Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro. (Book Reviews).

Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro. By John David Smith. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2000. Pp. xviii, 386. $34.95, ISBN 0-8203-2130-3.)

John David Smith has written a disturbing book about a disturbing historical character, but the author's treatment of this "Black Judas" is excellent. Professor Smith's research, analysis, and writing are solid and thought-provoking.

"Black Judas" was William Hannibal Thomas (1843-1935), and he disagreed with such noted black leaders as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. During what historian Rayford W. Logan called the nadir of black history in the United States, circa 1877 to 1901, Washington had guarded optimism about the contemporary black world, as did Du Bois, believing as he did in the "talented tenth." Thomas would have none of that. He denounced fellow blacks in harsh terms, holding that they were inferior to whites physiologically, intellectually, morally, and culturally. Blacks themselves--not white racists--caused their own problems. They were hopelessly depraved, unlike virtuous mulattoes like himself. Character, he said, determined the course of a person's life, and he suggested that blacks should emulate role models like noble whites or exemplary mulattoes.

Thomas set down his prejudices in The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become (New York, 1901), a work published by the nationally prestigious Macmillan Company, whose reputation guaranteed maximum exposure for the book. Many black leaders and their followers were shocked by Thomas's effort. Washington and Du Bois both reviewed the book and found it unacceptable. Other blacks lobbied Macmillan to withdraw the book, arguing that Thomas had led a dishonest, corrupt life, that his book was really just a bitter diatribe, and that he was a rank hypocrite. African American newspaper editors attacked the book, as did black preachers. Black women's clubs tried to get public libraries to ban Thomas's book. In The American Negro Thomas disowned black America. Black America struck back by disowning him.

The author tries to explain Thomas's views and to understand the forces that propelled him to disavow the African American masses. Ultimately, Thomas saw himself as a man who did not belong--anywhere. Not quite white, not quite black, he did not fit--anywhere. Furthermore, his own weaknesses of character caused him constant problems. He would rise to prominence in a job only to tumble from grace largely because, in positions of trust, he usually stole money until caught; whereupon, he always made a fast getaway. Then he would pop up in another place, only to do it all again. A con artist, an artful dodger, a man on the make--that was William Hannibal Thomas.

His hatred of blacks (seemingly a form of self-denial and self-hatred) knew no bounds. In the 1890s, even as he reproached African American teachers and preachers for not doing their duty to reform the race, he advocated the castration of all black men who raped white women. Never before in American history had a person of color so condemned his own. And he did so as the United States was entering its imperial era, bringing people of color into the American sphere by the thousands, when white racists were looking for any ammunition to condemn nonwhites.

Author Smith does an excellent job of chronicling Thomas's adult career and explaining the crises in his life, while analyzing how those crises molded his character and thought. A victim of racism, Thomas turned racist himself, coming to regard himself as superior to other people of color. Hoping for white acceptance, he tried to distance himself from the black masses by clinging to his status as a mulatto even as modern America's distinction between "Negro" and "Mulatto" was fading. Torn between two worlds, one that he disavowed and one that refused to accept him, Thomas became the "Black Judas." In the end, his notorious book was really his own bitter assessment of himself.