The observation that Adams was “marked for assassination”—in addition to biographical information on the activist—may be found in Painter, Exodusters, 71-81.

Additional biographical information may be found in Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds., Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 2:1072-73.

While in Liberia, Smith weathered recurring, debilitating bouts of “acclimating fever.” “Acclimating fever”—also referred to as “African fever” in numerous letters to the American Colonization Society by prospective emigrants to Liberia—was a folk name for malaria.

As with the majority of race literature produced between 1878 and 1930, it is somewhat difficult to ascertain number of copies sold and actual readership of Smith’s Autobiography. One contemporary source, however, claimed that the book enjoyed “wide sale.” See H. F. Kletzing and W. H. Crogman, Progress of A Race, or, The Remarkable Advancement of the Afro-American Negro (Atlanta: J. L. Nichols, 1898. Reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 575.

Smith’s narrative is not strictly chronological, therefore it is difficult to ascertain exactly when the reception in Cape Palmas occurred. Moreover, she does not provide so much as a vague reference as to month or season. Based on emigrant rosters published in the African Repository, the seventieth and seventy-first annual reports of the American Colonization Society, and Peter Murdza’s exhaustive inventory of emigrants to Liberia after 1864, I believe that Smith must be referring to a sizable group of emigrants that left New York City on October 30, 1886, and arrived in Cape Palmas in late December; with the exception of one lone party from Florida, the entire contingent hailed from South Carolina. Given that this expedition was about twice the size of another that departed in March 1887 and since Smith’s narrative underscores that the particular group of emigrants arriving in Cape Palmas was rather “large,” she must be referring to the emigrants who sailed in October.

Significantly, descriptors within emigrant rosters (e.g., family position, age, occupation) released by the American Colonization Society can be problematic given that ACS agents apparently manipulated information regarding emigrants. For example, the promotional organ of the American Colonization Society—revealingly titled The African Repository—published selective information regarding emigrants sent. See Peter J. Murdza Jr., Immigrants to Liberia, 1865 to 1904: An Alphabetical Listing, Liberian Studies Research Working Paper No. 4, University of Delaware (Newark: Liberian Studies Association in America, 1975), 43; African Repository 63, no. 1 (January 1887): 28-29; ibid., no. 2 (April 1887): 63; The Annual Reports of the American Colonization Society, Vols. 64-71 (Reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969).

What Smith did or did not explicitly address in her narrative reflected both her times and her chosen profession. For example, she not only invoked nativist arguments concerning Polish, Jewish, Italian, Irish, and German immigrants to the United States during the late nineteenth century, she also spoke disdainfully of the habits, cleanliness, and overall “enlighten[ment]” of African American “new-comers” to Liberia. Finally, her conviction that racial oppression gave black Americans an even greater claim to membership in U.S. civil society reflected her time as well, in that a range of contemporary race women and men made similar assertions. Refer to pages 451-63 of her Autobiography.

Invocations of “racial destiny” in secondary literature may be found in Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 178; and Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 111.

My decision to use “aspiring class” partially reflects Glenda Gilmore’s argument that “middle class” was a term “never used” by “leading black men and women” as well. Moreover, both Kevin Gaines and Stephanie Shaw invoke the term “rising” when discussing educated strivers; Gaines further speaks of “aspiring and middle class members of racialized . . . populations.” See Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), xix; Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 246, 259; Stephanie J. Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 80.

Important analyses of gender and/or sexuality include the following: James Oliver Horton, “Freedom’s Yoke: Gender Conventions among Antebellum Free Blacks,” Feminist Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 51-76; Nell Irvin Painter, “‘Social Equality,’ Miscegenation, Labor, and Power,” in The Evolution of Southern Culture, ed. Numan V. Bartley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 47- 67; Jim Cullen, “‘I’s a Man Now’: Gender and African American Men,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford, 1992), 76-91; Hazel V. Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 738-55; Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Christina Simmons, “African Americans and Sexual Victorianism in the Social Hygiene Movement,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4, no. 1 (July 1993): 51-75; Karen V. Hansen, “‘No Kisses Is Like Youres’: An Erotic Friendship between Two African American Women during the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Gender and History 7, no. 2 (August 1995): 153-82; Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow; Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Maurice O. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1995 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

For further discussion of African Americanist scholarship on gender and sexuality, see Michele Mitchell, “Silences Broken, Silences Kept: Gender and Sexuality in African American History,” Gender & History 11, no. 3 (November 1999): 433-44.

Ethiopianism emerged from scripture (Psalms 68:31) that suggested people of African descent—referred to in the Bible as “Egypt” and “Ethiopia”—would eventually thrive despite various trials and tribulations. And, as Wilson Moses points out, Ethiopianism was also predicated upon “a cyclical view of history—the idea that the ascendancy of the white race was only temporary, and that . . . divine providence . . . was working to elevate the African peoples.” See Wilson J. Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 23-24; Moses, “Introduction,” in Classical Black Nationalism , 16.

My reason for placing “Anglo-Saxon,” “Alpine,” and “Nordic” in quotation marks is based on my observation that these terms, in social Darwinist thought, typically connoted something in addition to region of origin and ethnic heritage: each one conjured up the apex of whiteness and the heights of civilization.

