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Re-Racing the Nation: From Cuba—A Drama of Freedom to the Cultural Performance of Negro History Week

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Performing Race and Erasure

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History ((PSTPH))

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Abstract

In November 1898, shortly after the end of the War, the American Law Enforcement League of Minnesota organized what may be the first Afro-American pageant in the USA: the large-scale four-act spectacle, Cuba—A Drama of Freedom. (Cora Pope, “Cuba—a Drama of Freedom” (unpublished pageant manuscript (nonextant), 1898). On the performance, “‘Cuba’—a Drama of Freedom Presented by Local Talent,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, November 5 1898; “‘Cuba’ Notes,” Globe, November 9 1898; “Cuba an Ornate Success,” The Daily Pioneer Press, November 11 1898; “‘Cuba’ a Drama of Freedom Presented by Local Talent,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, November 12 1898; “‘Cuba’ Repeated at the Grand—Popular Prices,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, November 19 1898; “‘Cuba’ Echoes,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, November 19 1898. See also Abram L. Harris, “Historic Background of the Negro Population in Minnesota,” in The Negro Population in Minneapolis: A Study of Race Relations (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Urban League and the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House, 1927), 8; Dave Riehle, “‘300 Afro-American Performers’: The Great Cuba Pageant of 1898 and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” Ramsey County History (1999); Paul D. Nelson, Fredrick L. Mcghee: A Life on the Color Line, 1861–1912 (Minneapolis: Minnesota Historial Society Press, 2002), 61–62; Errol G. Hill et al., A History of African American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 200–01.) The pageant’s purpose was to raise funds for the League, a Negro organization that spoke out against lynching in the USA and aligned its cause with US intervention in Cuba, which it felt supported the struggle for freedom by Cubans of African descent. (Lynching escalated after Reconstruction. “Lynchings: By Year and Race,” University of Missouri, Kansas City Law School, http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html.) Written and supervised by Cora Pope, whose husband, Sergeant ZA Pope, had fought in one of the US Colored Troops at the battle of Santiago, the pageant was performed for integrated audiences at the Lyceum Theater in Minneapolis and the St. Paul Metropolitan Opera House. (The four regiments that comprised the United States Colored Troops, or “Buffalo Soldiers,” were the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments and the 24th and 25th Infantry Regiments. The pageant ran at the Lyceum Theater on November 3rd and 4th and the Opera House on the 10th. Riehle, “‘300 Afro-American Performers’,” 17.) Historical reviews note that “the theater was packed to the doors with a fashionable audience,” which numbered more than 2000 at the Opera House alone and that the performance was “given entirely” by a cast of “300 colored performers.” (“‘Cuba’ a Drama of Freedom Presented by Local Talent.” “‘Cuba’ Notes.”; “‘Cuba’ a Drama of Freedom…. Benefit of American League of Minnesota to Be Presented at Metropolitan Opera House, St. Paul by ‘300 Afro-American Performers’,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, November 5. The article from the Globe dated Nov. 9 refers to “300 colored performers”; the ad in The Appeal refers to “300 Afro-American Performers.”) Indeed, many more people organized the pageant and managed off-stage activity, making the production a community-wide event that touched many of the Negro families in the Twin Cities area. (Nelson, Fredrick L. Mcghee, 62.) A review in The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper called it the “most notable dramatic event ever produced by the Afro-Americans of the Twin Cities,” while historian Paul D. Nelson describes it as “one of the most spectacular demonstrations of patriotic enthusiasm ever witnessed in Minnesota.” (“‘Cuba’ a Drama of Freedom Presented by Local Talent.”; ———, Fredrick L. Mcghee, 61.) Yet where much of the patriotic spectacle in white popular culture justified the war effort through its focus on remembering the USS Maine, this production did so by focusing loosely on the cause of Cuban freedom and independence from slavery and Spain. Public response was so positive, there were several encore performances later in the month. (“‘Cuba’ Repeated—with Great Artistic Success at the Grand Opera House, St. Paul,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, December 3 1898; “‘Cuba’ Repeated at the Grand—Popular Prices.”; “‘Cuba’ Echoes.”)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Cora Pope, “Cuba—a Drama of Freedom” (unpublished pageant manuscript (nonextant), 1898). On the performance, “‘Cuba’—a Drama of Freedom Presented by Local Talent,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, November 5 1898; “‘Cuba’ Notes,” Globe, November 9 1898; “Cuba an Ornate Success,” The Daily Pioneer Press, November 11 1898; “‘Cuba’ a Drama of Freedom Presented by Local Talent,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, November 12 1898; “‘Cuba’ Repeated at the Grand—Popular Prices,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, November 19 1898; “‘Cuba’ Echoes,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, November 19 1898. See also Abram L. Harris, “Historic Background of the Negro Population in Minnesota,” in The Negro Population in Minneapolis: A Study of Race Relations (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Urban League and the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House, 1927), 8; Dave Riehle, “‘300 Afro-American Performers’: The Great Cuba Pageant of 1898 and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” Ramsey County History (1999); Paul D. Nelson, Fredrick L. McGhee: A Life on the Color Line, 1861–1912 (Minneapolis: Minnesota Historial Society Press, 2002), 61–62; Errol G. Hill et al., A History of African American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 200–01.

