatives and liberals likened blacks to women, children, imbeciles, and savages. Depending on the writer's political or ideological stance, the metaphor conveyed either contempt or condescension and nearly always marked African Americans as an inherently distinct, inferior, and unmanly race. Mirroring broader societal prejudices, white scientists reified African Americans' unfitness to exercise the rights and responsibilities of manhood and bolstered opposition to African-American social, economic, and political advancement.; An emerging cadre of African-American social scientists challenged the scientific foundations of white racial and gender supremacy. This is their story. It begins with Anna Julia Cooper's radical late-nineteenth-century religious and scientific deconstruction of the American racialized gender system and then explores W. E. B. Du Bois's and Kelly Miller's middle-class early-twentieth-century focus on developing an “education for manhood.” From the sociological popularization of the Race Man to E. Franklin Frazier's mid-century working-man hypothesis to Nathan and Julia Hare's late-twentieth-century Afrocentric approach to bringing the black boy to manhood, the dialectical relationships between personal, scientific, and political understandings of manhood are examined.; Guided by their personal convictions and racial ambitions, their strategies for manhood uplift reflected the constraints of their eras and subject positions. Nonetheless, black intellectuals challenged popular scientific thought on both the existence and character of black manhood and womanhood. Collectively their stories offer a critical perspective on how the definitions, ideals, problems, and discursive deployments of black manhood changed throughout the twentieth century and provide a powerful glimpse of what these transformations have meant for African Americans and the nation. |
