“The Steep Edge of a Dark Abyss” 1 : Mohonk,White Social Engineers,and Black Education

What Shall They Do With the Negro?

The First Mohonk Conference on “The Negro Question” occurred during June 4–6, 1890, and a second conference convened exactly 1 year later. Conference proceedings indicate that conveners, spokespersons, and attendees viewed the Mohonk conferences as [largely] Christian-inspired philanthropic efforts to uplift and rehabilitate Native Americans and Southern Negroes in order to assimilate both groups into a highly-stratified, rapidly industrializing, racialized sociopolitical hierarchy. A clear constant that emerged throughout both the Indian ² and Negro conferences is the propensity and intensity of paternalist, ruling-class Euro-Americans to assume roles as colonial agents, racial benefactors, and social engineers. And while the agency and welfare of Indigenous and Black Americans was the touted rationale for White benefaction, a more critical textual analysis of the Proceedings from the 1890 conference suggests that Mohonkers’ actions were largely motivated by a mix of racially-mediated socio religious beliefs, political and capitalist intentions, and White society’s collective, deep-seated racial fear and loathing of Black Americans. All of this, of course, was buttressed by Whites’ collective allegiance to maintaining domination and the U.S. as a White ethnostate. Channeling the socioracial theorizing of E. Franklin Frazier and Martin Luther King, Jr., historian Brandon M. Terry (2018) contends that the racialized, irrational fears of Whites include fear of “losing economic or social standing, of contamination of an unknown future, and, above all, of revenge and retaliation” (p. 14).

Deeper scrutiny of the political rationale of Mohonkers belies what the author contends is a pernicious and toxic White paternalism driven by multiple factors, including: an exaggerated fear and organic loathing of Blacks/Blackness; uncomfortable memories of Black political leadership and socioeconomic mobility during Reconstruction; collective anxiety over Communism, the U.S. economy, jobs, infrastructure; perceived threats against White agency (particularly that of White women); and broader concerns over Whiteness/White identity, globalization, and the feared increase of an educated and skilled free Black population. In one harrowing example, the convict-lease system served as effective mechanism to exploit Black labor. By criminalizing petty offenses stemming from the infamous Black Codes, White industrialists sought to keep freed Black workers tied in perpetuity to their former owners’ farms and plantations. As Blackmon (2008) avers, the convict-lease system operated in every southern state subjected Black men, women, and children to work in coal mines, lumber camps, and turpentine factories. This system that was created could effectively be understood as a response to Black progress during Reconstruction.

In this paper, the author will provide a critical overview of the First Mohonk Conference on “The Negro Question” and discuss its historical significance, its attendees and their political inspiration, implications and educational recommendations for Black Americans.

Theoretical and Methodological Contours

This article builds on theoretical, methodological, and cultural insights drawn from two sources: (1) the radical critique, theorizing, and praxis of W. E. B. Du Bois; (2) The Black Intellectual Tradition. For Du Bois, the history and heritage of people of African ancestry existed and functioned as primary sites of memory, historiography, meaning-making, and psychocultural liberation. A Du Boisian lens, therefore, is most effective for interrogating the sociopolitical and sociocultural conditions of Black life (Du Bois, 1903, 1935; Kazembe, 2019), particularly as informed and shaped by centuries of enslavement, Jim Crow racial terrorism, material dispossession, and White supremacy racism.

In addition, other aspects of Du Boisian radical thought and critique call for unapologetic development and materialist articulation of Black agency (Du Bois, 1903, 1973; Kazembe, 2019), insistence on and leveraging of Pan-African identity (Du Bois, 1965), and a nourishing and flourishing of African global consciousness as the touchstones for mental and physical liberation (Du Bois, 1920, 1950). For Du Bois, Black agency, Pan-African identity, and African global consciousness were sentient and required constant activation of Black cultural memory in order to stimulate educational and pedagogical imagination. Du Bois’ (1960) two-pronged challenge to Black educational stakeholders called for an informed praxis geared toward “the utter disappearance of color discrimination in American life and the preservation of African history and culture as a valuable contribution to modern civilization” (p. 196).

