Inventing the New Negro. Daphne Lamothe
for the vice, promiscuity, and debauchery associated with all black Americans. Moreover, many Negro elites found the main culprit of their neighbors’ cultural degradation in African cultural patterns. (“Research” 52)
Nonetheless, despite the potency of the Hampton Ideology, which emphasized racial “cleansing,” its folklorists retained a sense of connection to the traditions their teachers encouraged them to leave behind in pursuit of mainstream notions of progress. For example, Daniel Webster Davis wrote in a correspondence to Robert Russa Moton (both were elected officers of the organization, and Moton went on to succeed Booker T. Washington as president of Tuskegee) that he found folk games such as ring plays to be “sweet” and “fair” like a dream. He also described taking pleasure in the memory of participating in these games. Waters argues that equating “expressions of Negro folklore” with a dream underscores the strangeness of these traditions to the “normal conscious activity of proper black educators or, more generally, of properly educated black people.” Yet he also astutely notes that the educators’ expressions of sympathy and memory “emphasized the broad continuities between unlettered folk and educators” (Waters 50).13
Some African American members and supporters of the society emphasized more than disdain, ambivalence, or nostalgia in the researcher’s approach to the collection of Negro folklore. Educator Alexander Crummel, for example, cautioned HFS members to “offer a positive and not a negative interpretation of their African heritage” (Baker, “Research” 57). And activist and writer Anna Julia Cooper cautioned society members not to lose sight of their people’s genius in the face of what must have seemed to be an “overpowering” model of civilization. Cooper warned against a definition of achievement and success that would compel the Negro to accept the notion that “Anglo Saxon ideas, Anglo Saxon standards, Anglo Saxon art, [etc.] must be to him the measure of perfection,” and reminded her audience that “the American Negro cannot produce an original utterance until he realizes the sanctity of his homely inheritance.”14 These statements, resonating with cultural pride, clearly anticipate the thinking of New Negro intellectuals who would follow a generation later.
Hampton Folklore Society scholars thought deeply about the value of African American folklore and their work as collectors, and they also considered the uses to which that work would be put. In fact, the group’s origins were based on an article linking science and the study of race, published in The Atlantic Monthly by Nathaniel Shaler, a Harvard professor of paleontology and geology. Despite the intrinsic racism of Shaler’s essay, “Science and the African Problem” (1890), it suggested to Alice Bacon the idea of starting a society of folklorists. Shaler argued that the transplantation of Africans to the New World constituted “a most remarkable experiment,” which offered the opportunity to study the “improvability of the lower races of mankind” (cited in Waters 10). He proposed that a systematic study of Negro “improvability” be taken from three methods of inquiry: one, a historical investigation that would examine the slave trade to ascertain the African origins of slaves; two, an anthropological study to assess the physical and mental characteristics of Blacks in the United States and to compare those traits to those of Africans; and three, a study of “the social and civic quality of the race” to determine how to secure its advancement (Waters 10–11). Although Shaler accepted many of the crudest stereotypes of the African American character (he believed, for example that Blacks were promiscuous, were naturally rhythmic, and were in need of supervision), he did believe that Whites’ assumptions about Black folk were formed in “the midst of a great darkness” and scientific inquiry was necessary for their enlightenment (Waters 12). The Hampton folklorists, recognizing the severity of America’s race problems, must have desired to participate in an organized, collective scientific inquiry of these issues (Waters 12). At the same time, the Society departed from Shaler’s belief in genetically based racial difference by embracing the Hampton ethos of environmentalism, which argued that Blacks had an innate capacity for social and intellectual improvement.15
Like participants in the related disciplines of anthropology and sociology, by this time in the 1890s, folklorists viewed themselves as participating in a “scientific” endeavor, and they considered their professionalism evident in the objectivity and thoroughness of their studies. In underscoring the precision of folklore collection as science, Hampton folklorists were indebted to the influence of William Wells Newell, Franz Boas, and their colleagues who founded the American Folklore Society (AFLS) in 1888.16 The founders of the AFLS sought to describe the concept of folklore with a precision that it had lacked up to this point. Its founders considered the then popular definition of folklore—“a particular kind of mental and cultural expression with its ‘own set of facts’” —to be unnecessarily vague. So they shifted definitions of and added nuance to the term by having it refer to “oral transmission and its traditional, or conventional character” (Waters 23–25). Newell also insisted on the importance of methodological rigor in the study of folklore. He recognized that folklore needed to be written down in order for it to be studied systematically, but he also considered it essential that the collector refrain from adding to, “adorning” to render more literary, or otherwise tampering with the “evidence” (Waters 27). Newell argued that folklore was entirely different from literature although both made use of figurative devices. Where literature was “systematic” in its application of such devices, folklore used them as a matter of convention and not aesthetic judgment. Newell concluded that the addition of aesthetic principles to conventional materials was the equivalent of falsifying the material; it would fundamentally change the data. “Folklore, in other words, is a separate and independent subject, not a subset of literature” (Waters 28). The AFLS founders established folklore’s suitability for scientific inquiry by locating it under the rubric of anthropology as part of culture, namely the oral tradition. They considered any similarities between literature and folklore to be coincidental, occurring merely because both are modes of communication.17
Boas and Newell rejected evolutionary ideas of racial and cultural development, as did Armstrong, Bacon, and the other Hamptonites. Instead, they focused on analyses of the historical, geographic, and social factors that determined the development of oral traditions; these analyses were facilitated by scrupulous methods of collection. AFLS founders discovered that their agenda intersected with that of the Hampton Folklore Society, so much so that Newell, acting as secretary of the AFLS, traveled to Hampton in May 1894 in order to personally address the group at one of its first meetings and to recruit its members for his organizations membership.18 Newell’s address, which was later published in the Southern Workman in July 1894, covered familiar rhetorical ground, including remarks on the importance of recording cultural traditions that were in the process of disappearing. Newell defined folklore as “the learning or knowledge peculiar to the Negro race. It is that mass of information which they brought with them from Africa, and which has subsequently been increased, remodeled, and Anglicized by their contact with the whites” (Waters 186). Calling folklore a “body of thought [that] belongs to the past,” that was vanishing under the march of African Americans’ educational progress, he asked the society members to consider what purpose was served by their turning their attention to “these out-grown notions and usages” (Waters 186).
Newell’s answers to that question diverged. On the one hand, he professed a humanistic vision, claiming membership in no race other than the human race and declaring that races existed “to be merged in the unity of races, as rivers flow to disappear in the ocean.”19 Yet he also suggested that folklore reveals that “each [race] has its distinctive customs, ideas, and manners.” Newell expressed ambivalence over the impending erasure of “racial memory” and suggested that only folklore (defined as race-knowledge) could preserve it. Thus, he declared, it was the responsibility of the individual to preserve the “memory of his race” in order to “to tell of the height to which they rose, the depth through which they have passed.” Finally, Newell also touched on the mobility and dynamism of African traditions, a subject that Black scholars like Du Bois and Locke would remark on to much greater effect in their own writings. Newell stated that Negro folktales were cosmopolitan by virtue of the ground they had traversed: “These tales are by no means solely the possession of Negroes; on the contrary, a good many are nearly cosmopolitan. Proceeding from some common center, they have traveled about the world, and that by several