Prospective emigrants also compared the potential for freedom in Oklahoma, Kansas, and western states to Liberia. See James A. Miller (San Souci, Ark.) to Coppinger, September 9, 1891, ACS Papers, ser. 1A, container 281, vol. 284; Henry Adams (New Orleans, La.) to Coppinger, July 9, 1879, ACS Papers, ser. 1A, container 236; [J. W.?] Harvey (Helena, Ark.) to Coppinger, September 12, 1891, ACS Papers, ser. 1A, container 281, vol. 284.

For reference to Bishop Turner, see G. W. Walter, M.D., to Coppinger, [March 14, 1891?], ACS Papers, ser. 1A, container 279, vol. 282. Significantly, Edwin Redkey points out that Turner’s “name was mentioned by many who wrote to the Colonization Society” in Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890-1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 172.

For a more benign, benevolent statement of the society’s purposes during the postbellum era, see “Our Mission,” African Repository (hereafter AR) 50, no. 2 (February 1874): 47. A general account of colonization efforts during Reconstruction may be found in Willis Dolmond Boyd, “Negro Colonization in the Reconstruction Era, 1865-1870,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 40, no. 4 (December 1956): 60-82.

In 1854, Mary Bibb was the National Emigration Convention’s Second Vice President; in 1856, both Bibb and Shadd were on the Convention’s Board of Publications. See “Black Women in the United States: A Chronology,” in Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds., Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 2:1312. For discussion of women delegates at these conventions, see Dorsey, “A Gendered History of African Colonization,” 93.

In the introduction to the Arno reprint Two Black Views of Liberia (a volume which combines Nesbit and Williams), Edwin Redkey notes that Williams charged Nesbit “attacked Liberia because he needed money from the sale of the book and because he came under the influence of [Martin] Delany.” “Introduction,” vi-ii.

Apparently, African Americans in New Orleans maintained a fairly committed tradition of celebrating Liberia’s Independence Day—as late as 1894, J. Wesley Pierce informed the ACS that “thair has been for some years a very healthy feeling in this section for the Liberian Republic.” J. Wesley Pierce (New Orleans, La.) to J. Ormond Wilson, August 8, 1894, ACS Papers, ser. 1A, container 286, vol. 291; see also Pierce to Wilson, July 22, 1894, ACS Papers, ser. 1A, container 286, vol. 291.

South Carolinians formed a decisive majority within the LEA, but a few emigrants were from Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, and Alabama. See Williams, The Liberian Exodus, 31-32.

Another source claimed the Azor was a former slave ship used “in the fruit trade between Boston and the Azore Islands.” See Rev. Thomas S. Malcom, “Is it Suitable for Emigrants?,” AR 55, no. 1 (January 1879): 19-22, esp. 19.

According to most secondary sources, the Azor left Charleston Harbor with 206 people. However, Williams reported a total of 274, Harrison Bouey claimed there were 256, and another contemporary report—one that relayed the story of unhappy emigrants who returned to the United States in 1879—claimed 370 sailed. Williams, The Liberian Exodus, 32; Harrison Bouey, “The Azor Passengers,” AR 56, no. 6 (October 1880): 109-10, esp. 110; “Home From Liberia,” Herald (New York, N.Y.), November 19, 1879, 5.

Whatever the actual total, George Tindall points out the number of people desiring to go exceeded available space. See “The Liberian Exodus of 1878,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 53, no. 3 (July 1952): 133-45, esp. 139.

For additional information on the Irons family, consult “A Talk With a Returned Emigrant,” AR 61, no. 4 (October 1885): 120-22; “Dr. Blyden in Charleston,” AR 66, no. 1 (January 1890): 28-29; Letter to Bishop Turner, Voice of Missions 1, no. 1 (January 1893): 3; Debra Lynn Newman, “The Emergence of Liberian Women in the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Howard University, 1984), 176-79.

One of the more publicized of these independent efforts, the Liberia Exodus Arkansas Colony, would be markedly less successful than the Liberia Exodus Association. See Adell Patton Jr., “The ‘Back-to-Africa’ Movement,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 51, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 164-77.

According to an annual report of the ACS, the petition by the Emigration Aid Society was presented in the House of Representatives in late October, 1877. See Sixty-First Annual Report of the American Colonization Society (Washington, D.C.: American Colonization Society, 1878), 9-10.

It is important to note that the league’s proceedings refer to “ladies” in attendance but do not name any of the women who were there. Since Ferdinand Barnett was there, one could surmise that Ida Wells-Barnett—along with many of her contemporaries in the club movement—was also involved with the league. Kevin Gaines identifies Wells-Barnett as one of the “dissident black leaders” responsible for establishing the league. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 29.

Predictably, perhaps, Heard’s mentor Henry McNeal Turner was among the few African Americans who publicly supported the Butler Bill. The bishop even suggested that emigration bills could be considered reparations since the United States owed “the colored race forty billions of dollars anyway.” See “A Colored Bishop on Emigration,” AR 66, no. 2 (April 1890): 54-55.

Edwin Redkey points out that the appearance of the colonization bills in 1890 was due to a recent Federal Elections Bill (also known as a “force bill”) by the Republican Party that was an effort to ensure black men would retain the franchise. See Redkey, Black Exodus, 59-61.

For evidence of mass meetings, see “Convention!” (broadside), ca. 1878, ACS Papers, ser. 1A, container 233; “Notice! Notice! The Colored Citizens of Ouachita and Adjoining Counties” (broadside), ca. fall 1890, ACS Papers, ser. 1A, container 278, vol. 281; Colored Colonization Association broadside, ca. 1891, ACS Papers, ser. 1A, container 280, vol. 283.