In his efforts to bring attention to the need for the protection and self-determination of Africans worldwide, Du Bois attended and spoke at the Pan-African Conference in 1900 in London. The conference (which took place one decade following the first Mohonk Conference) represented an early step toward uniting the Black global diaspora, establishing a Black internationalist agenda, and espousing Pan-African consciousness. As a further articulation of Black agency, Du Bois organized and participated in several Pan-African Congresses between 1919 and 1945. Contrary to the Mohonkers, DuBois understood that Black peoples’ liberation required liberal, culturally insistent education and not strict vocational training. And while he may have shared the Mohonkers’ collective outlook on certain aspects of education for Blacks (i.e., cultivating social values, personal thrift, collective work and responsibility), Du Bois also regarded education as fundamentally subversive. Thus, his strategic approach to articulating the education of Black people was informed by his radical philosophical and political orientation that challenged European/Euro-American imperialism, inequity, and ideological domination.

Conceived and operationalized as ideology and praxis, the Black Intellectual Tradition exists and functions as an important site of intellectual scrutiny, political discourse, and cultural affirmation. Simultaneously, it functions as an ongoing synthesis, cultural orientation, and set of methodological practices responsive to the shifting conditions and temporal realities of the Black Diasporic experience. As a cultural inheritance and framework, the Black Intellectual Tradition is useful as a revolutionary site of possibility in order to make worthwhile use of the history and heritage knowledge of Africana/Black people, to resist and work to dismantle White supremacy and antiBlack racism, to commit to the physical and intellectual liberation of Black bodies and minds, and to positively transform society (Asante, 2017; King, 2014, 2016, 2018; Kelley, 2003; Rabaka, 2003, 2010; Robinson, 2007; Watkins, 2001; Woodson, 1933).

For this article, critical textual analysis (Fürsich, 2009; Heilig et al., 2012) was used to examine and synthesize the content and meaning of/across various texts. Critical textual analysis is useful for developing understanding of how others (in this case, 20th century White social engineers) made/make sense of the world and their place in the world. In addition, applying a race-conscious lens to the textual analysis assisted the author with framing critical questions, making historical connections, and highlighting the historical and contemporary machinations of race/racism in education. Several diverse texts were analyzed in order to effectively correlate and synthesize the impulses and activities of White social engineers both during the Mohonk period and the present day. Textual analysis of historical Mohonk-era documents included: conference proceedings, books, essays from periodicals, opinion/thought pieces, policy documents, philanthropic reports, and law school journal articles. Textual analysis of contemporary sources included: federal/state legislation on education, policy briefs, educational statistical data, and foundation annual reports. This massive corpus of material (including valuable and richly candid first-person published testimonies of Mohonkers) enabled the author to espy clear and consistent patterns of intentional social engineering and racialized political maneuvering during the last 130 years.

The Mohonk Conference on “The Negro Question”: Anteriors and Interiors

“We have in this country the grave problem of the negro.”

excerpt from a letter by Harvard zoologist Charles B. Davenport to the Carnegie Foundation regarding his eugenics experiments at Cold Harbor, NY in 1903.

According to the 1890 United States Census, Black people numbered roughly 7,488,676 (or 11.9 percent) of the total counted population (U.S. Census Bureau, 1890). Both before and after passage of the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31, 1865, the question of what to do with a free (i.e., formerly enslaved) Black population had long-occupied the minds of Whites from the so-called Cotton States, and also the minds of their brethren to the north. How would the Negro live? Where would they live and how would they be kept there? Should they have a role in the new South? How should they live? Who and/or what is the Negro? How are they to be educated? Is emigration feasible? Are they owed anything? If so, what? Whom will they serve? How had enslavement prepared them? How had freedom spoiled them? Were they ready for citizenship and did they even deserve it? Had Negroes been sufficiently cleansed of the barbarous influence of their African past? Might Christianity civilize them? How were future generations of Negroes to be organized within the rapidly expanding social and political structure of the U.S.? As evidenced by copious political, scientific, and social literature of the times, these and other ravenous questions coopted and colored the thinking of Whites in the U.S., particularly those occupying elite, influential positions as civic leaders, businessmen, and politicians.

