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closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand,” he wrote. “Let Paul Robeson singing ‘Water Boy’ and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”

Black pride and growing demands for equality and respect were threatening to many whites who preferred America’s black population to be cowed and submissive. The archconservative senator Henry Cabot Lodge had Claude McKay’s defiant poem, “If we must die, let it not be like hogs” read out to the Congressional Record as evidence of the unsettling new spirit rising up among American blacks.

Pseudo-scientific works like Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color of 1920 warned that America was being swamped by “colored” races. It was Stoddard whom Tom Buchanan, in The Great Gatsby, misremembered as “this fellow Goddard”: “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.” Stoddard quoted the scholarly Du Bois as an example of the threat posed to whites by blacks. “These nations and races, composing as they do a vast majority of humanity, are going to endure this treatment just as long as they must and not a moment longer. Then they are going to fight, and the War of the Color Line will outdo in savage inhumanity any war this world has yet seen. For colored folk have much to remember and they will not forget.”

Madison Grant, chairman of the New York Zoological Society and a trustee of the Museum of Natural History, wrote the foreword to Stoddard’s book, using spurious scientific and historical claims to back up Stoddard’s racial prejudices and prophesy disaster if white men did not safeguard their position of racial dominance. Allowing the races to mingle, or even permitting “brown, yellow, black or red men” to share in Western European democratic ideals, said Grant, would be “suicide pure and simple, and the first victim of this amazing folly will be the white man himself.” “Oh,” wrote Claude McKay, “I must keep my heart inviolate / Against the potent poison of your hate!”

But despite the racism still deeply entrenched in American society, changes had started to take place. The work of anthropologists and sociologists studying foreign and “primitive” cultures discredited eugenicist literature that sought to demonstrate the inherent inferiority of blacks and other unwanted immigrants. President Harding—for whom Duke Ellington’s father worked in the White House as butler—urged educational and economic support for blacks, proposed an interracial committee to find ways to improve race relations and, in a brave speech in Birmingham, Alabama, in October 1921, was the first President to call for an end to lynching.

Harding supported a bill that would have made lynching illegal by federal rather than state law, although this move was rejected in 1922 by a block of Southern senators. But gradually the South grew ashamed of its violence and, while eighty-three people were lynched in 1919, by 1928 that number had fallen to eleven. Harding’s efforts on behalf of blacks were especially poignant because rumors of his having unacknowledged black ancestors had threatened his presidential chances during his campaign of 1920.

And yet, even while one section of the nation was seeking fresh ways to stamp down what they saw as the threat represented