Pedagogies of Respectability: Race, Media, and Black Womanhood in the Early 20th Century

Abstract

In the early 20th century, a period in which African Americans migrated north from the Jim Crow south in unprecedented numbers, the politics of respectability were a matter of concern for social reformers. Numerous scholars have traced the ways the Great Migration exacerbated class and cultural differences among northern blacks, and the role the black elites played in inculcating respectable behavior. Studies have interrogated the gendered nature of theories of racial uplift and the expectations placed on black women’s shoulders. This article examines the role of the black press and black cinema as critical sites for instructing black women, especially those in the working class, on deportment, sexuality, and moral values.

Keywords:

• African American women
• black press
• gender politics
• great migration
• race movies
• respectability
• silent cinema

Notes

Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, The Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 28–29.

Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 2.

Thomas Cripps, “‘Race Movies’ as Voices of the Black Bourgeoisie: The Scar of Shame,” in Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video, edited by Valerie Smith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 47.

Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro: An Interpretation, edited by Alain Locke (1925; rpt., New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 186.

Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 6.

Ibid., pp. 18–48.

W. Caleb McDaniel, “The Fourth and the First: Abolitionist Holidays, Respectability, and Radical Interracial Reform,” American Quarterly 57 (March 2005): 130.

See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 190, 195.

Du Bois quoted in Derrick P. Aldridge, “Of Victorianism, Civilization, and Progressivism: The Educational Ideas of Anna Julia Cooper and W. E. B. Du Bois, 1892–1940,” History of Education Quarterly 47 (November 2007): 429.

See discussion in Megan E. Williams, “The Crisis Cover Girl: Lena Horne, the NAACP, and Representations of African American Femininity, 1941–1945,” American Periodicals 16, no. 2 (2006): 200–218; also Amy Helen Kirschke, Art in Crisis: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Struggle for African American Identity and Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 209–20.

Susan Nance, “Respectability and Representation: The Moorish Science Temple, Morocco, and Black Public Culture in 1920s Chicago,” American Quarterly 54 (December 2002): 638.

The Chicago Defender, October 20, 1917.

The Chicago Defender, August 11, 1923.

Chicago Broad Ax, May 7, 1921.

Chicago Broad Ax, August 19, 1922.

The Savannah Tribune, January 10, 1914.

Chicago Defender, September 20, 1924.

Ibid.

The Washington Bee, July 5, 1919.

Pittsburgh Courier, July 13, 1929.

The Chicago Defender, May 29, 1926.

The Chicago Defender, October 13, 1928.

Pittsburgh Courier, February 6, 1926; also see Martha H. Patterson, “‘Chocolate Baby, a Story of Ambition, Deception, and Success’: Refiguring the New Negro Woman in the Pittsburgh Courier,” in Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco, eds., The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011), doi:10.3998/dcbooks.9475509.0001.001.

Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negros, 94; also see discussion in Jacqueline N. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 230–39.

Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negros.

California Eagle, October 14, 1916.

For a discussion of Micheaux’s political motivations, see Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 133–37.

Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence, Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 200), 141.

Jane M. Gaines, “Within Our Gates: From Race Melodrama to Opportunity Narrative,” in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era, edited by Pearl Bowser, Jane M. Gaines, and Charles Musser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 68.

The Chicago Defender, January 10, 1920; January 17, 1920.

For an extensive critical analysis of this narrative, see Jane M. Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), chapters 5, 6.

Gaines, “Within Our Gates,” 72.

Pittsburgh Courier, June 18, 1927.

See Cripps, “‘Race Movies’ as Voices of the Black Bourgeoisie,” 54.

See Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negros, 146–47; Chicago Defender January 17, 1920; Pittsburgh Courier April 20, 1929; April 27, 1929; Amsterdam News May 22, 1929.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jane Rhodes

Jane Rhodes is Professor and Head of the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Rhodes is author of Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Indiana University Press 1998), Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (The New Press 2007; University of Illinois Press 2017), and numerous articles and chapters on black social movements, media, and the politics of representation.