For his part, Scottish writer and philosopher Thomas Carlyle chose the medium of racist satire to ruminate on the fate and future of people of African ancestry who since the mid-1500s had found themselves victimized by Whites during the European (i.e., Transatlantic) Slave Trade. In his 1849 essay entitled Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question (later expanded into a pamphlet and retitled Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question), Carlyle criticized White philanthropists and blamed their charity and grace for encouraging laziness among Black people in Jamaica–themselves newly freed from enslavement. In the eyes of Carlyle’s caricatured protagonist (Dr. Phelim M’Quirk), White social engineers’ redress to “The Negro Question” in the Caribbean had resulted in the evolution of an unambitious class of Black people who were “up to the[ir] ears in pumpkins, imbibing sweet pulps. . . while the sugar-crops rot round them uncut” (p. 671). Carlyle’s influential essay, published sixteen years after Britain abolished its traffic in human beings, inspired colorful and lively debate among many of his European and Euro-American contemporaries and friends, most notably John Stuart Mill.

While Carlyle had used racist satire to imagine and project the fear and loathing of White society’s reaction to a free Black population, President Andrew Johnson espoused kindred convictions in his 1867 message to the United States Senate regarding the voting rights of Black men (Dos Passos, 1903). Insofar as suffrage occupied much of the popular discourse on “The Negro Question,” the Tennessee Tailor imagined (as D. W. Griffith would nearly half a century later on celluloid), a degraded republic whose power would finally be destroyed should voting power be extended to Black men who, according to many, were “wholly unprepared by previous habits and opportunities to perform the trust which it demands” (p. 467).

Organized during June 4–6, 1890, the First Mohonk Conference on “The Negro Question” was convened at Lake Mohonk, New York and attended by over one hundred businesspersons, philanthropists, social reformers, teachers, politicians, newspaper editors, and clergymen. For three full days, these White social architects, met to present and share formal reports, discuss and forge common understandings, and implement collective, tactical plans to tackle what was termed and popularly understood as “The Negro Question.” A Second Mohonk Conference on the Negro was convened exactly 1 year later (June 3–5, 1891) with former U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes again serving as official chairman. Prior to both Mohonk Conferences on “The Negro Question,” White social engineers (for 22 consecutive years), had held similar annual gatherings at Lake Mohonk where they focused their anthropological gaze and social engineering plans on Native American people. ³

It is noteworthy that conference organizers did not include any Black people [men] at both the 1890 and 1891 conference. Yet, while Blacks were intentionally not invited, a few of the Mohonkers recommended that specific Black men be included. In one instance, author and attendee George W. Cable wrote to A. K. Smiley (conference convener and owner of the Lake Mohonk mountaintop retreat) suggesting that the then well-known Booker T. Washington (Tuskegee University president), William T. Scarborough (Wilberforce University president), and John W. Cromwell (a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer, teacher, and founding member of the American Negro Academy) (Fishel, 1993) be invited. In his reply to Cable’s letter (a copy of which had been sent to him), the Wizard of Tuskegee issued a faint rebuke as he viewed the propensity of “our friends” [Whites] to exclude Black people from conversations about the future of Black people as “rather trying and perplexing at times” (Butcher, 1948).

Specifically, the 1890 Mohonk Conference attendees included White clergy, missionaries, businessmen, military officers, publishers, politicians, college presidents, professors, and a former U.S. president. During the conference, several speakers introduced themselves as long-time abolitionists, antislavery activists, and advocates for Reconstruction. Conference organizers assumed formal roles as chairman, secretaries, treasurers, and planners. In addition, the Conference included an executive and publication committee, with H. O. Houghton (co-founder of Houghton Mifflin Publishers (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and former mayor of Cambridge, MA) serving on both. Diverse organizations were represented at the conference including universities and schools (21), religious-affiliated (16), social welfare (4), government (2), publishers (14), and private philanthropic (2) (First Mohonk, 1890).

Convened across 3 days and 6 sessions, the 1890 Conference featured 39 speakers (men and women) who offered prepared remarks in the form of sermons, statistical analyses, formal briefs, philanthropic pledges, ethnographic reports, and position statements. The speakers offered observations and perceptions on various aspects of Black people’s lives and character including their (recent) enslavement, absence of surnames, home life, fitness for citizenship, amiability, intelligence, encounters with and reactions to White aggression/racism, regional experiences, educational accomplishments, and morality (First Mohonk Conference, 1890). These loquacious witnesses also provided copious testimony regarding Black peoples’ aesthetic traits, economic practices, habits of mind, temperament, generational distinctions, Christianization, and potential for improvement and advancement in society. More than a few expressed marked relief that 19th century Negroes appeared to have shed all vestiges of African culture (specifically language and religion expression) which, in turn, had moved them that much closer to the “civilizing” force of European-sponsored religion and education.

