2019 PA N A F R I C A N CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.II
ALPHA PHI ALPHA FRATERNITY DEVELOPS LEADERS, PROMOTES BROTHERHOOD AND ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE, WHILE PROVIDING SERVICE AND ADVOCACY FOR OUR COMMUNITIES.
2016 WORLD POLICY COUNCIL
P.1
THE MISSION OF THE ALPHA PHI ALPHA WORLD POLICY COUNCIL (WPC) IS TO ADDRESS ISSUES OF CONCERN TO OUR BROTHERHOOD, OUR COMMUNITIES, OUR NATION, AND THE WORLD. The council has been charged with applying sustained and profound intellectual energy to understanding an alternative means of bringing about the resolution of problems at the community, national, and international levels; expanding fraternal and public knowledge of such problems, and engaging public discussion about them. The council, in fulfilling its mission, is non-partisan, gives consideration to domestic and international issues, seeks the counsel of experts in relevant fields, provides perspectives on specific problems, and, where practicable, recommends possible solutions that may have a favorable impact on African Americans, the community, the nation, and the world.
P.2
CONTENTS (4)
PRESIDENT’S GREETINGS
(8)
FROM THE CHAIR
(10)
INTRODUCTION
(12)
PAN-AFRICANISM: THE HISTORICAL BOND OF EQUALITY (11) THE PAN-AFRICAN ASSOCIATION, 1897 (15) ANNA JULIA COOPER (17) W.E.B. DU BOIS (19) THE 1ST PAN-AFRICAN CONGRESS, FEBRUARY 1919 (22) THE EMANCIPATIONISTS AND THE NEW IMPERIALISTS (24) THE ROLE AND CONDITION OF BLACK SOLDIERS IN WORLD WAR I
(32)
REFERENCES
(35)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
2016 WORLD POLICY COUNCIL
P.3
FROM THE GENERAL PRESIDENT
P.4
In February of this year, I led a delegation of Alpha men to London, England and Paris, France, to commemorate the 100th Anniversary Pan African Congress. Alpha Advocacy has defined the historical legacy of our great fraternity through the courageous Alpha men that comprise our membership. The intellectual leadership of Brother Dr. W.E. B. DuBois and General President Dr. Rayford Logan as key organizers of the 1919 Pan African Congress serves as an unprecedented model advocacy in action. One hundred years ago, following the conclusion of World War I, Brothers DuBois and Logan firmly believed that global democracy must include the continent of Africa. Subsequently, their courageous leadership served as the catalyst for insisting upon African independence from European domination. We must never forget, that within months following the Pan African Congress, African Americans citizens, especially African American veterans, experienced brutal murders and gang violence during the “Red Summer of 1919.� However, Alpha men stood firm against brutal violence and continued the fight against injustice. Now more than ever, the men of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. must utilize their individual and collective strengths to fight against the rise of white supremacy and any forms of racism. Please join me in congratulating Brother Ambassador Horace Dawson, Ph.D., the World Policy Council and Brother Robert Harris, Ph.D. for historically documenting the significance of the Pan African Congress and the leadership of Alpha Phi Alpha men. This publication serves as a guidepost for a new generation of Alpha men to embrace their obligation of leadership in confronting the issues of today and tomorrow. The legacy of Alpha Advocacy in Action is in our hands. Onward and Upward Always,
Everett B. Ward General President Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity
2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.5
WORLD POLICY COUNCIL MEMBERS EDWARD W. BROOKE 1919-2015 [Beta ’37] Emeritus Founding Chairman, World Policy Council; United States Senator, 1967-1979; Attorney General, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1963-67; awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2004, Congressional Gold Medal, 2009. HORACE G. DAWSON JR., Chairman [Nu ’46] Awarded honorary degree (LLD) by Howard University, 2016; Founding Director, Ralph J. Bunche International Affairs Center, Howard University; Former U.S. Ambassador to Botswana; Lincoln University LLD and Hall of Fame; Distinguished Alumni Award, University of Iowa, 2009; Alpha Award of Merit, 2005 HENRY PONDER, Vice Chairman [Beta Kappa ’48] Former President and Chief Executive Officer, National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education; Former President, Benedict College, Fisk University, Talladega College; Former Interim President, Langston University; Honoree, Oklahoma State University Diversity Hall of Fame; Former General President, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity BOBBY W. AUSTIN [Tau Lambda ’68] President, Neighborhood Associates, Inc.; Director of the Education Portal of CRP, Inc.; Mahatma Gandhi Fellow, American Academy of Social and Political Science; Founding President of the Village Foundation; Executive Director of the National Task Force on African American Men and Boys, convened by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation; Former Assistant Director, Kellogg National Fellowship Program M. CHRISTOPHER BROWN II [Mu Lambda ‘04] President, Kentucky State University; Former Executive Vice President and Provost, Southern University and A&M. College System; former President, Alcorn State University; Former Provost, Fisk University; Former Dean, College of Education, University of Nevada - Las Vegas; Former Vice President, American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education; Former Executive Director, F.D. Paterson Research Institute. P.6
RALPH E. JOHNSON [Kappa Alpha ’79] Dean of the Center for Student Success, Washington Adventist University, Takoma Park, Md.; Former Associate Dean of Students, Johns Hopkins University; Former Assistant Dean of Student Life and Director of Minority Student Affairs, University of South Carolina; and Former Coordinator of Greek Affairs, University of Arkansas. In 1998, he founded and continues to direct the Alpha Phi Alpha College Chapter Leadership Academy. KENTON W. KEITH [Upsilon ’58] Senior Inspector, Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of State; Former Foreign Service Officer, United States Information Agency in the Middle East, France, and Brazil; Former Senior Vice President, Meridian International Center, Washington, D.C.; Former U.S. Ambassador to the State of Qatar CHARLES B. RANGEL [Alpha Gamma Lambda ’64] Member (Retired), United States House of Representatives (D-NY); Former Chairman, U.S. House Ways and Means Committee and Dean, New York State Congressional Delegation; Founding Member, Congressional Black Caucus KANTON T. REYNOLDS [Eta Omicron ‘91] Director of Undergraduate Programs, Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh; formerly with General Motors, IBM, and Lenovo in such specialties as systems engineering, system assurance, program development, and project management. A former graduate researcher at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Reynolds was an observer of elections for that institution in Mahdia, Guyana, in 2015. IVORY TOLDSON [Nu Psi ’92] Associate Professor, Counseling Psychology Program, and Editor-in-Chief, The Journal of Negro Education, Howard University; Senior Research Analyst, Congressional Black Caucus Foundation
RAPPORTEUR Hartford T. Jennings Sr., United States Foreign Service Officer (retired) 2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.7
FROM THE CHAIR
P.8
As I begin, I would like to first offer a very special word to Brother Dr. Warren M. Washington, the Word Policy Council’s first guest author, whose 2016 seminal contribution to the WPC Report was on climate change, the scientific area in which he was recognized earlier this summer as co-recipient of the Tyler Prize, widely regarded as the Nobel Prize in the field. The World Policy Council extends its heartiest congratulations to Brother Dr. Washington. Now, Brother Dr. Robert L. Harris, Jr., the Fraternity’s National Historian, follows Brother Dr. Washington, as the World Policy Council’s second guest author. Brother Dr. Harris generously accepted the Council’s invitation to write on the formation and contribution of the first Pan African Congress. The subject was of special relevance to Brother General President Dr. Everett B. Ward who has focused the Fraternity’s attention on the important role of the Pan African Congress in its advocacy of freedom, equality, and justice for people of African descent world-wide. With vision, courage, and ingenuity, the group, which included several brothers of Alpha Phi Alpha, met in London and Paris in 1919. “This centenary must be recognized and celebrated,” said Brother Dr. Ward, “as an iconic event in the struggle for human and civil rights.” From February 7th through February 13th, 2019, the General President led a high-level delegation of Alpha Phi Alpha officials on a pilgrimage to London and Paris commemorating the Congress’s centenary with specific emphasis on the Alpha brothers involved in its formation. Accompanying Dr. Ward were Brother Dr. Harris; Brother Van Strickland, Director of Conventions; Brother Ambassador Horace G. Dawson Jr., Chairman, World Policy Council; Brother Eric C. Webb, Assistant Director of Public Relations and Community Engagement as well as the Managing Editor, SPHINX magazine; as well as Brother Harold Daniel III, Assistant Vice President, Eastern Region. Brother Ronald Sewell, President, Rho Chi Lambda Chapter, London, joined and hosted the group in London. In both London and Paris, the delegation identified and visited venues where the Congress held meetings, attended lectures, searched for relevant documents and locations, and visited historical sites. They also met with Alpha brothers from chapters in London, France and Germany and from British cities outside London. The World Policy Council is grateful to Brother Dr. Harris for his contribution on the Pan African Congress in this Report.