The reference to the women’s organization in New Orleans appears in Reverend Thomas S. Malcom, “Is it Suitable for Emigrants?,” AR 55, no. 1 (January 1879): 19-22, esp. 20. It is, however, important to realize that since the ACS published the African Repository and because the society had a vested interest in portraying emigrationism as a popular movement, it is possible that the ACS inflated the numbers of people who wanted to emigrate. In other words, the actual number of members in the women’s organization in New Orleans might have been considerably lower.

Late nineteenth-century Afro-Americans rarely used the term “nationalism” but instead spoke of “nationalization” or “Negro nationality”; when discussing the possibility of carving a black nation out of the United States, they occasionally used “segregation.”

Apparently, the Edwards family made it to Liberia safely. The last piece of correspondence I have been able to locate regarding Ollie Edwards is a letter in which her niece asks Coppinger about her aunt’s health and whereabouts; Coppinger assured her “Mr. & Mrs. Edwards and children . . . safely and duly arrived at Grand Bassa, Liberia.” See Julia Adams (Columbus, Ga.) to William Coppinger, July 7, 1891, ACS Papers, ser. 1A, container 280, vol. 283; Coppinger to Adams, July 10, 1891, ACS Papers, ser. 2, container 35.

For evidence that people received information via lectures and word of mouth, see E. W. Edwards (Bushnell, Fla.) to William Coppinger, October 7, 1889, ACS Papers, ser. 1A, container 275, vol. 277; and H. H. Rhoads (Bushnell, Fla.) to Coppinger, [October 6?], 1889, ACS Papers, ser. 1A, container 275, vol. 277. See also Thomas Taylor’s letter for an example of someone who wanted to “subscribe for a paper so I can learn something about this Negro Exodus.” Thomas Taylor (Turner, Ark.) to Coppinger, ca. December 1891, ACS Papers, ser. 1A, container 282, vol. 285.

Sample female emigrants’ occupations were culled from the ACS Papers, ser. 1A, containers 275-85.

There are a few possibilities as to the fate of the rest of John Carter’s family. His wife and children most likely stayed in the United States in the event that John established a new household with another woman after he emigrated, if he died in Liberia before his family could join him, or if Carter became a returnee shortly after his arrival in Africa. It is also possible that after John Carter sailed, the family might have fallen upon hard times or decided against emigrating. Even if the rest of the Carter family remained committed to the idea of going to Liberia, passionate emigrationists such as James Dubose never left the United States because poverty prevented them from so doing. Negative publicity could also have discouraged Mrs. Carter and the children: newspaper articles about death, dissipation, and derelict settlements in Liberia were especially effective in rattling prospective emigrants, eroding their resolve, and influencing them to remain stateside. If this was the case, then the Carter household might have been permanently fractured.

Redkey observes that out of thirty-nine participants, twenty-two rejected emigration outright; he also provides a rather thorough account of Turner’s convention where approximately “800 delegates joined a throng of local blacks to hear Bishop Turner’s opening address.” Black Exodus, 183-94.

Representative antiemigrationist sentiment includes Rev. Emanuel K. Love, “Oration Delivered on Emancipation Day, January 2, 1888” (n.p., n.d.), 6; Rev. R. F. Hurley, “Why We Should Not Go to Africa,” Christian Recorder, February 21, 1878, 1; Rev. Andrew J. Chamber, “American Versus Africa,” Christian Recorder, March 7, 1878, 1; Rev. T. E. Knox, “The Negro is at Home Here,” Christian Recorder, May 15, 1890, 5.

For general overviews of African American viewpoints on European imperial campaigns in Africa, see Sylvia Jacobs, The African Nexus: Black American Perspectives on the European Partitioning of Africa, 1880-1920 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), and Elliott P. Skinner, African Americans and U.S. Policy toward Africa, 1850-1924: In Defense of Black Nationality (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1992). For a detailed, rich history of the A.M.E. Church and its complex relationship to South—and, to a lesser degree, West—Africa, see James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

For discussion of Liberia as an “open door” for those of “pioneer spirit,” see Francis H. Warren, “The Upbuilding of Liberia, West Africa,” Alexander’s Magazine 2, no. 10 (February 1907): 183-85, esp. 183; and T. McCants Stewart, “A Letter to the Editor,” Alexander’s Magazine 3, no. 3 (July 1907): 173-75, esp. 173.

R. A. Wright was, it seems, able to find success in Africa: in addition to practicing law in Greenville, Liberia, Wright farmed and served as a representative in the Liberian legislature. R. A. Wright (Greenville, Liberia) to J. Ormond Wilson, July 7, 1897, ACS Papers, ser. 1B, vol. 27, pt. 2; Wright to Wilson, May 8, 1899, ACS Papers, ser. 1B, vol. 27, pt. 2.

For other perspectives on heroism in war, see “Peter Purity: . . . A word about Black Heroes,” Broad Ax (Salt Lake City, Utah), January 7, 1899, 4; Lena Mason, “A Negro In It,” in Twentieth Century Negro Literature or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating to the American Negro, ed. D. W. Culp (Naperville, Ill.: J. L. Nichols, 1902), 447.

Gatewood summarizes the formation and deployment of black “immune” regiments; see “Introduction,” in Smoked Yankees, 11.

In Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995), Anne McClintock points out that the international concept of a “white man’s burden” could be at once racist and crassly commercial; she notes that Pears’ Soap used Kipling’s phrase as eye-catching advertising copy. See McClintock, Imperial Leather, 32-33.

The reason for my ambiguity regarding whether certain papers were actually delivered at the conference is that not all of the papers listed within the official program actually appear in the published proceedings of the congress, I. Garland Penn and J. W. E. Bowen, eds., The United Negro: His Problems and His Progress, Containing the Addresses and Proceedings [of] the Negro Young People’s Christian and Educational Congress, Held August 6-11, 1902 (Atlanta: D. E. Luther Publishing, 1902). There are at least three plausible reasons: some of scheduled speakers were absent or unable to present; they failed to submit drafts to Penn and Bowen; or, the editors simply decided not to publish certain contributions.

Analyses of sexuality during slavery include Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), as well as Anthony S. Parent Jr. and Susan Brown Wallace, “Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery,” in Fout and Tantillo, American Sexual Politics , 19-58. Relevant commentary pertaining to the U.S. South may be found in Peter W. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Moreover, Sander L. Gilman offers relevant analysis of Western—specifically European—concepts of black sexuality in Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 109-27.

Kelly Miller published a lengthy rebuttal to Hoffman in conjunction with the American Negro Academy. See Miller, “A Review of Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro,” American Negro Academy Occasional Papers, No. 1 (Washington, D.C.: American Negro Academy, 1897. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969), 3-36.

George Fredrickson provides vital historical context pertaining to Hoffman and like-minded thinkers in The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), esp. 228-55.

For interpretation of Councill as a “notorious accommodator” and “unctuous sycophant,” see August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 77, 110, 209-20.

In 1896, the National Association of Colored Women was established when the National Federation of Afro-American Women and the National League of Colored Women consolidated forces. Further, detailed discussion of club women’s assaults on sexual stereotypes as well as overarching analyses of the club movement may be found in the following: Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1984); Wilson J. Moses, “Domestic Feminism, Conservatism, Sex Roles, and Black Women’s Clubs, 1893-1896,” Journal of Social and Behavioral Sciences 24, no. 4 (Fall 1987): 166-77; Dorothy Salem, To Better Our World: Black Women in Organized Reform, 1890-1920 (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1990); Stephanie J. Shaw, “Black Women and the Creation of the National Association of Colored Women,” in “We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: A Reader in Black Women’s History, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed (New York: Carlson Press, 1995). Also relevant is Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes toward Black Women, 1880-1920 (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1990).

Related analyses which provide additional historical context for assertions made here may be found in the following texts: Simmons, “African Americans and Sexual Victorianism”; Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

A revealing discussion of “illegitimacy,” eugenics, and children’s importance to the future of black Americans can also be found in Lucy C. Laney, “Address Before the Women’s Meeting,” in Social and Physical Conditions of Negroes in Cities. Report of an Investigation Under the Direction of Atlanta University: And Proceedings of Problems Concerning Negro City Life, Held at Atlanta University, May 25-26, 1897 (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1897), 55-57.

Twenty years later, novelist Sutton Griggs would be far more blunt than Bryant, Hunton, or Logan. He opined that the race needed “to make disposition of its waste matter” if it ever wanted to enjoy an exalted future. See Sutton E. Griggs, Science of Collective Efficiency (Memphis: National Public Welfare League, c. 1921), 20. Griggs also spoke at the 1902 Negro Young People’s Congress; he participated in a symposium on “The Negro’s Contribution to His Own Development.” See Souvenir, 67. For an example of a race activist questioning popular invocations of heredity and race, see W. E. B. Du Bois, “Heredity and the Public Schools,” in Pamphlets and Leaflets by W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson, 1986), 45-52.

It is worth noting here that the 1913 edition of Life Lines of Success was simultaneously published under the title of Progress and Achievements of the 20th Century Negro (n.p., 1913). Similarly, The College of Life was reissued as the Afro-American Home Manual and Practical Self-Educator in 1902. As John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman have pointed out, multiple editions of “guides to sexual health . . . revealed how hungry Americans were about the meaning of sexuality.” D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 72.

For an overview of Progressive Era reformers’ fixation on ethnicity, nativity, race, and birthrates, see Miriam King and Steven Ruggles, “American Immigration, Fertility, and Race Suicide at the Turn of the Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22, no. 3 (Winter 1990): 347-69. King and Ruggles argue against conventional wisdom that the birthrate of immigrant women exceeded that of native white women by asserting “the much heralded ‘breeding power’ of ethnics at the turn of the century was an illusion.” Furthermore, King and Ruggles maintain that children of immigrants had even lower birthrates than their white contemporaries who were the children of native-born Americans. King and Ruggles, “American Immigration, Fertility, and Race Suicide,” 364, 352. Along similar lines, Daniel J. Kevles connects anxieties over immigrants’ fecundity to the popularity of eugenics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See In the Name of Eugenics, 72.

Primary sources which discuss birthrates include John S. Billings, “The Diminishing Birth Rate in the United States,” Forum 15, no. 4 (June 1893): 467-77; J. McKeen Cattell, “The Causes of the Declining Birth Rate,” and Walter F. Will-cox, “Differential Fecundity,” in Proceedings of the First National Conference on Race Betterment: January 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 1914, Battle Creek, Michigan (n.p.: Race Betterment Foundation, ca. 1914), 67-72, 79-89.