As highly influential members of the U.S. ruling-class, the Mohonkers’ intense scrutiny of the social lives, character traits, collective personal habits, cognitive ability, and civic potential of Black people was particularly striking as it revealed Euro-Americans’ penchant for claiming, classifying, naming, assigning, and establishing hierarchy and dominion. In a curious sense, White Southerners’ antebellum speculation over Black peoples’ enslaved bodies and labor potential resembled White Northerners’ postbellum speculation over Black peoples’ emancipated lives and educational futures. Blacks found themselves, in both cases, on the receiving end of heightened racial scrutiny, White authoritarianism and coloniality, and imposed decision-making. As northern minister and writer Rev. Samuel J. Barrows (1891) contended, the question “What shall we do with the negro” belied negative assumptions, and therefore, would be more practically posed as “What can we do to contribute to his development?” (p. 693).

As at earlier Mohonk Conferences, opinions, observations, and suggestions explicated by attendees during the 1890 gathering were diverse, yet seemed to fall within six general areas: (1) concern for national prosperity and security; (2) sense of religious duty/purpose; (3) Northern political obligations; (4) liberal, paternalistic guilt and pity; (5) development of the mental and moral character of Black people; (6) fear of southern backlash from Blacks and poor Whites. For White corporate philanthropists in attendance, their collective outlook seemed to be undergirded by concern over several things including maintaining power and control in a rapidly industrializing United States, a productive agricultural base, a favorable business environment, and access to cheap labor. For forward-thinking capitalists, a common understanding was that reannexation of the southern states was critical to the future economic stability and prosperity of the country.

The general consensus among Mohonkers was that such stability and prosperity could only come about through the gradual elevation [to second-class citizenship] of the South’s nearly 8 million Black citizens. White Northern altruism was, in fact, eclipsed by commercial concerns for the nation’s future. Mohonk Conference chairman and former U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes proclaimed that if decisive action to assist Black people were not taken, then the nation would face “industrial bankruptcy, social degradation, and political corruption” (First Mohonk Conference, p. 9). Further scrutiny of Hayes’ opening remarks seems to indicate that political expediency, commercial security, and White racial protectionism– not altruism–were his true motivations for wanting to uplift his “brothers in black” (p. 9).

White missionary philanthropists, on the other hand, espoused a different set of concerns with regard to the education of Black people and the young nation’s future. Departing from Hayes’ fear of national economic collapse and social ruin, the collective motivations of Mohonk’s Christian devotees exposed concern with religious enlightenment, national character, social amelioration, social welfare, and pursuing the promise of informed democracy. For General Samuel Chapman Armstrong and others espousing this outlook, “deficiency of character”–not three hundred years of enslavement, exploitation, and psychic terrorism–was the true source of Black peoples’ plight (First Mohonk, p. 13). Along this premise, Armstrong and others of his ilk felt that the educational and religious instruction prescribed for Black people must encourage subservience, passivity, and docility. Toward this end, White architects of education saw the benefit of ceding to Blacks opportunities to participate in and serve society by cultivating their own subordinate character, albeit in very particular, stringent, prefabricated, and socially-engineered ways (Fishel, p. 19). The impassioned testimony of religious Mohonkers exposed their interest in Black character-shaping vis-à-vis intense Bible instruction, manual labor, and, through ultimate commitment, Christian regeneration (evangelization). Much Mohonk testimony was offered by White Social Gospel reformers who shared stories of their individual involvement with projects they described as being designed to aid and assist the Black peoples’ moral, spiritual, and character development. In one detailed report, Ohio journalist and politician John Cutler Covert detailed the prodigious building of churches and schools for southern freedmen by various religious denominations and the tens of millions of dollars involved (First Mohonk, p. 33).