Horace G. Dawson Jr., Ph.D. Chairman Alpha Phi Alpha World Policy Council 2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.9
BIOGRAPHY
P.10
Robert L. Harris, Jr. received his Ph.D. in U.S. history from Northwestern University and has been a Rockefeller Foundation humanities fellow at the State University of New York/Buffalo, W.E.B. Du Bois fellow at Harvard University, Ford Foundation postdoctroal fellow, Rockefeller research fellow, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow. The Association for the Study of African American Life and History awarded him the Carter G. Woodson Scholar’s Medallion for Distinguished research, writing, activism. He is the author of Teaching African American History, The History of Alpha Phi Alpha: A Tradition of Leadership and Service: Volume 2, and co-editor of The Columbia Guide to African American History Since 1939, as well as more than 50 articles, chapters in books, and dictionary entries. He is a past president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, co-chair of the History/Social Studies Committee of the national Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and consultant to the Law School Admission Council, among other positions. He was history consultant for Rubicon Productions’ Emmy awardwinning Building the Cream about the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C. and Alpha Phi Alpha: A century of Leadership and Service. He has also served as history for the Writers Guild of America’s Best Television documentary, Billy Strayhorn: lush Life, American Experience; Ulysses S. Grant, and trouble Behind: A Documentary of the 1919 Corbin, Kentucky Race Riot. He wrote the Prime School Television teacher guides for I Remember Harlem, Roots: The Next Generation, and Roots: The Original Saga of an American Family. Initiated into Theta Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, Inc. on April 27, 1963, he served as Theta Chapter president and from 1965-66 as midwestern assistant vice president and is the national historian. The Robert L. Harris Jr. award for Outstanding Multi-cultural Greek Letter Council Leader, inaugurated in 2004 by the Cornell Office of Fraternity and Sorority Affairs; Robert L. Harris Jr. ADVANCEments in Science Lecture Series, inaugurated in 2008 by the Cornell University-Advance Center; and the Robert L. Harris Jr. Ithaca High School Outstanding African American Male Senior Award, started in 2013, are all named in his honor.
2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.11
INTRODUCTION Pan-african congress: The hisTorical Bond of equaliTy Nothing so much stalks our calendars — and our lives — as commemorative events, constant and inevitable reminders of the most significant moments and occurrences in history and in our lives as groups and individuals. Some of these rise to mystic levels — Christmas, the Fourth of July, the Bastille, Guy Fawkes — encompassing vast populations and areas of belief. Others attain varying degrees of significance and symbolism. In terms of this country’s struggle with race, three anniversary events this year present profound reminders. They include 1) Africans first arrival in America (and therefore the beginning of slavery) four hundred years ago in 1619 at Jamestown; 2) the first legislative assembly of Europeans in the New World convened in Virginia to establish freedom and justice under law that very same year — in the — the; and 3) Between 1838-39, Jesuit officials at Georgetown University sold their slaves into enhanced bondage in Louisiana to raise funds to stabilize the university’s finances. Freedom for all and also commercial trafficking in human beings would seem irreconcilable; yet these twin posts of contradiction constitute the dilemma so well noted by Myrdal in his iconic work on the American past, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Democracy. The story of the advance by people of color since the abolition of slavery in the mid-19th century to virtually every facet of life in the United States, now including the White House, is one of the great sagas in human history. Well chronicled by Brother Dr. John Hope Franklin, in his classic work, From Slavery to Freedom. The drama has its parallels, albeit with variations and differences in extent, in Europe and in the West Indies. And although the history of colonialism caused considerable delay in Africa, particularly in Southern Africa, every country on that continent today enjoys self-rule. As well illustrated in From Slavery to Freedom, political, economic, and social achievements by African Americans have not come without difficulty. Each post bondage situation — whether in the Americas, Europe, or in Africa — has its own Gordian knot to untangle. In none of these areas, however, has equality been recognized as complete. And certainly, this was by no means the case as the 19th Century came to an end. A series of gatherings beginning in the late 1800s culminated in 1919 with the meeting in London and Paris of the first Pan-African Congress. The purpose was to explore and expose inequality for people of color P.12
world-wide with emphasis on the situation in Africa. This bold step was taken exactly a century ago by a group consisting mainly of American and West Indian intellectuals. Prominent among them were members of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., most notably, Brother Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, who organized the meeting. Other leaders’ names of distinction in various fields of endeavor also come to mind. The event, itself, stands out as commemorative, “an event and time to be remembered,” said Brother Dr. Everett B. Ward, General President of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. and recently-retired President of Saint Augustine’s University in Raleigh, N.C. What was the primary purpose of this venture? Why did it occur at just this particular time? What does it say about the societies of the day, about one as opposed to the other? What motivated the organizers, and how in that day and time did they muster the audacity to include women? These are, but a few of the questions posed by Brother Dr. Ward in underscoring the importance of the first Pan-African Congress and in paying tribute to those who brought it about. Although we shall never know the full value of their contribution, he said, we know ourselves to be enormously in their debt. It was in recognition of this and the importance of the event that Brother Dr. Ward led a delegation of Alpha officials on a pilgrimage to London and Paris from February 7 through February 13, 2019 to commemorate the centenary of the first Pan-African Congress. The delegation visited venues where the Congress held their meetings, heard lectures by experts on the subject; searched for bits and pieces of missing information; and otherwise “walked in the footsteps” of the Congress delegates. Among those accompanying the General President on the trip to Europe was Brother Dr. Robert L. Harris, Jr., Professor Emeritus of History, Cornell University, and National Historian, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. Brother Harris, for whom a Cornell University lecture series, “Advancements in Science,” was recently named in his honor, was invited by the World Policy Council to write an essay on the Pan-African Congress for this WPC 2019 Council Report. The accompanying essay is the result. Constituting the sole contribution for this commemorative edition, it honors the formation of the first Pan-African Congress and the memory of those visionaries, including Alpha Phi Alpha brothers instrumental in bringing it into being. The essay is presented on the following pages.
