Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny After Reconstruction

by Michele Mitchell

Between 1877 and 1930--years rife with tensions over citizenship, suffrage, immigration, and "the Negro problem--African American activists promoted an array of strategies for progress and power built around "racial destiny," the idea that black Americans formed a collective whose future existence would be determined by the actions of its members. In Righteous Propagation , Michele Mitchell examines the reproductive implications of racial destiny, demonstrating how it forcefully linked particular visions of gender, conduct, and sexuality to collective well-being.

Mitchell argues that while African Americans did not agree on specific ways to bolster their collective prospects, ideas about racial destiny and progress generally shifted from outward-looking remedies such as emigration to inward-focused debates about intraracial relationships, thereby politicizing the most private aspects of black life and spurring race activists to calcify gender roles, monitor intraracial sexual practices, and promote moral purity. Examining the ideas of well-known elite reformers such as Mary Church Terrell and W. E. B. DuBois, as well as unknown members of the working and aspiring classes, such as James Dubose and Josie Briggs Hall, Mitchell reinterprets black protest and politics and recasts the way we think about black sexuality and progress after Reconstruction.

Genres: History, American History, Race

388 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really interesting research focus on the collective post reconstruction role of black Americans during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, not as as a history of the interracial politics of the time within the narrative of the long civil rights movement, but as an intraracial intellectual and cultural history, giving a much wider perspective on possible goals for African American political movements in which the 1950s and '60s were not a teleological end. With strong analysis on gender and sexuality this book provides a view of diverse ways African Americans thought, both descriptively and prescriptively, about their collective destiny. While the portion about emigration movements could have used some more political contextualization, the sections on the black appropriation of eugenicist thought are extraordinarily well done and demonstrate the complex ways in which these ideas about African Americans' future existed both within and in tension with broader ideologies of the time

[Erica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantasic cultural/social history of black ideas and efforts at a positive "racial destiny" in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Especially useful were the chapters on miscegenation (I didn't know the actual word wasn't invented until the 1860s--significant), African American dolls, race purity, gender construction, and much more. This book seems teachable for the upper-undergraduate level.

I am a little perplexed how Charles Chesnutt and other Af-Am fiction authors on miscegenation in the period didn't make it into the book. Plenty of other amazing primary sources here, and all are dealt with in an even and interesting hand. But I would have loved to see her add a chapter on the fictions of racial destiny and miscegenation from the black perspective.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently read this book for a class (Readings in African American Historiography). Mitchell focuses on Reconstruction through the first decades of the twentieth century. Well researched, although I wish she took the time frame a bit earlier and discussed regional differences more fully.