With regard to education, a general consensus among the Mohonkers was that Black people be: (1) rapidly evangelized; (2) trained for service. Allocated funds and written policies (the smoking guns of formal testimony) indicate the strong, collective conviction among Mohonk’s White social engineers to curate and choreograph a particular type of education for Black Americans in the South. Indeed, this brand of White sponsorship bespoke a broader and more nuanced program of social engineering designed to simultaneously “improve” the South, the nation, and to “uplift” Black Americans by preparing them for second-class citizenship. Upchurch (2004) rightly points out that the majority of the Mohonkers were not so much interested in the welfare of Black Americans as they were with maintaining a stable southern economy and securing “partisan political advantage that could be gained from the [B]lack vote of the south” (p. 15). In support of that reasoning, Virginia Senator John S. Barbour expressed what he considered to be the disproportionate tax burden imposed on White southerners and hinted at its likely increase should the federal government not do something to improve the literacy rate of Black children. Inaction, according to Barbour, would likely spur Southern Whites to reassess their political loyalty (especially during election time) and “vote with the man from Wisconsin [rather than] the man from Virginia” (First Mohonk, p. 74).

As pointed out by Mohonk speaker, John Jay (prominent New York attorney and grandson of Founding Father and Chief Justice John Jay), the South’s time-honored practice of imposing illiteracy on enslaved Black Americans had served multiple purposes, not least of which to ensure the physical safety of Whites. However, Jay reasoned, in the postbellum world, White southerners (indeed, Whites everywhere) were now forced to rethink the logic of the strategy of denying education to a newly freed 8 million Black people–arguably, a nation within a nation. By extension, with consideration to White southern taxpayers’ collective angst regarding their so-called disproportionate tax assessment, not a few Northern Mohonkers reminded the assembly of the historical conditions that created White southern wealth, Blacks underdevelopment, and the resulting terse racial imbalance. In an eerily prescient critique, Jay expressed concern that these “plain facts” had not been understood by “misinformed Whites” (First Mohonk, p. 75).

Posing and Problematizing “The Negro Question”

From surviving accounts, it appears that most nineteenth and twentieth century Europeans and Euro-Americans contended that people of African ancestry (i.e., the people who would become or are still becoming African Americans) were as rootless, savage, and as backward as the continent from which they originated. Indeed, closer scrutiny of the observations of European and Euro-American philosophers, scientists, and politicians belies protracted efforts to systematically and routinely mischaracterize, oppugn, and negate the history and humanity of African people. Long before they had even conceptualized “The Negro Question,” many influential Europeans and Euro-Americans had first conceptualized an Africa/n question. ⁴

In his infamous and woefully underexamined article published in the Yale Law Journal, famed New York corporate attorney John R. Dos Passos (1903) justified repealing the Fifteenth Amendment on the grounds that it represented “short-sighted, reckless and thoughtless policy” that was ultimately wasted on Black people, whose “original condition. . . in their native regions was that of the most appalling and hopeless barbarism” (p. 475). Such sentiment on the part of Whites was not sui generis, but instead reflected a general national attitude–particularly prominent during the postbellum Jim Crow years.

To be sure, antiBlack racism was not the exclusive domain of White elites. Poor and working class Irish, German, Italian, and Czech immigrants willfully participated in ritualized physical and non-physical assaults against Black people. In the mildest sense, White psychocultural aggression manifested in the form of blackface minstrelsy (particularly among the Irish) and the lampooning of Blacks via animated caricatures, ethnic jokes, and racial parodies in the emerging motion picture industry (Bogle, 2001; Nowatzki, 2006; Sammond, 2016). In the most extreme cases, members of White ethnic groups articulated their whiteness and thereby secured their attendant privilege through direct and/or indirect participation in both organized and de jour racialized terror campaigns against Black people (Nevels, 2007; Strickland, 2008). Thus, in the name of racial solidarity, Whites across all classes embraced the post-Reconstruction “Redeemer Rule” which used intimidation, racialized media formations, racial violence, and state legislation as tools to challenge Black citizenship, exclude Blacks from membership in trade unions, and alleviate White economic anxiety.

Prior to the convening of the Mohonk Conference on “The Negro Question,” various political and business leaders hailing from several states (including Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi) had, since the end of Reconstruction, been involved in rewriting their state constitutions, in part to disenfranchise Black Americans (Brophy, 2018). This is a critical point as it speaks to the harrowing position (a sort of racial pincer) that Black Americans found themselves in by the time of and beyond the 1890 conference. One pincer was represented by Mohonk’s attendees who advocated for and allocated resources to fund a specialized form of training designed to train certain kinds of Negroes who would then be fitted to occupy particular roles within the social hierarchy and the political economy of the new South. The other pincer reflected the extremist, unyielding pogroms of Jim Crow/ers’ (meted out physically, economically, psychoculturally, as well as legalistically) racial terrorism that effectively served to restrict, reduce, and/or rout Black political activity. Of course, an ultimate aim of that agenda was to intimidate Black people from participating in the machine of government and from winning their full citizenship.