Horace G. Dawson Jr., Ph.D. Chairman Alpha Phi Alpha World Policy Council 2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.13
PAN-AFRICANISM: THE HISTORICAL BOND OF EQUALITY
P.14
“I was convinced that as long as black folks were oppressed anywhere because of race and colour the problem of American Negroes would never be settled.” W.E.B. Du Bois*
In an era that has spurred “Black Lives Matter” protests and thinly veiled racial animus from United States President Donald Trump, where he refers to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries,” and white supremacists, the Far-Right and the Alt-Right recently seizing considerable seats in various parliaments and as Prime Minister in several European countries, Pan-Africanism takes on greater import. Pan-Africanism is an inextricable bond between Africans on the continent, in the Caribbean, Canada, the United States, and Central and South America, i.e. the diaspora. It is based on common history, heritage, and experience of racial oppression. It also seeks to unite people of African ancestry for economic, political, and social progress. In the spirit of Pan-Africanism, Nigerian Nobel Laureate in Literature, Wole Soyinka, recently relinquished his U.S. Green Card to protest the retrograde President of the United States. Soyinka, in an interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., said that he took such action because “… many people do not know how emotionally, not just historically or intellectually, attached I am to our diaspora.”1
The Pan-African Association, 1897 Henry Sylvester Williams, a teacher in Trinidad during the late nineteenth century and later a barrister in England, was appalled by the conditions under which Black people suffered in South Africa, where they were bought and sold similar to enslavement in the United States and women were forced into concubinage. In June 1897, Williams, who had visited Canada, the U.S., and England, and had found similar racial oppression, organized the world’s first Pan-African Association and placed the word “Pan-African” into the lexicon of Black resistance. The Pan-African Association’s constitution called for full civil and political rights for Africans and her descendants throughout the world; encouragement of educational, industrial, and commercial enterprises among people of African ancestry, friendly relations between the races, organization of a depository for publications and statistics on the African diaspora, and the development of a fund to support the organization.2 *”The Early Beginnings of the Pan-African Movement,” W.E.B. Du Bois, Speech to the 6th Annual Conference of the All African Student Union of the Americas, June 20, 1958. W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. 2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.15
While Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute, was traveling in the United Kingdom during the summer of 1899, Williams conferred with him about holding a Pan-African Conference in London during the Paris Exposition of 1900, since many members of the African diaspora would be in Europe. The purpose of the meeting would be to influence public opinion about the conditions of racial oppression under which people of African ancestry lived in various parts of the world. In a letter to African American newspapers, Washington urged Black Americans “…to attend what was likely to be one of the most effective and far-reaching gatherings that has ever been held in connection with the development of the race.”3 In response to Washington and other Black Leaders, African Americans pressed for an American Negro exhibit at the Paris Exposition. Ultimately, the exhibit would review African American progress since Emancipation, including a display of books and pamphlets written by African Americans. Daniel Murray, who served as Assistant Librarian at the Library of Congress, was asked to organize the exhibit. Murray was the father of Brother Nathaniel Allison Murray, one of the Jewel Booker T. Washington Founders of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. at Cornell University in 1906. Through his work at the Library of Congress, Daniel Murray had been identifying books and pamphlets written by authors of African ancestry. His goal was to demonstrate that not only could a peoples’ progress be found in their literature, but that color was no bar to intellectual achievement. He vigorously rejected racist accusations that Africans had made no contributions to world civilization and that African Americans had played a negligible role in the development of the United States.4 For the exhibition, Murray compiled a list of 980 titles, with 214 books, 160 pamphlets, and two bound volumes of newspapers that were displayed in Paris. Washington sent a series of photographs showing African Americans as agricultural and industrial workers. Brother W.E.B. Du Bois, the first African American to receive a Ph.D. degree from Harvard University, took a different angle and produced a series of photographs and statistical charts that highlighted African American initiative and accomplishment. He explained that the exhibit showed the history of the American Negro, his present condition, his education, and his literature. To counter the accusation of a Boston Lawyer that “I never knew a Negro to invent anything but lies” in response to a P.16
Pan-Africanism: The Historical Bond of Equality
patent office inquiry, the exhibit listed 350 patents issued to African Americans. Brother Du Bois also asserted that 60 percent of Black children were in school and that their illiteracy rate was lower than that of Russia. Murray’s collection of literature by Black authors took many viewers of the African American exhibit by surprise. They found it difficult to fathom that a despised race could write such a large body of work.5 From July 23-25, 1900, the Pan-African Conference called by Henry Sylvester Williams met at Westminster Town Hall in London. A.M.E. Zion Bishop Alexander Walters, who had been elected President of the Pan-African Association, presided Daniel Murray over the meeting. Bishop Walters was also a founder of the National Afro-American Council in 1898, of which he was President. The National Afro-American Council opposed lynching, disfranchisement, and racial discrimination. In its Address to the Citizens of the United States, the Council protested persistent efforts to eliminate African Americans from southern politics. The Council proclaimed: “We are not to be eliminated. Suffrage is a federal guarantee and not a privilege to be conferred or withheld by the States.” The Address maintained that the suppression of Black voting rights was responsible for many of the wrongs that African Americans experienced, especially in the South.6 Bishop Walters used the term “Afro-American” to identify “… Americans by way of Africa or Americans whose ancestors came to this country from Africa …” He argued that it was the only proper term to designate people of African and American ancestry, who could not be defined by color alone. People, he said, should be identified by what defines their country and race and not the color that distinguishes them from the rest of mankind. “We are,” he stated, “Afro-Americans – not colored Americans or Negro Americans.”7 In addition, Bishop Walters was a frequent speaker at Christian Endeavor Society meetings. The Christian Bishop Walters Endeavor Society sought to involve youth in Christian ministry. He was a trustee of the United Society of Christian Endeavors and attended the World’s Convention of Christian Endeavor in London, 2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.17
July 13-20, 1900, just prior to the Pan-African Conference. He spoke at the Christian Endeavor Convention and declared that it was “… the first organization in which black people have been treated as the equals of white people.”8 Five years earlier, at the Christian Endeavor National Convention in Boston, he was a main speaker and addressed “The Responsibility of the AfroAmerican in America.” He described efforts to educate young African American men in informed use of the ballot. He explained that African Americans must maintain enfranchisement and that racial segregation would only be changed by “intelligence, character, wealth, and wise agitation.” Oppressors, Walters stated, have always sought to suppress wise agitation but for the oppressed to secure their rights, they must speak out.9 At the 1900 World’s Convention of Christian Endeavor, Bishop Walters reminded the audience that African Americans were not the only people to be enslaved. The Egyptians enslaved the Hebrews for 430 years. The ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons were once enslaved. For the most part, few nations had not been enslaved at some point in their history. Although some traducers of the race sought to define Africans as inferior beings, Bishop Walters recited the Christian Endeavor motto “We all are brethren.” He recalled for them the scriptural references that “God hath made of one blood all nations” and the proclamation “The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man.” He cited the progress African Americans had made since emancipation in owning property, in building schools and churches, in establishing newspapers, as well as in producing teachers, doctors, and lawyers. He would later explain: “There is not the slightest difference under the microscope between the blood of a Chinaman, Japanese, Negro or a white man.” Walters exploded the myth of “blue blood, patrician blood, and royal blood” as distinct from “common or plebian blood.” He drew from the work of Kelly Miller, mathematician, sociologist, Dean of the College at Howard University, and member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. Brother Miller posited that there were no permanent superior or inferior races, and that in the history of civilization, various races and nations rise and fall like the waves of the ocean. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there were still efforts to differentiate people on the grounds of “race” and to establish a hierarchy of privilege, dating back to the seventeenth century to justify enslavement and later colonization.10
Anna Julia Cooper Also in attendance at the Pan-African Conference was Anna Julia Cooper, author of A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892). P.18
Pan-Africanism: The Historical Bond of Equality