  2. 2.

    Lynching escalated after Reconstruction. “Lynchings: By Year and Race,” University of Missouri, Kansas City Law School, http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html

  3. 3.

    The four regiments that comprised the United States Colored Troops, or “Buffalo Soldiers,” were the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments and the 24th and 25th Infantry Regiments. The pageant ran at the Lyceum Theater on November 3rd and 4th and the Opera House on the 10th. Riehle, “‘300 Afro-American Performers’,” 17.

  4. 4.

    “‘Cuba’ a Drama of Freedom Presented by Local Talent.” “‘Cuba’ Notes.”; “‘Cuba’ a Drama of Freedom…. Benefit of American League of Minnesota to Be Presented at Metropolitan Opera House, St. Paul by ‘300 Afro-American Performers’,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, November 5. The article from the Globe dated Nov. 9 refers to “300 colored performers”; the ad in The Appeal refers to “300 Afro-American Performers.”

  5. 5.

    Nelson, Fredrick L. McGhee, 62.

  6. 6.

    “‘Cuba’ a Drama of Freedom Presented by Local Talent.”; ———, Fredrick L. McGhee, 61.

  7. 7.

    “‘Cuba’ Repeated—with Great Artistic Success at the Grand Opera House, St. Paul,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, December 3 1898; “‘Cuba’ Repeated at the Grand—Popular Prices.”; “‘Cuba’ Echoes.”

  8. 8.

    “‘Cuba’ a Drama of Freedom Presented by Local Talent.”; “Cuba Notes,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, November 5 1898.

  9. 9.

    “‘Cuba’ a Drama of Freedom Presented by Local Talent.” “Cuba an Ornate Success.”

  10. 10.

    “‘Cuba’ Notes.”

  11. 11.

    Frank Hassall, “A Versatile Musical Drama, Burlesque, and Spectacular and Transformation … Entitled the World’s Champion American Boy,” (Library of Congress/American Memory Collection, 1896); Frank Tannehill, “Flags of the World,” (Library of Congress/American Memory Collection, 1898).

  12. 12.

    “‘Cuba’ a Drama of Freedom Presented by Local Talent.”

  13. 13.

    Ibid.

  14. 14.

    Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 145.

  15. 15.

    Riehle, “‘300 Afro-American Performers’,” 19. Nelson, Fredrick L. McGhee. On ghosting, Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).

  16. 16.

    “‘Cuba’ a Drama of Freedom Presented by Local Talent.”

  17. 17.

    See Louis A. Pérez, Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); ———, Cuba under the Platt Amendment, 1902–1934 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986).

  18. 18.

    Hill et al., History of African American Theatre, 91, 150–54.

  19. 19.

    “‘Cuba’ Notes.”

  20. 20.

    “‘Cuba’ a Drama of Freedom Presented by Local Talent.” J.C. Reid, “A ‘Cuba’ Criticism,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, December 3 1898. Letters by Reid, McGhee, and Marie L. Armstrong, a high school student, were published weekly in The Appeal through December: Marie L. Armstrong, “Cuba Criticisms–Continued,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, December 10 1898; Mattie McGhee, “Cuba Criticisms—Continued,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, December 10 1898; J.C. Reid, “Cuba Criticisms,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, December 17 1898; Mattie McGhee et al., “Cuba Criticisms,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, December 24 1898; Marie L. Armstrong, “Cuba Criticisms,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, December 31 1898; J.C. Reid, “‘Cuba’ Criticisms,” The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper, December 31 1898.

  21. 21.

    McGhee, “Cuba Criticisms—Continued.”

  22. 22.

    Reid, “Cuba Criticisms.” By “light,” he refers to an intellectual or moral beacon for the race as well as to the racial mixture of the colored elite among Afro-Americans in the Twin Cities and elsewhere.

  23. 23.

    Ibid.

  24. 24.

    McGhee, “Cuba Criticisms—Continued.”

  25. 25.

    The Appeal, February 9 1899, p. 4, according to Riehle; I have not been able to find it.

  26. 26.