As Brophy (2018) observes, for pro-Confederates and Whites generally, “The Negro Question” was about “explaining the problems that people of African descent posed for [W]hite supremacy” and that chief among them was curtailing the “voting rights of African Americans” in the South (p. 3). Two key points highlight the fact that this went far beyond mere individualist, racist sentiment. The first, as Brophy notes, is the widespread contempt held by “leading Northerners, including lawyers” regarding African American rights. By extension of the evidence, this widespread contempt was also shared by the U.S. Supreme court, policy specialists, and state lawmakers (Ring, 2012). The second point that belies widespread White contempt of Blacks/blackness is underscored by the multitudinous publications (in the form of articles, essays, pamphlets, published speeches, and books) dedicated to discussing and dissecting what was originally termed “The Negro Problem,” but then came later into popular parlance as “The Negro Question.” Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1884, 1890), George Washington Cable (1890), North Carolina Senator Zebulon Baird Vance (1890), Joseph Renner Maxwell (1892), Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry (1899), Thomas Nelson Page (1904), Eberhard Hayen (1908), Thomas Pearce Bailey (1914), and Moorfield Storey (1918) were among the dozens of “leading” Whites who penned and published impassioned responses to what one chronicler described as “the dreadful question” (Dudley, 1885, p. 273).

As Brophy (2018) avers, an existential and theoretical link to “The Negro Question” had been popularly explored by English journalist and poet, Rudyard Kipling in his 1899 text, The White Man’s Burden. Hence, convening Mohonk Conferences on the Indian and the Negro, as well as problematizing the fate and future of both groups, seemed the logical outgrowth of the supposed burden that [W]hites assigned themselves to “care for non-White races” (Brophy, p. 4). During the same year that Kipling penned his thoughts, former Confederate officer, U.S. Representative, and Minister to Spain, Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry published his essay, The Negro Question, in the summer 1899 issue of Popular Science Monthly. Curry traced the “Iliad of [White peoples’] woes” (which he referred to as ‘the negro problem’) to the year 1620 when Africans were kidnapped, brought to the Jamestown, VA colony, and made victims of human trafficking (p. 178). Prior to their forced arrival in the U.S., according to Curry, Africans had “made little or no advancement for nearly four thousand years” and instead, suffered an existence characterized by “ignorance, nakedness, superstition, and savagery” (p. 179).

Paleontologist, geologist, and writer Nathaniel S. Shaler (1884) ascribed to the popular belief that people of African ancestry had been “bred in immemorial savagery” (p. 697) and that Whites were owed recognition for exposing Black people to the “mildest and most decent system of slavery that ever existed” (p. 697). Among White writers such as George W. Cable (1890), the imagined cultural deficiencies, lack of moral character, and arrested cognitive development of people of African ancestry elicited stirrings of whether or not they were even entitled to “the full measure of the American citizen’s rights” enjoyed by Whites (p. 2). Far from shocking or anomalous, such racist sentiment served to justify and promote as normative the denial of African history and humanity, while simultaneously stimulating a form of toxic paternalism among many elite Whites, and general, antiBlack racial animus among Whites collectively. Madison (1997) has shared that, “the purpose of racism is to control the behavior of [W]hite people, not Black people. For Blacks, guns and tanks are sufficient.”

For additional insight into what contributed to compounding White fears and preoccupation with Black lives and destinies (both pre- and post-Mohonk), one need only turn to the proliferation of racist propaganda through which White writers, pseudo-philosophers, pseudo-scientists, sermonizers, and frantic, race-obsessed others hedged over the alleged extinction of White people owing to increased social and political mobility among Black people. Chief among the factors fueling the fears of White writers was an imagined genetic annihilation via interracial sexual amalgamation–mainly between Black men and White women. It is also significant to connect this to the numerous instances where alleged sexual offenses against White women resulting in the maimings and murders of hundreds of Black men.