She attended St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute (now St. Augustine’s University) and taught mathematics part-time at the remarkable age of 10 years old. She later graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio with a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics. She taught at M Street High School in Washington, D.C., of which she became principal in 1902. She later earned a doctoral degree at age 67 from the Sorbonne in Paris with a dissertation in French on “Slavery and the French Revolutionists, 1788-1805.” She was a member of the Executive Committee for the Pan-African Association. Cooper read a lengthy paper at the Pan-African Conference on “The Negro Problem in America.”11 Although there is no extant copy of her paper, we can speculate from her writings the substance of her remarks. In an address on September 5, 1902 to the General Conference of the Society of Friends (Quakers), she explained that “…the Negro Question in America today is the white man’s problem …” 12 Cooper argued that the African American was a “… silent rebuke to the Nation’s Christianity, the great gulf between its professions and it practices.” The Anna Julia Cooper degraded status and debased condition of African Americans gave lie to America’s vaunted ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The early 20th Century was a particularly trying time for African Americans. The foreigner could learn the language and “out-American the American.” He could, she commented, “…apply burnt cork and impute his meanness to the colored race as his appointed scape goat.”13 The most insidious explanation of African Americans’ status in American society, according to Cooper, was that it was their own fault. Moreover, with the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War, the North left the South to its own devices. With the abolition of slavery, the African American was supposed to be able to stand on their own two feet despite being crippled by enslavement. White America’s wanton disregard of their rights and the insecurity of their property placed African Americans in a most vulnerable position. The collapse of the Freedmen’s Savings Bank, in which Black Civil War veterans had been encouraged by the federal government to place their pay, bonuses, and pensions, removed what little capital African Americans had to start their new lives as freed men and women. Cooper cited the 1898 Wilmington Massacre in her home state of North Carolina as an example of African American vulnerability. During the 1890s, African Americans were the majority of the population in Wilmington and enjoyed prominent positions in commerce and 2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.19
industry with a successful professional class. Wilmington was also home to the only Black daily newspaper at the time, The Daily Record, owned by the descendant of a white former governor and his slave mistress. White supremacists in the state resented the political representation of African Americans who with progressive white politicians held important political offices in the city and county.14 On November 10, 1898 after months of stirring up white resentment to African American economic and political success, white marauders invaded the Black community of Wilmington, sacked businesses, torched homes, and burned the Daily Record offices to the ground. In addition, white supremacists destroyed other Black newspaper offices throughout the state as a means of curtailing Black communication. The Massacre led to the deaths of some 300 African Americans and their white allies. More than 2,000 African Americans fled the city. White supremacists gained control of the state government, passed racial segregation laws, and disenfranchised Black voters.15 P.20
Pan-Africanism: The Historical Bond of Equality
Despite the hardship and tribulation that African Americans suffered in the United States, Cooper opposed African Americans leaving the country. She affirmed that: “The Negro is the most stable and reliable factor today in American industry. …The American Negro is capable of contributing not only his brawn and sinew but also from brain and character a much needed element in American civilization, and here is his home.” She said that African American contributions to American literature and music were the most original. She concluded that: “… the national web is incomplete without the African thread that glints and ripples thro it from the beginning…” 16 The Pan-African Conference ended with a decision to hold biennial meetings with the next meeting in 1902 in the United States and the 1904 meeting in Haiti on the occasion of the centennial of Haitian Independence. The meeting passed a resolution acknowledging the work of the Anti-Slavery Society for the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, Africa, the United States, and Brazil. But it recognized the work remaining to end bondage on the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba in the Indian Ocean. It also resolved that the meeting “…representing the African and his descendants from every part of the world …” appreciates efforts of the Native Races and Liquor Traffic United Committee for seeking to suppress the iniquitous traffic in liquor among Africans. The meeting also congratulated The Aborigines Protection Society and the Society of Friends for their work in promoting freedom, independence, and citizenship. The Pan-African Conference addressed an appeal directly to the Queen of England about the treatment of her subjects in South Africa. There was the so-called “indenture” which was basically bondage of native men, women, and children to white colonists, compulsory labor on public works, the pass system for people of color, curfews, segregated transportation and footpaths, denial of housing and the franchise.17
W.E.B. Du Bois Brother W.E.B. Du Bois chaired the committee that drafted an “Address to the Nations of the World” from the Pan-African Conference. His dissertation, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade,” was the first publication in the Harvard Historical Studies. He also studied economics, history, and sociology at the University of Berlin, and became fluent in German. Du Bois was a founder in 1905 of the Niagara Movement, which strongly objected to Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of racial accommodation and acquiescence to racial inequality. The Niagara Movement advocated full citizenship rights for African Americans and vigorously opposed the idea that African Americans consented to racial inferiority and submission to oppression without forceful protest. The Niagara Movement made a strong impression on the men enrolled at 2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.21
Cornell University who founded the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity in 1906. They studied and discussed Du Bois’ writings at their meetings. One of the Fraternity’s Jewel Founders, Brother Dr. Henry Arthur Callis, remarked that Du Bois became interested in their effort to organize at Cornell. When Du Bois traveled to the University of Michigan for a lecture, he met with members of the Epsilon Chapter and was initiated in 1909 as an Exalted Honorary Brother of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity.18 That same year, Du Bois helped to start the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) after the atrocities in Springfield, Illinois in 1908, a year before the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. A mob invaded Springfield’s Black community after two African American men were accused of rape. The mob set fire to Black homes and businesses, and lynched two Black men, one an elderly barber and the other an 84-year old cobbler. Thousands of African Americans fled their homes as businesses fired them and grocers refused to sell them food. Hundreds left on foot for asylum in St. Louis and Chicago. Towns such as Jacksonville and Peoria, Illinois would not let the exiles enter their city Brother W.E.B. Du Bois limits. Many northern liberal whites were appalled that such malice could take place in Springfield, Illinois, the city that housed the tomb of the “Great Emancipator. ” In response, they helped to organize the NAACP as a guardian of African American rights that would let no injustice escape without protest and that would work primarily through the legal system. Du Bois became director of publicity and editor of the Crisis Magazine for the NAACP.19 The “Address to the Nations of the World” included Brother Du Bois’ famous phrase, “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” He asked “… how far differences of race, which show themselves chiefly in the colour of the skin and the texture of the hair, are going to be made, hereafter, the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.” Du Bois acknowledged that at the time the darker races were less advanced in culture according to “European Standards.” That, however, was not always the case. In the history of the world, both ancient and modern, “… there were many instances of no despicable ability and capacity among the blackest races of men.” Moreover, the black men in Africa, America, and the islands of the sea as well as the brown and yellow men elsewhere will have a major influence on the world of the future. But they should not “… be sacrificed to the greed of gold, their liberties taken away, their P.22
Pan-Africanism: The Historical Bond of Equality