Whereas I do not explore the various methods demographers use to compute fertility rates here, it is important to note that a variety of methods for determining fertility exist, including backward projection to obtain total fertility rates, computation of woman-child ratios, and estimation of gross-reproduction rates. It is equally important to point out that despite a variety of methods, and despite discrepancies in actual findings, virtually every approach suggests that the drop in black women’s fecundity was both undeniable and substantial. Discussion of various approaches may be found in Farley, Growth of the Black Population, 51-56, 102-4; Jamshid Momeni, “Black Demography: A Review Essay,” in Demography of the Black Population in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography with a Review Essay (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 13-14; Robert Higgs, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865-1914 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 15-17.

Unfortunately, in the 1940 exploration of differential fertility, the Census Bureau ascertained women’s class status according to their husband’s occupation; I assume that a majority of the African American women polled worked outside of the home. For brief commentary on fertility differentials by class and region, refer to Momeni, “Black Demography,” 16.

For analysis of fertility in the South—which Lantz and Hendrix consider “a high fertility region for both races”—see Lantz and Hendrix, “Black Fertility and the Black Family,” 254-56; Stanley L. Engerman, “Black Fertility and Family Structure in the U.S., 1880-1940,” Journal of Family History 2, no. 2 (June 1977): 117-38, esp. 124. Tolnay offers similar observations, though he largely distinguishes between rural and urban rather than by region; see Stewart Emory Tolnay, “The Fertility of Black Americans in 1900” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1981).

Statistics regarding migration and regional concentrations of African Americans may be found in Daniel M. Johnson and Rex R. Campbell, Black Migration in America: A Social Demographic History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1981), 73-74.

I eschew arguments that suggest lower black birthrates primarily resulted from “impaired fecundity” due to “biological” factors. Such views were, perhaps, most popular with demographers during the early 1970s. Another take on the “impaired fecundity” thesis is contained within Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow where historian Jacqueline Jones observes that the “decline in black fertility . . . [was] probably due in part to the poor health of rural women and their families.” Health was likely a factor for many women, yet I believe that “changes in the social fabric of the Black population” (migration, education, urbanization, decreased utility of children within a sharecropping context, labor participation of women, conscious childlessness) probably had greater overall impact. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 88, 123; Tolnay, “The Fertility of Black Americans in 1900,” 23.

Reynolds Farley completely discounts any role that contraception might have had in lowering black women’s fecundity; I am far more swayed by the argument of Joseph McFalls and George Masnick, who persuasively contend that many Afro-Americans “undoubtedly perceived [a] need and . . . practiced birth control.” See Joseph McFalls and George Masnick, “Birth Control and Fertility of the U.S. Black Population, 1880 to 1980,” Journal of Family History 6, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 89-106. Additional observations about black views on and practices of birth control during the time period under consideration are located in Jessie May Rodrique’s “The Afro-American Community and the Birth Control Movement, 1918-1942” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1991). For primary evidence that suggests that literature aimed at upwardly mobile and elite race members contained discussion of family limitation, see Gibson and Gibson, Golden Thoughts, 361-62.

For decennial statistics pertaining to the African American population, see Negro Population, 1790-1915, 21-27, esp. 25; [U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census], Negroes in the United States, 1920-32 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1935), 1, 2, 13. In Negroes in the United States, the Census Bureau conceded that both the 1870 and 1890 enumerations under-counted African Americans; adjustments estimate that the 1870 census should have accounted for about 5,392,000 black Americans and the 1890 census 7,760,000. Useful analysis of African American population growth rates per decade—along with adjusted figures and percentages—may be found in Momeni, “Black Demography,” 5-7.

Discussions about the census in the Afro-American press include “As to the Negro’s Future,” Gazette (Raleigh, N.C.), February 12, 1898, 1; “The Twelfth Census,” Colored American (Washington, D.C.), March 17, 1900, 15; “Negroes Constitute Tenth of Population,” Courier (Pittsburgh, Pa.), November 18, 1911, 1; “Negroes in the 1910 Census,” Defender (Chicago, Ill.), July 27, 1912, 1; “Census Bureau and Negro Facts,” Age (New York, N.Y.), October 15, 1914, 1.

A primary source that provides capsule biographies of some doctors who participated in the Colored American’s forum is John Kenney’s The Negro in Medicine (n.p., ca. 1912).

Holt observes that, despite the bureau’s intentions to serve all children, one of its critics was Kelly Miller. As Holt points out, Miller wondered whether the bureau accounted for the possibility that black babies—the descendants of former slaves—might not be adequately served by programs and approaches that ignored the physical legacy of racial oppression (116).

Additional analysis on infant welfare campaigns may be found in Richard A. Meckel, Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

For evidence that she sold books herself, see handwritten note from Crumpler to a “Mrs. Stone” (ca. April 1884) inserted behind frontispiece of copy at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland.

The information cited in the text regarding the Harper WCTU may be found in A History of the Club Movement, 5. Another primary source on club women and mothers’ meetings is Josephine Silone Yates, “Kindergartens and Mothers’ Clubs,” Colored American Magazine 8, no. 6 (June 1905): 304-11.