In his popular essay, Eberhard Hayen’s (1908) stark description of Black people (post-Reconstruction) is indicative of the esprit de corps among racist rhetoricians of the day:

The thirsting desire after liberty was unknown to [the Black man]. And when finally he received his liberty, not gained by his own endeavors, but forced upon him by the discord among his former white masters, how did he use it? His old faults and sins reappeared. Laziness, drunkenness, coarseness, thieving and sensuality became his marks and our jails and penitentiaries and the police court records are sad witnesses of the degeneracy of the colored race. Forty-three years of liberty have not improved him in the least: yes, it is to be questioned if they have not had an influence in the opposite direction (p. 19).

By even a modest, critical interpretation, Hayen’s comments could easily be construed as a grim presaging of the modern prison industrial complex that currently imprisons over 2.2 million Black Americans. In a predictable twist of Hayen’s racist logic, the White-controlled criminal justice system (and legislative and judicial collaborators) of his day was immune from being implicated in the proliferation and consumption of Black bodies in jails and penitentiaries (i.e., greater confinement), as well as the chronic disruption of Black families and communities.

Spouting similar sentiment, Hayen’s literary contemporaries found a willing audience among White readers throughout and beyond the U.S. Indeed, Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1911), Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918), and Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy (1920) were four of the most influential texts that fueled frantic fears of a White future that might possibly be interrupted, tinged, and/or eclipsed by the insistent genes of people of African ancestry. Such ideas and incessant fears were also not lost on the White architects and advocates of scientific racism, a pseudo-intellectual movement that emerged in seventeenth century Europe, but quickly gained traction in the U.S. during the first few decades of the twentieth century. This movement, combined with a proliferation of antiBlack art ⁵ and lingering antiBlack sentiment helped to further legitimate racial attitudes of indifference and hostility among Whites generally during the 19th and 20th centuries and beyond.

To promote what they no doubt regarded as their empirical response to “The Negro Question,” White pseudo-scientists employed their elite education and superior acumen to intimately explain and copiously document Black peoples’ laziness (dysesthesia aethiopica), their annoying tendency to escape enslavement (drapetomania), their limited mental capacity (phrenology), and Black men’s uncontrollable lust for White women (brutism). Such hypotheses, racially codified through social scripts, professional gatherings, publications, and university courses, served to promote and confirm the idea of Black inferiority, rationalize de jure and de facto mistreatment of Black people, justify lynching and mass imprisonment, and promote the ideology and practice of White supremacy. As such, these durable twentieth century racist ideas (propagated heavily via education and mass [and now social] media) worked overtime as dehumanization schema and have succeeded in sustaining persistent antiBlack racism. Unlike viruses (such as the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic) which required physical contact to propagate and spread, the virus of White supremacy racism required only a shared emotional bond among Whites of the previous era and now.

Mohonk, Education, and Black Agency

Broadly, Mohonk Conferences could be understood as a major axis of a grand political strategy conceived and orchestrated by ruling-class Whites to sustain power and control well into the future. For that to be realized, however, it was critical that the South’s nearly eight million Black Americans be amalgamated into the social structure and political economy in such a way that White rulership and control were maintained. Direct testimony from Mohonkers reveals that they generally favored a specialized form of education for Black people bracketed by intense religious instruction, industrial service, and total subservience. In short, ruling-class Whites supported such education (or training) for Black people to the degree that it served and protected Whiteness, discouraged and disallowed Black independence and autonomy, did not question or critique existing power arrangements, and did not challenge White social control, hegemony, and privilege.

Nearly a decade prior to the First Mohonk Conference on “The Negro Question,” philanthropic White financiers such as John Fox Slater (The Slater Fund) and George Peabody (The Peabody Fund) had provided money to promote industrial education for Blacks in the South. These men applied their firm belief in the gospel of wealth and the power of education to finance normal schools and teacher training programs for Black people that leveraged their experiences with two centuries of enslavement (indeed, the ultimate on-the-job training) and simultaneously prepared Blacks to strive for second-class citizenship. In many ways, these grand efforts were an updated version of the “seasoning” or “slave breaking” process that Europeans/Euro-Americans employed in order to acclimate African people to enslavement and to acquiescence to White enslavers (Blassingame, 1971; Gilroy, 1993).

Generally understood among Mohnkers was the need to provide Black people with the type of training that would foster lower-rung citizenship, develop their missing higher-order traits, and make them more useful to the immediate and long-term economic growth and modernization of the Southern states (specifically) and the United States (generally). Relatedly, during the 1890 conference, some Mohonkers reserved their presentation time to showcase the accomplishments of exceptional Black men who had surpassed higher education and settled into professional careers as professors, physicians, lawyers, and clergy. As noted in Conference proceedings, many Whites both welcomed and supported the development of a “talented” Black elite, if for no other reason, so that this group may inherit and tackle “The Negro Question” and thus relieve the White man’s burden.