family life debauched, their just aspirations repressed, and avenues of advancement and culture taken from them.” The cloak of Christian missionary work must not be allowed in the future as in the past to hide ruthless economic exploitation of the less developed nations. The “Address” asked the Nations of the World to respect the “integrity and independence of the free Negro States of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Liberia, and Hayti…” It invoked the names of individuals such as William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharpe and other British leaders in the abolition of the slave trade as examples of advocates for the rights of responsible government for the Black colonies of Africa and the West Indies. In the spirit of William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass and other leaders in the abolition of slavery in the United States, the “Address” called for the right of the franchise and security of person and property for African Americans. From 1899 to 1903, 1,578 Black men, women, and children were lynched in the United States in sadistic rituals in which they were hung from trees, burned at the stake, and had body parts taken as souvenirs.20 The Pan-African Conference ended with an expectation that branch associations would be established throughout the African diaspora. Brother W.E.B. Du Bois was designated as the representative in the United States, with the title of Vice President. Bishop Walters later reported that a visit to the British Parliament at the end of the meeting was a “crowning honor.” They had tea on the terrace of the House of Commons and the men were able to visit the House of Commons. Women, however, were not yet allowed admission to the Parliament.21 Given the far-flung members of the Pan-African Association and the problems of international transportation and communication, the organization was not able to sustain itself. Bishop Walters saw the Pan-African Conference as being a success in bringing together African American tourists who visited London and the Paris Exposition with members of the African diaspora who they might not otherwise encounter.22 Beyond expressing solidarity with the fate of Africans, there was little concrete action that could be taken. The delegates to the Pan-African Conference turned their attention to more immediate problems at home. By 1903, the Pan-African Association had basically dissolved. Marika Sherwood in her study of the Origins of PanAfricanism concluded that the Niagara Movement established a PanAfrican Department that would lead to the Pan-African Congress called by Brother Du Bois in 1919.23 Neither Henry Sylvester Williams, who died in 1911, nor Bishop Alexander Walters, President of the Pan-African Congress, who died in 1917 lived to see the development of the PanAfrican Congress.24 2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.23
The 1st Pan-African Congress, February 1919 Brother Du Bois anticipated that the end of World War I would provide an opportunity for the beginning of decolonization in Africa. He proposed to the NAACP a plan for internationalization of the former German colonies; representation for the colonies by educated Africans, African Americans, West Indians, and South Americans through a Pan-African Congress, and a merger of modern advances in science, education, and communications with traditional and efficient African institutions of local self-government. Given that Brother Du Bois saw educated members of the diaspora as being representatives of Africa, he probably used the term congress rather than conference. Use of the term congress also distinguished the 1919 meeting from the conference in 1900. The NAACP accepted his proposal and sponsored his travel to the Paris Peace Conference that met for a year in Versailles, January 1919 to January 1920. He was also to study the role and condition of Black soldiers from throughout the diaspora in World War I.25 On February 19, 1919, the 1st Pan-African Congress convened in Paris at the Grand Hotel, Boulevard des Capercines, with 57 delegates including 16 African Americans, 20 West Indians, 12 Africans, and the rest from France, Belgium, and Portugal. The meeting was held with the assistance of Blaise Diagne, who served as President of the Pan-African Congress, and Brother W.E.B. Du Bois, who served as Secretary. Diagne, from Senegal, was the first African to hold a position in the French government as an elected member of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the French Parliament. The French policy of “assimilation” and “indirect rule” granted citizenship rights to highly educated colonial subjects. The U.S. State Department denied passports to African Americans seeking to attend the Paris Peace Conference on the grounds that the President Woodrow Wilson French government would not look kindly on an unofficial delegation of African Americans. Brother Du Bois, however, was able to travel to Paris as an accredited press representative for the Crisis.26 President Woodrow Wilson, who segregated federal employees in Washington, D.C. and who showed the racist film “Birth of a Nation” in the White House, which influenced a revival of the Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain, Georgia in 1915 stopped Japan from placing the principle of race equality on the agenda of the Paris Peace Conference.27 P.24
Pan-Africanism: The Historical Bond of Equality
The 1st Pan-African Congress took place during a period in AfricanAmerican history that Brother Rayford W. Logan, who became the Fifteenth General President of Alpha Phi Alpha, described as the “Nadir.” It was a time from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the 1920s. There was an upsurge in anti-Black violence, lynching, disenfranchisement, and racial segregation. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson approved the principle of “separate but equal,” that legitimized separation of the races in accommodations, education, housing, and transportation.28 The “Nadir” for African Americans coincided with colonization in Africa. From 1884-1885, the major European powers gathered in Berlin, Germany to carve up the African continent. They arbitrarily established boundaries that did not conform to African history or tradition. No Africans were invited to participate in the conference, often referred to as “the scramble for Africa.” Aside from the exploitation of Africa’s labor and natural resources, Brother Du Bois wrote that the two worse things that happened were the destruction of African cultural patterns and the denial of education.29 Brother Logan assisted Brother Du Bois in organizing the Pan-African Congress. He was appointed to the bureau for the Congress and helped Brother Du Bois with French translation.30 Plessy v. Ferguson Illustration Other Alpha men attended the meeting, including Brother Dr. John Hope, President of Morehouse College; Brother Henry A. Hunt, President of Fort Valley State College, and Brother Dr. Channing Tobias, YMCA Executive and later Director of the Phelps-Stokes Fund. Brother Logan, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Williams College in Massachusetts, enlisted in the Army after graduation and rose from the rank of private to lieutenant. He became embittered by his military service during which he experienced segregation and humiliation. Although an officer, he was not accorded the dignity and respect of white officers. Cooks served him the worst portions. A curtain separated African American officers from white officers in the same barracks. 2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.25
White soldiers did not salute him and the military brass questioned Black officers competence and efficiency. Given the relative freedom from racial discrimination in France, Brother Logan requested a discharge from the military in France, which he was granted on August 21, 1919. He had learned the intricacies of currency speculation, i.e. buying and selling foreign money to take advantage of exchange rates, and remained in France until 1924, when he returned to an academic career in the United States.31 On January 1, 1919, Brother Du Bois sent out a memorandum on the Pan-African Congress, primarily “… to representatives of organizations devoted to the advancement of the darker races.” He included the independent African nations of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Liberia, and Hayti as well as the European nations with colonies in Africa. He identified the work of the Pan-African Congress as hearing statements on the condition of Negroes throughout the world. They would solicit authoritative statements on the Great Powers’ policies toward the Negro race. The Pan-African Congress would appeal to the Peace Conference for a voice in the proposed League of Nations and protection for the more than 250 million colonized Negroes. They asked for political rights for the “civilized” Negroes, native rights to the land and natural resources, industrial development to benefit the inhabitants and not the colonizers, promotion of autonomous government according to native custom with the goal of gradually developing “… an Africa for the Africans.” The Pan-African Congress asked for friendly and cordial relations among the races based on mutual respect and equality. There would be a permanent Secretariat headquartered in Paris with responsibility for collecting the history of the Negro race, studying the present condition of the race, publishing reports, encouraging Negro art and literature, and arranging for a second PanAfrican Congress.32 The Pan-African Congress passed nine resolutions. They resolved that the Africans should have effective ownership of their land and as much as they could profitably develop. There should be regulation of investment to prevent exploitation of the natives and exhaustion of natural resources. They called for the abolition of slavery, forced labor, and corporal punishment. Every native child should have the right to learn to read and to write in their own language and that of the trustee nation at public expense. The State should maintain a corps of native teachers. The State should train a native medical staff and establish a scientific system of public hygiene specific to the tropics. African natives should be allowed to participate in local and tribal government according to their traditions. They recommended that: “This participation shall gradually extend, as education and experience P.26
Pan-Africanism: The Historical Bond of Equality
proceeds, to the higher offices of State, to the end that, in time, Africa be ruled by consent of the Africans.” There should be freedom of religion with no specific culture imposed on them. Native uplift should take into account their current condition and give scope to “… racial genius, social inheritance and individual bent as long as these are not contrary to the best established principles of civilization.” They concluded that: “Wherever persons of African descent are civilized and able to meet the tests of surrounding culture, they shall be accorded the same rights as their fellow citizens; they shall not be denied on account of race or color a voice in their own government, justice before the courts and economic and social equality according to ability and desert.” The Pan-African Congress appealed to the League of Nations to guarantee security of life and property to the Africans, to protect workers through international labor legislation, to provide for African representation in all areas of the League of Nations. Moreover, the Congress asked that whenever there was unjust treatment of Africans and exclusion from participation in politics and culture by any State, “it shall be the duty of the League of Nations to bring the matter to the attention of the civilized world.” 33 The Committee on Permanent Organization met March 12-14 and suggested that the group constitute itself as the “Pan-African Congress for the Protection of the Natives of Africa and the Peoples of African Descent.”