In commenting on the beginnings of the child welfare movement in the United States, Alisa Klaus points out that women—Julia Lathrop and Florence Kelley, for example—were critical in establishing and staffing children’s welfare agencies, including the U.S. Children’s Bureau. In addition to her observation that the “baby-health contest was invented by two Iowa club women purportedly inspired by the effectiveness of the livestock show in improving the breeding of cattle,” Klaus also notes that Janie Porter Barrett’s settlement house “sponsored an annual Baby Day beginning in 1909.” See Alisa Klaus, “Depopulation and Race Suicide: Maternalism and Pronatalist Ideologies in France and the United States,” in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, ed. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (New York: Routledge, 1993), 188-212, esp. 191, 203, 206.

It should be noted that the Children’s Bureau declared 1918 “Children’s Year.” As the Chicago Defender announced in May of that year, “all over the land the first fundamental step is being made to build up a nation of strong, fine, happy young men and women by saving and protecting the babies and children.” “Campaign for Better Babies,” Defender, May 18, 1918. I sincerely thank Wallace D. Best for alerting me to this article.

Apparently, the contest aroused similar interest the next year. See “State Fair Next Week,” Journal and Guide, October 23, 1915, Tuskegee File, ser. 1, main file, reel 4, frame 176.

Scheduled to run photographs from July 22 to September 2, 1915, the paper continued to publish them long after the competition had ended; moreover, the Age did not even announce winners until April of 1916. Winners were presented with silver cups which, incidentally, were not awarded until July 1916 due to “war conditions.” “Babies Who Win Prizes,” Age, April 6, 1916; “Prize Babies Will Get Cups,” Age, July 6, 1916.

I thank Wallace Best for providing me with a copy of the rather interesting item out of the Defender.

In addition to Williams’s column in the Defender, at least two other black newspapers carried regular health columns during the mid-1910s: Dr. Lloyd E. Bailer’s “Health Hints” appeared in the Sun (Kansas City, Mo.), Tuskegee File, ser. 1, main file, reel 4, frame 248; Dr. J. W. Pierce contributed “Health Talks” to the Journal and Guide.

Williams’s reference to “damaged goods” refers to a contemporary book that was realized both as a play and silent film; see his column from January 22, 1916; and separate advertisement for Damaged Goods, Defender, January 1, 1916, 6.

Significantly, Christina Simmons makes the observation that in black social hygiene work during the late 1910s, “the voices of male professional experts dominated the discourse.” Simmons, “African Americans and Sexual Victorianism,” 58. This certainly appears to be the case in terms of v.d. canvassing during the Great War.

Biographical data on Hall appears in the introductory pages of the Capsule (v-vi) and additional information on her may be found in Who’s Who Among the Colored Baptists of the United States, ed. Samuel William Bacote (Kansas City, Mo.: Franklin Hudson Publishing, 1913), 1:258-60. This entry claims that Hall’s book enjoyed “a wide circulation . . . by thousands of people—both white and colored—who have attempted to solve the so-called race problem.”

On a somewhat related note, Hall announced that while she had little interest in the question of “Woman’s Rights” (155-57), earlier in the text (65) she nevertheless observed that “[if] the same dishonor was attached to male debauchers, which stigmatizes women . . . would there not be a better state of affairs in society?”

Nicole Stanton quite thoughtfully alerted me to the existence of McHenry’s work as I was writing this chapter; I sincerely thank her for doing so.

On page 60, the author makes an oblique reference to his own “very peculiar history” regarding marriage; this reference follows Pettiford’s assertions that husbands must be able to provide for their wives. According to William Simmons, Pettiford’s first marriage occurred when he was twenty-two; Simmons further suggests that despite ample initiative on his part, Pettiford’s young manhood was one of economic hardship. See William J. Simmons, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive, and Rising (Cleveland: Geo. M. Rewell, 1887), 460-65. Brief references to Pettiford’s later years as prosperous race man may be found in Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 3, 108.

Patricia J. Campbell makes the revealing observation that during the late nineteenth century “flirting” also connoted what “later sex educators were to call . . . ‘petting.”’ Campbell further notes that late nineteenth-century authors often argued that flirting on the part of young women resulted in frustrated young men seeking sexual release with prostitutes. See Campbell, Sex Guides: Books and Films About Sexuality for Young Adults (New York: Garland Publishing, 1986), 37.

According to one source, Benjamin authored at least seven more works by the end of the century. See Kletzing and Crogman, Progress of a Race, or The Remarkable Advancement of the Afro-American Negro (Atlanta: J. L. Nichols, 1898. Reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 578.

Mia Bay not only alerted me to the existence of Benjamin’s work, she graciously provided me with a copy of his version of Don’t. I became aware of Bunce’s book through John F. Kasson’s Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 52.

For discussion of homosexual experimentation and sex play among children and adolescents during the early twentieth century, see Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion, 233-34, 295-98. For analysis that situates the emergence of concepts regarding homosexuality within the racially charged atmosphere in which black men and women produced conduct literature, see Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 15-38.

As did a number of his contemporaries who were social reformers, Silas Floyd attended the 1902 Negro Young People’s Christian and Educational Congress; he also contributed a column to Voice of the Negro for a brief time. A brief biography of Floyd may be found in Souvenir: Official Program and Music of the Negro Young Peoples’ Christian and Educational Congress, Held August 6-11, 1902, Atlanta, Ga. (Nashville: National Baptist Publishing Board, ca. 1902), 183.

Ironically, in 1918, an anonymous Defender subscriber from Georgia suggested that Silas Floyd was the last man in any position to offer advice to the race: “I’ve known [Floyd] all my life and he is not a decent man morally. He is what I would call a white people’s nigger.” Defender (Chicago, Ill.), February 16, 1918, 10.

