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

Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction. By Michele Mitchell. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. v, 388. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 0-8078-55677; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2902-1.)

The debate among black Americans over their "racial destiny" has been a long one. Even in the colonial period, some free blacks made plans to return to Africa where they might live free of slavery's shadow. Those prototypical race men and women believed that their future, and that of their children, lay beyond American shores. When the issue of slavery was resolved by the Civil War--and when former slaves were able to participate--debates over African Americans' destiny as a people became more pronounced. Michele Mitchell has looked closely at the idea of racial destiny in the aftermath of Reconstruction and has found in it an overlooked yet powerful theme. The notion of racial destiny, she concludes, was inseparable from ideas about black reproduction and racial regeneration. From the 1870s to the 1930s, Mitchell argues, black people's racial destiny hinged on their ideas about the most advantageous and healthful means of reproducing the race. The inverse of notions about black people's hyper-sexuality, the political ideology of black racial destiny asserted black manhood and the solemn duty of black women to reproduce the race.

Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction begins with emigration, the phenomenon that puts the idea of racial destiny in the sharpest relief: whether the future of black Americans lay within or outside the United States. Potential migrants expressed their dissatisfaction in terms of black manhood denied and assaults on black women that threatened the purity of the race. In explaining their desire to leave for Liberia in 1891, for instance, one group from Arkansas cited disfranchisement and the fact that black men were murdered at the hands of mobs, leaving their women vulnerable to rape by white men. Such concerns would persist, with Marcus Garvey arguing in 1922 that black men needed to "strike back on white men trying to get too close to black women." It was important, in his view, to protect "the purity of the black race not only down South, but all through the world" (p. 221).

Mitchell's book charts the strategies of black leaders, activists, scholars, and advice writers for asserting black manhood and preserving and promoting the so-called purity of the black race. They addressed, for instance, the dilemma posed by Anglo-Saxon imperialism at the turn of the century. By joining the fight against Spain in the Spanish-American War, one newspaper suggested, black men would be "treated as men among men" (p. 61). But in light of the U.S. fight in the Philippines, some black editors viewed imperialism as an attempt to "blight the manhood of the darker races" (p. 64). Still others saw imperialism as a means to spread civilization to Africa, which would benefit all people of color and transform Africa into a great "Negro nation" offering "self-dependence and ... manhood" (p. 60).

If debates over imperialism were expressed largely in terms of black manhood, however, domestic concerns over the economic and political status of African Americans in the United States appear to have been domestic in both senses of the word. Discussions of behavior, declining birthrates, and living conditions were most often centered on the supposed duties of black women. Concerns over the birthrate sparked a wealth of literature about black women's reproductive duty and encouraging the production of "better babies." As one Fisk University professor proclaimed: "[the] race, like the women of whom Paul once wrote to Timothy, must be 'saved through child bearing'" (p. 95). That salvation, according to some, could be aided by the market through the consumption of black dolls, which would instill parenting instincts in black children. Other experts, most notably W. E. B. Du Bois, looked to living conditions. Cabins, in particular, drew the ire of reformers who believed close quarters discouraged healthful child rearing and had implications for the race as a whole. But black women's reproduction remained the cornerstone of racial regeneration. Writers and activists exhorted black women to shun the attentions of white men, believing that "rape, concubinage, and miscegenation compromised racial reproduction" (p. 206). This thinking was seconded by Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, which actively promoted "racial purity" and, in Mitchell's view, "placed the blame for miscegenation at the feet of black women, if not in their beds" (p. 238).

The reader wishes that Mitchell had given more attention to the images she includes. And more could be drawn from the relationship between racial destiny and the market, which the author confines to one chapter. Also, the title, a phrase uttered by a black pastor, seems an odd choice for this book since Mitchell does not focus on religion. Should we see Righteous Propagation as an ideological counterpart to Manifest Destiny? Perhaps. Although religious in tone, both terms speak most loudly about the racial destiny that people, not God, must fulfill.

MARY NIALL MITCHELL

University of New Orleans