The Emancipationists and the New Imperialists In tone, tenor, and substance, the Pan-African Congress of 1919 differed dramatically from the 1900 Pan-African Conference. The latter focused more on racial equality by refuting allegations of racial inferiority. It surveyed similar racial oppression against people of African ancestry on the continent and throughout the diaspora. Given the Pan-African Conference’s reference to renowned international abolitionists such as Wilberforce, Sharpe, Garrison, and Douglass, it supported the intellectual tradition of the emancipationists according to Judith Stein in contradistinction to the new imperialists. The emancipationists sought through moral suasion to improve the condition and status of Africans, while the new imperialists looked to economic development to elevate Africans.34 The Pan-African Congress fell more into the new imperialist category. It took a basically elitist approach to the progress for Africans. Similar to Brother Du Bois’ idea of the talented tenth, Africans would be rescued by their exceptional men. In an essay published in 1903, Du Bois elaborated his idea of the talented tenth. He was primarily addressing the issue of education, that he said should be geared to the talented tenth to develop the best of the race “… to guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.35 2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.27
For Brother Du Bois, the history of human progress was the process of an aristocracy of talent and character lifting the bottom upward with culture filtering from the top down. When Brother Du Bois referred to “civilized” Negroes, he was speaking of acculturation according the norms of western societies. When Marcus Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica on August 1, 1914, the anniversary of Jamaican emancipation, among the organization’s goals was “to assist in ‘civilizing’ the backward tribes of Africa” and “to strengthen the imperialism of independent African states.”36 In his survey of African history, published in 1915 as The Negro, Brother Du Bois wrote that the ancient world knew the African without condescension. “The modern world, in contrast, knows the Negro chiefly as a bond slave …we face to-day a widespread assumption throughout the dominant Marcus Garvey world that color is a mark of inferiority.” He asserted that there was no scientific definition of race, which is a “…dynamic and not a static conception … continually changing and developing, amalgamating and differentiating.” He attributed the art of P.28
Pan-Africanism: The Historical Bond of Equality
smelting iron to Africans as well cotton weaving, among other artistic developments. In contradistinction to Marcus Garvey, Brother Du Bois explained that “The Pan-African movement will not be merely a narrow racial propaganda but … a unity of the working classes everywhere, a unity of the colored races, a new unity of man.” The modern white worker in Europe and America in his support of militarism and colonial expansion held the key to the exploitation of Black labor. So long as Black workers are not free, Brother Du Bois concluded that white workers would not be free.37 As a fundraiser for the NAACP and in observance of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Brother Du Bois wrote a pageant, “The Star of Ethiopia.” One of the most quoted phrases for African American writers has been Psalm 68:31 “Princes Shall Come Out of Egypt and Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Forth Her Hands Unto God.” Brother Du Bois’ pageant, which was performed outdoors in New York City before 14,000 people with a cast of four hundred Black actors, was scheduled for the 100th General Convention of the A.M.E. Church in Philadelphia, May 16 to 20, 1916. The pageant illustrated the history of the African race from pre-historic times through Egypt, Ethiopia, the Kingdoms of the Sudan and Zimbabwe, slavery, and America. It started with prehistoric Black men and their invention of iron welding and featured Shango, the God of Thunder handing off to Ethiopia the Star of Faith. Ethiopia descends into darkness. With the rise of Toussaint in Haiti and Nat Turner and John Brown in the United States, Ethiopia emerges with sword in hand. The freedmen after emancipation plan to build a Tower of Light to shine forever. Ethiopia calls forth the five great rivers of Black History. The Mississippi provides the stone of Knowledge for the Tower of Light. The Congo gives the stone of Labor. The Nile lays the stone of Science. The Niger adds the stone of Justice, and the Orinoko from South America bring the stone of Art. The capstone Love appears with star-bearing children, and above all, there is the Star of Faith. Du Bois planned the Pageant as a means of racial uplift.38 2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.29
The Role and Condition of Black Soldiers in World War I In his report on the role and condition of Black soldiers from throughout the diaspora in World War I, Brother Du Bois wrote in the Crisis Magazine that “…the black soldier saved civilization in 1914-1918.” The nearly 400,000 Black troops from Senegal, the Congo, and the Caribbean helped to prevent the German Army from taking control of France early in the war. Moreover, the African American stevedores, approximately 150,000 of the 200,000 Black men in the American expeditionary force in France, provided the arduous labor that sustained the American and French fighting forces. They unloaded ships and prepared automobiles, airplanes, and locomotives for use in the war. They cleared forests, built roads, cleared the fields of undetonated shells, and buried the dead, often working twelve to fourteen hour days, poorly clad and housed. He observed that “… if American food and materials saved France in the end from utter exhaustion, it was the Negro stevedore who made that aid effective.”39 About one thousand African American men were commissioned as officers for the war. Beta Chapter spearheaded a drive among Howard University students and faculty for the Army to establish an officers training camp for Black men. Alpha men predominated as commissioned officers at the camp established at Fort Des Moines, Iowa.40 During the war, the company officers for Black troops were mainly fellow African Americans while the field officers were primarily white. The fate of African American troops and officers was in the hands of white, often southern field officers. African American officers faced racial discrimination and numerous challenges. Brother Charles Hamilton Houston They received no instruction in artillery and engineering. They were subjected to efficiency boards and court martials for trivial offences that resulted in the wholesale removal of African Americans. They were refused leaves and often received poor equipment and clothing. In only few instances did Black officers receive commissions higher than captain. When friction occurred between Black and white soldiers the burden of proof always rested with the Black soldier.41 P.30
Pan-Africanism: The Historical Bond of Equality
Four regiments of the Ninety-Third Division, one of two all-Black divisions, fought as part of the French Army, because many white American soldiers refused to perform combat duty with African American soldiers. The 369th Regiment of the Ninety-Third Division, dubbed the “Harlem Hellfighters,” spent more time on the battlefront than any other American troops and also suffered more casualties. The unit received a regimental Croix de Guerre from the French for bravery in battle and was one of the most decorated American units during the war. Under the direction of James Reese Europe, the 369th’s regimental band introduced jazz to European audiences. Black soldiers sensed little racial discrimination among the French. The U.S. military, however, circulated a memorandum among the French “Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops” that warned against fraternizing with Black soldiers. It informed the French about American views of African American inferiority and asked them explicitly to prevent any intimacy between Black troops and white women.42 While teaching English at Howard University, Brother Charles Hamilton Houston served as Chairman of the Press Committee for the group seeking an officers training camp. He was commissioned as a First Lieutenant in the 368th Regiment. His experience in the military, in which he witnessed Black soldiers being punished for alleged infractions without adequate legal representation, influenced him to become a lawyer. He was later initiated at Sigma Chapter, while attending Harvard Law School, where he became the first African American member of the Harvard Law Review editorial board, received a Bachelor of Laws degree and was the first African American at Harvard to earn a Doctor of Juridical Science degree (S.J.D.). He later became a mentor to Brother Thurgood Marshall while serving as Dean of the Howard University Law School and as Special Counsel for the NAACP.43 Brother Kelly Miller
Brother Du Bois deemed it important to record the role and condition of the Black soldier in World War I because on their return to the United States there would be an effort to disparage the Black officer and to eliminate him from the military despite his record. Two other Alpha Brothers published extensive studies of the Black soldier in World War I. Brother Kelly Miller, who was the first African American graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, studied Mathematics, Physics, and Astronomy. He joined the faculty of Howard University in 1890 and was appointed Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in 1907. He was made an honorary member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. at Beta Chapter in 1908 and was the only member of 2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.31
the Howard University faculty to speak at the Fraternity’s First General Convention, which was held on Howard’s campus. Jewel Henry Arthur Callis remembered Brother Miller as a sage adviser to the Fraternity in its early years of organization.44 Brother Miller published his study History of the World War for Human Rights in March, 1919, right after the war which concluded on November 11, 1918, with the German surrender. His book’s theme is that wars have resulted from a conflict of ideals, of democracy against autocracy. He examined the underlying causes of World War I, the result of centurylong clashes. The war had a tremendous effect on the status of the Negro in Africa and in America. Prior to the war, the African was regarded as “the monkey-man, the baby race, the black brute,” the missing link in evolution between the ape and man. In the United States, the African American had lost many of the gains that he had made since emancipation. In almost every walk of life, African Americans lost positions that they once held in labor and politics. For example, the Black postmaster had almost disappeared. The African American in 1914 “… had been reduced to the state of man without honor in his own country.”45 The Black man in Africa and in America wanted the world war to demonstrate that he was a productive member of world civilization. The Black soldier acquitted himself well during the war. Brother Miller concluded: “No American will dare to stand before the returned Negro trooper and say: ‘Behold a sub-species of mankind, wooly of hair, long of head, with dilated nostrils, thick lips, thicker cranium, flat foot… whose mentality is like unto a child, and closely related to the anthropoid ape; whose weight of brain is only comparable to that of the gorilla.” 46 The initiative, drive, and stamina that Black men displayed in all phases of the war proved their mettle. Brother Emmett J. Scott, an honorary member of Beta Chapter, served as Secretary of Tuskegee Institute and trusted adviser to Booker T. Washington, 1912-1917. During the war, he became the highest ranking Black member of President Woodrow Wilson’s Administration as Special Assistant for Negro Affairs to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. After the war, he was appointed Secretary-Treasurer of Howard University, a position he held until his retirement in1939 at 65-years-old. Baker appointed Scott to the position in large part to counter German propaganda that African Americans had little to gain from participation in the war.47 Brother Dean Kelly Miller announced that: “The race may rest assured that its interest will be looked after and safeguarded so far as the military situation is concerned as long as Emmett J. Scott sits at the council table.” P.32
