"Residence of Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee Institute, Ala."
"A Darky homestead"

We know intuitively that African-Americans during this era endured worse living conditions than large numbers of white Americans. When we try to support such a belief, however, with the documents available to us, unexpected difficulties crop up, especially if we are relying on photographic evidence.

Consider the home of Booker T. Washington, a residence that meets our expectations for someone of his status--spacious, comfortable, yet modest. To what extent can we generalize about the dwellings of other African-Americans based on Washington's house?

The photographic evidence takes us from Washington's Tuskegee residence to "A Darky homestead". If there is a middle ground between the two, we do not immediately see it. Instead, we are left with two images, the first one documenting a famous life and the second serving a less obvious purpose.

Should this Florida residence, photographed between 1900 and 1906, be thought of as more "typical" than Washington's house? Perhaps the title it carries in the Detroit Publishing Company's catalog suggests a point of view that considered African-Americans as picturesque. Such a photograph, therefore, may have been made more for its romantic stereotypical qualities than for how well it documents the subject of African-American residences. Whether the typical has been documented is a question not answered with these two images.

Negro Life on a Farm

"My school days was short 'cause we was po' folks an' had to work. Co'se Miss, us had plenty to eat and some clos." The speaker is "Aunt Celia," who told her life story to Mrs. Ina B. Hawkes," the person identified as conducting the interview. The interviews of the Federal Writers' Project of which Aunt Celia's is an example, were conducted between 1936 and 1940. They provide invaluable transcripts of the voices of all kinds of people, including this one of an elderly African-American woman who understood that social convention required her to address her white interviewer more formally than she could expect in return.

Did Celia really have plenty to eat? So simple a question may not be easy to resolve, even when she provides an answer, because of the complicating factor of the relationship between interviewer and subject. Surely Celia understood that anything she said that a white person like Mrs. Hawkes (especially one from whom she asks for help) took to be confrontational could cause trouble and, as she indicated with her closing comments about needing clothing, she had enough to worry about already. Suggesting that she had personally suffered because of the poverty to which she was consigned may have been the kind of comment that someone as long-lived as Celia would have instinctively avoided making.

We do not really know if this was the case with Aunt Celia and Mrs. Hawkes, but approaching such a document with greater awareness of its context can help us to be sensitive to subtle layers of interpretation.

Carve dat possum / by Sam Lucas.

One of the areas in which African-Americans were most cruelly stereotyped was music. There, white audiences could laugh at behavior and attitudes they took to reflect African-Americans' inclinations toward laziness, stupidity, foolishness, innocence, and rowdiness. At first glance, the song "Carve dat possum" appears to confirm this kind of stereotype. What are we to make, however, of the song's lasting popularily across several generations and the fact that its composer, Sam Lucas, grew famous as one of the nation's first notable African Amercan entertainers?

What we should avoid is simply dismissing the document without more closely examining it. Perhaps it can help us better understand the distortion that African-American genius often underwent in order to be accepted by white audiences.

The progress of colored women : by Mary Church Terrell ...

Mary Church Terrell described the work of the National Association of Colored Women this way: "By the Tuskegee club and many others all over the country, object lessons are given in the best way to sweep, dust, cook, wash and iron, together with other information concerning household affairs. Talks on social purity and the proper method of rearing children are made for the benefit of those mothers, who in many instances fall short of their duty, not because they are vicious and depraved, but because they are ignorant and poor."

How did the beneficiaries of Terrell's well-intended charity respond to this attitude? Did they agree with the assessment that they were not "vicious and depraved," but merely "ignorant and poor"? Historians of the Progressive movement have noted that middle-class aspirations did not necessarily correspond with the worldview of those for whom economic and social opportunities were more limited. (See, for example, William A. Link's The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930). Our view of the poor is often filtered through the sensibilities of those whose affluence allowed them to undertake benevolencies like those of Mary Church Terrell. What strikes the reader after browsing the pamphlets of the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection is that they are the products of middle class culture, which, although not surprising, cautions us, before accepting their pronouncements regarding people cared about, but different and not always easily understood.