An example of domestic whiggishness, Hall’s “What a Wonderful Progress!” commemorates uplift; this poem proudly highlights the race’s movement from “huts into cottages.” See pages 182-83.

For primary testimony on the maelstrom swirling about black political involvement during and after Reconstruction, see Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States. Vol. II: From the Reconstruction Era to 1910 (New York: Citadel Press, 1951), 572-99. See also Donald G. Nieman, ed., Black Freedom/White Violence, 1865-1900 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994).

Blackwell was corresponding secretary for the Woman’s Home and Foreign Missions Society; her husband was A.M.E. Zion preacher George Lincoln Blackwell. While it is somewhat difficult to ascertain the contours and demands of Blackwell’s own household—her two children were deceased by 1915—she believed every woman should work toward improving home life: her own or that of the collective. For additional biographical data see Frank Lincoln Mather, Who’s Who of the Colored Race: A General Biographical Dictionary of Men and Women of African Descent (Reprint, Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1976), 1:27-28.

Whereas her position might have eventually changed, Hall was hostile to woman suffrage in 1905. See “Woman’s Rights,” in Hall’s Moral and Mental Capsule , 155-57.

Benjamin was reportedly involved in at least three violent confrontations with white men in Alabama years before he was murdered. For a description of these encounters, see the introduction to Benjamin’s Southern Outrages: A Statistical Record of Lawless Doings, 5-7.

Apparently, local whites found Carroll—and his views—relatively palatable. Even the state’s rabidly racist senator, Benjamin Tillman, reportedly acknowledged Carroll was “‘highly thought of by the white people of South Carolina.”’ Carroll’s commitment to interracial cooperation might have emerged from his own multi- or biracial background—he was either the son or grandson of a white slaveholder. See Arthur B. Caldwell, History of the American Negro, South Carolina Edition (n.p.: A. B. Caldwell, 1919), 310-13, esp. 311.

Not only did the Gazette excerpt Carroll’s address, the editorial comment does not indicate how much—or little—of what Carroll actually said was printed. It is also important to note that the Gazette failed to publish the exact date of Sumter’s Emancipation Day celebration. Although observations of Emancipation Day varied around the United States, it is safe to assume that if Carroll spoke in January, the Sumter gala occurred on New Year’s Day. See William H. Wig-gins Jr., O Freedom!: Afro-American Celebrations (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), xvii-xx, esp. xix.

In terms of Carroll’s overarching vision of domesticity, industrial education, politics, and race reform, Kevin Gaines offers relevant commentary: “The problem with racial uplift ideology [was] . . . one of unconscious internalized racism. . . . Building black homes and promoting family stability came to displace a broader vision of uplift as group struggle for citizenship and material advancement.” Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 6.

Elsewhere, Tate suggests Tillman’s take on racial progress was tempered by the “harsh reality of segregation at the turn of the century, a time when the promises of Reconstruction proved false.” Tate, “Introduction,” in The Works of Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman, 3-62, esp. 52.

Inasmuch as Blackwell vaunted home life, she was loath to see women reduced to domestic “drudge(s).” Blackwell urged “capable women of the race to take up every question that tends toward the uplift and betterment of conditions.” She implored black women to engage in temperance work and called for mothers to protect children from sites of urban leisure. She further urged women to “counteract the influence of . . . selfish and ambitious men” in black churches. See Responsibility and Opportunity, 1, 5, 6, 8, 9, 13.

Susan Smith offers similar analysis of club women in Sick and Tired, 17-32, esp. 17-19.

Mention—albeit scant—of Bryant’s activity in the Baptist Church may be found in the following sources: Lewis G. Jordan, Negro Baptist History (Nashville: Sunday School Publishing Board, National Baptist Convention, 1930), 393; Thomas Oscar Fuller, History of the Negro Baptists of Tennessee (Memphis: Haskins Print, ca. 1936), 145. See also Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, esp. 157.

Victoria Matthews expressed her convictions regarding the need of black people to take initiative in establishing institutions for the “young and unfriended” in a paper excerpted in the Southern Workman 28, no. 9 (September 1898): 173-74; primary evidence of black working girls’ homes may be found in Efforts for Social Betterment among Negro Americans (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1909), 100-103. A general history that contextualizes the efforts of black women who established working girls’ homes is Dorothy Salem’s To Better Our World.

For a reference to reformers who decried the “lodger evil,” see Grossman, Land of Hope, 133.

Pride over race homes was no incidental aspect of race pride literature. In 1915 during the celebration of the “Lincoln Jubilee,” the Michigan Manual of Freedman’s Progress included a richly illustrated section on “Negro Home and Property Owners.” Many of the featured residences were spacious frame houses. See Michigan Manual of Freedman’s Progress, comp. Francis H. Warren (Reprint, Detroit: John M. Green Publisher, 1985), 146-93.

Du Bois’s early sociological work and his years in Atlanta are covered by David Levering Lewis in W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 179-237. See also Driver and Green, W. E. B. Du Bois on Sociology , 9-17, as well as Katz and Sugrue, W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and the City, esp. 1-37.

Du Bois was quick to note that “considerable social distinction” existed among black Philadelphians regarding region of origin. In other words, southerness was stigmatized to a sufficient degree in the city that Du Bois speculated many residents, when asked, preferred to claim “a Northern birthplace” even if their origins were below the Mason-Dixon Line. See The Philadelphia Negro, 73 n. 1.