Pan-Africanism: The Historical Bond of Equality
Brother Scott, however, sought to clarify the public misunderstanding of his appointment, that he stated “… was never intended to be an immediate cure for all of our racial ills in America” in civilian and military life.48 Similar to Brother Du Bois in his report, Brother Scott singled out the African American stevedore for praise. He pointed out that the efficient work of the Black stevedores in unloading and transporting munitions and supplies to the front lines made possible the victories on the battlefield.49 Brother Scott surveyed the status and condition of African American as well as African troops in all branches of the military. He deemed it important to address issues relating to African American soldiers in Brother Emmett J. Scott camps at home as well as overseas, and to consider African American military morale frankly and impartially. He affirmed that “To dodge it would be unworthy of an honest historian whose duty it is to chronicle facts, and might deny to the Negro race and also the government the opportunity of learning some valuable lessons from the war, of mutual profit not only in the present but possibly in the future.”50 Brother Scott posed the question “Did the Negro Soldier get a Square Deal?” In general, the answer was no. Black men who constituted 10.7 % percent of the population were 13.08 % of the men drafted into the military. They were discriminated against at a higher rate in receiving
2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.33
exemptions from military service. They received inferior medical care, food, clothing, and housing, were called racial epithets, given harder tasks, and sometimes beaten like slaves. There were disparities in reports about Black soldiers led by white officers and those led by Black officers. Black men had fewer opportunities to become noncommissioned officers and were usually treated more poorly by white non-commissioned officers, especially from the South. There was a concerted effort to eliminate Black officers from the Army forever. In France, General Ballou issued an order that African-American soldiers were not to speak to French women and that he military police should arrest them for violating the order. There was to be no social interactions between African American and French officers who were not to eat with them or even to shake hands. Despite such blatant racial discrimination, there were some white officers and soldiers who gave the African American soldier a “square deal.”51 Brother Scott concluded: “…the war has brought to the American Negro a keener and more sharply defined consciousness, not only of his duties as a citizen, but of his rights and privileges as a citizen of the United States.” He then delineated what the African American wanted as a citizen, i.e. justice in the courts instead of lynching, service on juries, the right to vote, and to hold office like other citizens. He wanted universal suffrage, equal educational opportunities, abolition of segregation in transportation, elimination of discriminatory regulations and segregation in departments of government, equal military training and opportunities for promotion, destruction of the peonage system, equal pay, better housing, and reforms in Southern penal institutions. “If, after having fulfilled the obligations of citizenship,” he warned, “Negroes do not get these things, then indeed, they feel, will the war have been fought in vain.”52 He ended his report by briefly mentioning African American’s broader vision in seeking opportunities for social, economic, and political development in Africa. Similar to the resolutions of the Pan-African Congress, he supported placing the former German colonies in Africa under the protection of the newly formed League of Nations. He referenced the Pan-African Congress and Brother W.E.B. Du Bois’ success in bringing together a large number of intelligent Negroes and sympathetic whites. For him, the most important accomplishment of the Pan-African Congress was the discussion of the rights of Black people throughout the world and efforts to protect those rights through the League of Nations.53
P.34
Pan-Africanism: The Historical Bond of Equality
The idea of Pan-Africanism took on greater currency after World War I. The 1st Pan-African Congress succeeded in bringing together members of the African diaspora. Brother Rayford W. Logan in the Sphinx Magazine called the 2nd Pan-African Congress (August/September, 1921 in London, Paris, and Brussels) “the greatest gathering of Negroes” with more than one hundred delegates from twenty-six countries and a thousand visitors.54 The largest delegation, over forty, was from the African continent. The meeting, however, carried seeds of disunity. Le Journal, a French publication, depicted Brother Du Bois as a disciple of Garvey that could not be farther from the truth. A member of the Haitian delegation sought to place the American occupation of Haiti on the agenda for the meeting, but Diagne vetoed his effort on the grounds of international comity that prevented France from criticizing a sister republic. During the session in Paris, Brother Du Bois reminded the gathering that “…no Negro in any part of the world can be safe as long as a man can be exploited in Africa, disfranchised in the West Indies, or lynched in the United States because he is a coloured man.” The Second Pan-African Congress closed with the formation of the Pan-African Association. Gratien Candace of France was named President; Mrs. Ida Gibbs Hunt from the U.S. became Vice President; Dr. George Jackson, Treasurer; Isaac Beton, General Secretary, and Brother Logan, Assistant Secretary.55 Subsequent Pan-African Congresses were held in London and Lisbon in 1923 and in New York in 1927. The Great Depression of 1929 made international meetings almost financially impossible. With the end of World War II in August 1945 and the formation of the United Nations, the 5th Pan-African Congress met in Manchester, England, October 15-21, with African leadership and a shift from the “talented tenth” to the role of the masses, especially organized labor. The 5th PanAfrican Congress passed two important resolutions. “The Challenge to Colonial Powers” condemned imperialism and demanded independence for colonized nations. “The Declaration to the Colonial Workers, Farmers, and Intellectuals” asserted that the attainment of political power was the first step to complete social, economic, and political emancipation. For Brother Du Bois, this shift also marked a change in his thinking as expressed in his book Black Reconstruction published in 1935. He emphasized the role that African Americans played in their own liberation from enslavement in the South and now looked at the role that Africans would play in decolonization. Because of his longstanding commitment to African freedom, the meeting hailed him as the “Father of Pan-Africanism.”56
2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.35
REFERENCES 1.
Wole Soyinka and Henry Louis Gates Jr., “There’s One Humanity or There Isn’t: A Conversation,” The New York Review of Books (March 21, 2019), p. 32.
2.
J.R. Hooker, Henry Sylvester Williams: Imperial Pan-Africanist (London: Rex Collings, 1975), p. 23.
3.
Washington quoted in Ibid. p. 29.
4.
Robert L. Harris, Jr., “Daniel Murray and the Encyclopedia of the Colored Race,” Phylon; 37:3 (1976), pp. 276-78.
5.
W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “The American Negro at Paris,” The American Monthly Review of Reviews (November, 1900), pp. 575-77; The Colored American Magazine, 1:5 (October, 1900), pp. 260 & 295; Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, The Original Black Elite: Daniel Murray and the Story of a Forgotten Era (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), pp.227-29.
6.
Emma Lou Thornbrough, “The National Afro-American League, 1887-1908,” Journal of Southern History, 27:4 (November, 1981), p. 506.
7.
Bishop Alexander Walters, My Life and Work (Wilmore, Ky.: First Fruits Press, 2016), p. 201.
8.
W. Knight Chaplin and M. Jennie Street, eds., Advance Endeavour: Souvenir Report of the World’s Convention of Christian Endeavor; London, UK; July 13-20, 1900 (Wilmore, Ky.: First Fruits Press, 2016), p. 164.
9.
Walters, Ibid., p. 209.
10. Walters, Ibid., pp. 222-37 and George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 2015). 11.
“The First Pan-African Conference of the World,” The Colored American Magazine; 4:1 (September,1900), pp. 226-27).
12.
Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, eds., The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), p. 212.
13.
Anna Julia Cooper, “Ethics of the Negro Question,” in Ibid., pp. 206-215.
14. Brent Staples, “When Democracy Died in Wilmington, N.C.,” The New York Times, January 8, 2006. 15.
LaRae Sikes Umfleet, A Day of Blood: The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot (Raleigh, N.C.: North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 2009).
16. Anna Julia Cooper, “Ethics of the Negro Question,” p. 213. 17.
Report of the Pan-African Conference, Held on the 23rd, 24th, and 25th July, 1900 at Westminster Town Hall, England, pp. 8-12, in W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, Series 22 (MS312). University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.
18.
Charles H. Wesley, Henry Arthur Callis: Life & Legacy (Chicago, Il.: Foundation Publishers, 1977), p. 16. Thomas D. Pawley, “The Rise and Decline of Honorary Memberships,” The Sphinx Magazine (Fall, 1995), pp. 44-46.
19. Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: The New Press, 2009), pp. 3-16.Philip S. Foner, ed. W.E.B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1890-1919 (New York: P.36
Pathfinder Press, 1970) pp. 144-148; Robert L. Harris, Jr. Teaching AfricanAmerican History (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1992), p.33; Marika Sherwood, Origins of Pan-Africanism: Henry Sylvester Williams, Africa, and the African Diaspora (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 92-93; Walters, My Life and Work, pp. 257-62. 20. Walters, p. 262. 21.
Walters, p. 260.