Even as many White social engineers regarded sponsored education/training as a practical and expedient route to elevate the condition of Black people, others favored keeping Blacks locked out of federal land distribution (i.e., Homestead Acts). Between 1862 and 1934, it is estimated that over 250 million acres of southern and western land (seized through violence-backed land cessions) had been transferred to White Americans and to newly-arrived European immigrants (Gates, 1940). Seemingly, the question of whether Negroes should be included in land distribution was never seriously considered, nor was the fact that said land had been violently and systematically stolen ⁶ from Indigenous inhabitants of North America. Unlike federally-sanctioned land allocations to individuals, money and land (totaling over 100 million acres) granted to southern and northern states went toward the establishment of an educational structure that included schools, universities, agricultural and mechanical colleges, and associated public land.

During the last day of the fifth session of the 1890 Mohonk Conference, with ex-President Hayes chairing, Judge Albion Winegar Tourgée (abolitionist, novelist, and lead attorney in the famed Plessy v. Ferguson case) commenced the morning session by speaking on “The Negro’s View of the Race Problem.” Though no Blacks had been invited to Mohonk, Judge Tourgée expressed interest in wanting to know (and to have heard by all) the representative collective testimony of the nearly eight million Black Americans, even going so far to suggest that said testimony would prove (at least to him) far more valuable than the opinions of “the wise White people” assembled (First Mohonk, p. 106). Interestingly, as a well-known fiction writer, Tourgée admitted that he culled his insights on Black people and their collective sociopolitical leanings through his fictionalizing of them in his numerous novels and plays. Tourgée presented on three separate occasions at Mohonk and dedicated much of his presentation to praising the “industrial excellences” among Black people and going so far as to posit that their industrial and social progress was surpassing (and quite possibly incurring the envy) of poor southern Whites (First Mohonk, pp. 24–25).

Another important historical point to glean is that the First Mohonk Conference on “The Negro Question” occurred 6 years before the monumental 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Thus, at the long doorstep of the 20th century (and beyond), the unfinished business of Mohonk involved White ruling elites grappling with the contentious reality of Black subjectivity (biography), Black population numbers (demography) and territory (geography). Whereas the Problem South formerly referred to sectional grievances and confliction over Reconstruction, as a “discourse and a material reality” (Ring, 2012), the geopolitical contours of the Problem South were expanded to refer to any U.S. state or territory south of Canada in which a Black presence loomed (p. 18).

As the political subtext of Mohonkers belied, an orderly South [they felt] would be best realized alongside the establishment of an intensely racialized social, class and economic hierarchy in which permanent White rulership was ordained, Blacks’ second-class status was compulsory, and their full-citizenship was perennially negligible. To achieve that reality, a new Southern strategy would have to be devised and implemented. Not incidentally, the updated vision was politically and economically expedient and, therefore, perfectly proportioned to the vision of White northern industrialists, merchants, corporatists, and religious philanthropists. Finally, for the vision to be realized, White liberals would have to continue serving as the principal architects of philanthropy and curated education reform for current and successive generations of Black Americans. During and beyond the Mohonk era, these individuals served as the social engineers who helped to shape the content, character, and direction of Black education. The grand outcomes of White social engineering, in order to come to pass required (then as now) continuous cross-class collaboration from different (seemingly opposed) groups of Whites.

A few years following the Second Mohonk Conference on “The Negro Question,” a new group of White social engineers convened at Capon Springs, West Virginia for a long series of education conferences to discuss the future of the American Negro (Ogden, 1903). Similar in nature to Mohonk, the conversations at Capon Springs centered on plotting the future socio-industrial order for the U.S. South and the nation. In the “new” South, the emergence of an educated Black mass would ultimately prove instrumental in challenging White rule and its attendant social and political arrangement of power. As Anderson (1988) observes, White conveners of these southern education conferences were deeply invested in practicing a form of toxic paternalism toward Blacks and were simultaneously fortified in their “shared beliefs in universal education, [W]hite supremacy, and [B]lack industrial training” (p. 84).