The Southern Workman series and some of its illustrations would later be integrated into a major discussion on housing in an Atlanta University study. See Du Bois, The Negro American Family, 42-96.

In his analysis of alley houses in Washington, D.C., James Borchert offers a similar analysis of lodging as James Grossman’s Land of Hope; Borchert also points out that “boarders” could actually be family members. He further argues “taking a boarder meant incorporating another person into the family; it also meant that aid and support were reciprocal. . . . [Furthermore, boarding typically] had established guidelines which helped to mitigate . . . disrupting influ-ences.” James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850-1970 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 80-81.

Not only did Du Bois maintain crowding was a greater problem in the country than in the city, he attempted to demonstrate just how widespread one-room cabins actually were: “in one black belt county, out of 1474 Negro families . . . 761 lived in 1 room, 560 in 2 rooms, 93 in 3 rooms and 60 in 4 or more rooms.” In addition, some rural homes with two “rooms” were, in reality, single chambers with suspended lofts. Ibid., 540; Du Bois, “The Problem of Housing the Negro, IV. The Home of the Village Negro,” Southern Workman 30, no. 11 (November 1901): 601-4, esp. 602.

Du Bois made explicit mention of prostitution only in terms of how segregation tended to place bordellos in black neighborhoods, but his objection to urban “disorder” mostly likely included sex workers; see Du Bois, “The Housing of the Negro, VI,” reprinted in Aptheker, Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals, 137.

Commentary on how early twentieth-century leisure spots could double as sites where prostitutes met clients may be found in Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 96-97.

Du Bois did not explore the ratio of women to men in the Southern Workman. However, when arguing that Philadelphia had an “unusual excess of females,” he openly acknowledged his intellectual debt to an essay Kelly Miller published under the auspices of the American Negro Academy. As Sharon Harley points out, he also referred to Miller’s work in The Negro American Family. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 53 n. 2; Sharon Harley, “For the Good of Family and Race: Gender, Work, and Domestic Roles in the Black Community, 1880-1930,” Signs 15, no. 21 (Winter 1990): 336-49, esp. 343 n. 16.

Here, it is also crucial to note that between 1880 and 1930, black females were reported as outnumbering black males in the general African American population. Labor migration undoubtedly skewed decennial enumerations but, all the same, females reportedly outnumbered males as far back as 1840, and most observers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries accepted the “fact” that African American females predominated. However, black men supposedly outnumbered black women in certain northern and western regions. See [U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census], Negroes in the United States: 1920-32 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1935), 78. An important regional variation appeared in the North and West where there were more black men. Figures for 1880, 1890, 1900, and 1910—most likely not adjusted for undercounts—reflecting regional variation may be found in [U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census], Negro Population: 1790-1915 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1918. Reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1969), 150.

In 1917, as a tribute to Booker Washington, National Negro Health Week was moved to April—the month of Washington’s birth—following his death in 1915. There was no Health Week in 1916. See Smith, Sick and Tired, 43-45.

Stephen Gilroy Hall provides an overview of the race history movement in “ ‘To Give a Faithful Account of the Race’: History and Historical Consciousness in the African American Community” (Ph.D. diss., The Ohio State University, 1999).

At least one black man, a Georgian named Leo Moss, made black dolls (largely as an avocation) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Perkins, Black Dolls, 12-18.

It is worth noting that French and British doll makers produced “realistic” colored dolls during this period, but in far fewer numbers than German factories; see Perkins, Black Dolls, 19. For examples of “servant” and “savage” dolls produced in Germany, see illustrations in Collector’s Encyclopedia of Black Dolls, 63, 74.

Formanek-Brunell speaks to the affordability of commercial dolls when she points out that, in 1905, mass-market “Campbell Kid dolls . . . sold for only one dollar . . . more than [working-class] families . . . could afford.” Made to Play House, 109.

Both Berry & Ross and the Gadsden Company produced “girl” and “boy” dolls. The National Colored Doll & Toy Company of Chicago sold the miniature gas masks. See “Boys! Go Over the Top,” [National Colored Doll & Toy Company advertisement], Half-Century Magazine 7, no. 1 (July 1919): 14.

As early as the 1920s, writers chronicled the rise of realistic black dolls. In 1924, W. D. Weatherford noticed that “fifty years ago . . . Negroes wanted white dolls for their children because white carried with it the idea of privilege and advancement. It is significant that this is now changed, that the Negro doll carries with it the sense of race pride and race achievement.” See Weatherford, The Negro from Africa to America, 427-28. See also Bruno Lasker, Race Attitudes in Children (New York: Henry Holt, 1929), 220-21. In discussing organizations responsible for popularizing black dolls, Weatherford mentions the National Baptist Convention, while Lasker mentions the Garvey movement.

The connection between Berry & Ross and Marcus Garvey is odd indeed. Berry & Ross’s president, H. S. Boulin—who, like Garvey, hailed from Jamaica —was initially hostile to the Universal Negro Improvement Association during the organization’s early existence; as agent “P-138,” Boulin informed on Garvey for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. By 1921 or 1922, however, Boulin was on friendly terms with Garvey. All the same, the reason and terms for the sale of Berry & Ross to the UNIA are not clear—neither Boulin, Berry, nor Ross appeared to have ever joined the organization.