22. Sherwood, Origins of Pan-Africanism, p. 123. 23. Hooker, Henry Sylvester Williams, p. 25. 24. Francis L. Broderick, W.E.B. Du Bois: Negro Leader in a Time of Crisis (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford U. Press, 1959), p. 129. 25. The Crisis Magazine, March, 1921, p. 198. 26. Stephen R. Fox, The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter (New York: Atheneum, 1970), p. 224. 27. Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 18771901 (New York: Dial Press, 1954). 28. W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa has Played in World History (New York: International Publishers, 1947), p. 35-37. 29. Rayford W. Logan Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; 166-32, Folder 7 and 166-43, Folder 19. Rayford W. Logan, “The Fourth Pan-African Congress,” The Sphinx Magazine, June, 1927, p. 8. 30. Kenneth Robert Janken, Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the AfricanAmerican Intellectual (Amherst, Ma.: U. of Massachusetts Press, 1993), pp. 49-50. 31.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “Memorandum to M. Diagne and Others on a Pan-African Congress to be Held in Paris in February, 1919.” January 1, 1919. W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.
32. Pan-African Congress Resolutions, February 21, 1919. W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. 33. Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U. Press, 1986), p. 11. 34. Julius Lester, ed., The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), pp. 385-404. 35. Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey, pp. 30 & 109. 36. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro (New York: H. Holt, 1915), pp. 3, 58, &121. 37. “The Star of Ethiopia: A Pageant,” 1915. W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. 38. W.E.B. Du Bois, “An Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War,” The Crisis Magazine, 18:2 (June, 1919), pp. 63-65. 39. Charles H. Wesley, The History of Alpha Phi Alpha: A Development in College Life (Baltimore, 2008), pp. 116-119.
2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.37
40. W.E.B. Du Bois, “An Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War,” pp. 69-72. 41. Jeffrey T. Sammons, Jeffrey and John H. Morrow, Jr., Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War: The Undaunted 369th Regiment and the African American Quest for Equality. (Lawrence, KS., 2014), and Jack D. Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History: A New Perspective (New York, 1974), p. 109-126. 42. The Sphinx Magazine, October, 1923. P. 5. 43. http://math.buffalo.edu/mad/special/miller_kelly.html. Charles H. Wesley, Henry Arthur Callis: Life & Legacy (Chicago, Il.: Foundation Publishers, 1977), pp. 82-83. 44. Kelly Miller, Kelly Miller’s History of the World War for Human Rights, May, 1919, p. 579. 45. Miller, p. 609-610. 46. Emmett Jay Scott, Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War (Emmett J. Scott, 1919), p. 41. 47. Ibid., pp. 47-49. 48. Ibid., p. 323. 49. Ibid., p. 426. 50. Ibid., p. 453. 51.
Ibid., p. 459.
52. Ibid., pp. 469-470. 53. Rayford W. Logan, “The Fourth Pan-African Congress,” The Sphinx Magazine, June, 1927, p. 8. 54. Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism A History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), pp.52-55. 55. Ibid., pp.124-127 and David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2000), pp. 514-515.
P.38
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Given Brother General President Dr. Everett B. Ward’s keen interest in and insight into African American history, he recognized that this year is the Centennial of the 1st Pan-African Congress convened in Paris, February 19, 1919, by Brother Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois and assisted by Brother Dr. Rayford W. Logan. Brother General President Ward asked the World Policy Council to develop a report on the Pan-African Congress and Pan-Africanism, more broadly, to inform the Brotherhood about the early interest and involvement of the Fraternity in international affairs. He strongly supported development of this report by arranging a trip by Alpha officials to London and to Paris for a personal exploration of where the meetings were held. Without the assistance of my daughter, Lauren Y. Harris, a corporate attorney in Luxembourg, who is fluent in French, and who joined us for our exploration in Paris, we might have missed some of the relevant sites. Brother Ronald Sewell, President of Rho Chi Lambda Chapter in London, was a gracious host and helped us with relevant sites there. Brother General President Ward attended the World Policy Council meeting in Washington D.C. to discuss an early draft of the report and made substantive suggestions for clarification and elaboration. World Policy Council Chair, Brother Ambassador Dr. Horace G. Dawson, with great efficiency and aplomb, shepherded the report through its various iterations. Many thanks to the World Policy Council Members for their careful reading of the report, informed discussion, and suggestions for revision. Brother Eric Webb, Managing Editor of the Sphinx Magazine, expertly edited the report and helped to shape the prose into more meaningful and readable form. Thanks to Brother Malik Whatley, Creative Director, for vetting the photos and to Brother Dr. Lopez Matthews at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center/Howard University for assistance in locating important photos. I hope that Brothers learn as much as we did about the early international reach of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., our commitment to racial uplift, and to setting the record straight about our history and heritage. Robert L. Harris, Jr. Ph.D 6/4/19 National Historian Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. 2019 PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS CENTENNIAL
P.39
Henry Arthur Callis became a practicing physician, Howard University professor of medicine and prolific contributor to medical journals. Often regarded as the “philosopher of the founders” and a moving force in the fraternity’s development, he was the only one of the “Cornell Seven” to become general president. Prior to moving to Washington, D.C., he was a medical consultant to the Veterans Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama. Upon his death in 1974, at age 87, the fraternity entered a time without any living Jewels. His papers were donated to Howard’s MoorlandSpingarn Research Center.
Charles Henry Chapman entered higher education and eventually became professor of agriculture at what is now Florida A&M University. A university funeral was held with considerable fraternity participation when he became the first Jewel to enter Omega Chapter in 1934. Described as “a brother beloved in the bonds,” Chapman was a founder of FAMU’s Beta Nu Chapter. During the organization stages of Alpha Chapter, he was the first chairman of the Committees on Initiation and Organization.
Eugene Kinckle Jones became the first executive secretary of the National Urban League. His 20-year tenure with the Urban League thus far has exceeded those of all his successors in office. A versatile leader, he organized the first three fraternity chapters that branched out from Cornell—Beta at Howard, Gamma at Virginia Union and the original Delta at the University of Toronto in Canada. In addition to becoming Alpha Chapter’s second president and joining with Callis in creating the fraternity name, Jones was a member of the first Committees on Constitution and Organization and helped write the fraternity ritual. He died in 1954.
George Biddle Kelley became the first African-American engineer registered in the state of New York. Not only was he the strongest proponent of the fraternity idea among the organization’s founders, the civil engineering student also became Alpha Chapter’s first president. In addition, he served on committees that worked out the handshake and ritual. Kelley was popular with the brotherhood. He resided in Troy, New York and was active with Beta Pi Lambda Chapter in Albany. He died in 1963.
Nathaniel Allison Murray pursued graduate work after completing his undergraduate studies at Howard. He later returned home to Washington, D.C., where he taught in public schools. Much of his career was spent at Armstrong Vocational High School in the District of Columbia. He was a member of Alpha Chapter’s first committee on organization of the new fraternal group, as well as the Committee on the Grip. The charter member of Washington’s Mu Lambda Chapter was a frequent attendee of General Conventions. He died in 1959.
Robert Harold Ogle entered the career secretarial field and had the unique privilege of serving as a professional staff member to the United States Senate Committee on Appropriations. He was an African-American pioneer in his Capitol Hill position. He proposed the fraternity’s colors and was Alpha Chapter’s first secretary. Ogle joined Kelley in working out the first ritual and later became a charter member of Washington’s Mu Lambda Chapter. He died in 1936.
Vertner Woodson Tandy became the state of New York’s first registered black architect, with offices on Broadway in New York City. The designer of the fraternity pin holds the distinction of being the first African American to pass the military commissioning examination and was commissioned first lieutenant in the 15th Infantry of the New York State National Guard. He was Alpha Chapter’s first treasurer and took the initiative to incorporate the fraternity. Among the buildings designed by the highly talented architect is Saint Phillips Episcopal Church in New York City. He died in 1949, at age 64.
P.41
ADDRESS
ALPHA PHI ALPHA FRATERNITY 2313 ST. PAUL STREET BALTIMORE, MD 21218
PHONE
(410) 554-0040
WEB
WWW.APA1906.NET
P.42