    Reid, “A ‘Cuba’ Criticism.”

  27. 27.

    E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 2.

  28. 28.

    Logan uses this term to periodize from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the end of WWI. Rayford M. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Collier Books, 1965).

  29. 29.

    Willard B. Gatewood, Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1893–1903 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), ix.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., ix–x.

  31. 31.

    Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 13.

  32. 32.

    Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 117.

  33. 33.

    OED defines “body politic” as “a nation regarded as a corporate entity.” A.D. Harvey, Body Politic: Political Metaphor and Political Violence (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).

  34. 34.

    McGirt (1874–1930), a writer, publisher, and businessman, graduated from Bennett College in 1895 and worked as a manual laborer until 1903 when he moved to Philadelphia. There, he started McGirt’s Magazine (1903–09), a significant publishing outlet for Afro-Americans. He was inducted into the Literary Hall of fame in 2004 for publishing. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/james-ephraim-mcgirt

  35. 35.

    James Ephraim McGirt, Avenging the Maine, a Drunken A.B., and Other Poems [1899], 2nd enlarged ed. (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Printers and Binders, 1900), 9.

  36. 36.

    Payne includes works by Dunbar, McGirt, Sutton E. Griggs, James Weldon Johnson, and the “soldier-poet” Charles Frederick White. James Robert Payne, “Afro-American Literature of the Spanish-American War,” MELUS 10, no. 3 (1983): 20.

  37. 37.

    Riehle, “‘300 Afro-American Performers’,” 17.

  38. 38.

    Henry Louis Gates, “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” Representations 24, Special Issue: America Recostructed, 1840–1940 (1988): 133. See n. 97 below.

  39. 39.

    Col. Alfred M. Waddell, “The Story of the Wilmington, N.C., Race Riots (1898),”(2009), http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/4361

  40. 40.

    Andrea Meryl Kirshenbaum, “‘The Vampire That Hovers over North Carolina’: Gender, White Supremacy, and the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898,” Southern Cultures 4, no. 3 (1998): 6.

  41. 41.

    North Carolina Freedom Monument Project, “The Wilmington Race Riot,”(2009), http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/4360

  42. 42.

    Kirshenbaum, “Vampire,” 6.

  43. 43.

    William Pickens (1881–1954) was born to liberated slaves and tenant farmers in Anderson County, South Carolina. He graduated from Yale (1904) and became a professor of Greek and sociology at Talladega College in Alabama. Pickens was involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from its inception (1910), a contributing editor for the Associated Negro Press, and Dean of Morgan College in Baltimore (1915–20). Who’s Who in Colored America, 1930–1932 (New York: Who’s Who in Colored America Corp.), 337. William Pickens, Bursting Bonds: The Autobiography of a “New Negro” [1923] (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).

  44. 44.

    ———, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro: His Political, Civil and Mental Status, and Related Essays (New York: Neale Publishing Company, 1916), 236.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., 237.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., 233.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., 234.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 232–33.

  49. 49.

    Like Shepperson and Drake, I use Pan-Africanism (with a capital “P”) to refer to that of W.E.B. Du Bois and the five Congresses; the First Pan-African Conference in London (1900) was prototypical to this movement because there, Du Bois gave his famous speech on the problem of the color line. A lower case “p” indicates the series of movements in which cultural elements often predominate, such as Négritude. Shepperson groups UNIA among the latter because of Garvey’s intense feud with Du Bois. George Shepperson, “Pan-Africanism and ‘Pan-Africanism’: Some Historical Notes,” Phylon 23 (1962): 346–47; St. Clair Drake, “Diaspora Studies and Pan-Africanism,” in Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, ed. Joseph E. Harris (Washington DC: Howard University Press, 1993).

  50. 50.

    W.E.B. Du Bois, “Pan-Africa and New Racial Philosophy,” Crisis 40 (1933): 247.

  51. 51.

    Ibid.

  52. 52.

    Ibid. Du Bois uses the term “economic problem” rather than “global economies,” yet he clearly intends such a meaning as in the same paragraph to describe negative impacts on people in Mexico, South America, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.

  53. 53.

    Hubert Henry Harrison, When Africa Awakes [1920] (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1997), 43.

  54. 54.

    Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  55. 55.

    Guterl, Color of Race, 7, 13.

  56. 56.

    W.E.B. Du Bois, “Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920).” (Project Gutenberg, 2005), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15210/15210-h/15210-h.htm

  57. 57.

    W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races (1897),” The American Negro Academy Occasional Papers, No. 2 (2004), http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5685/pg5685.html

  58. 58.

    Now the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, the ASNLH was co-founded and incorporated by Woodson in 1915. Sister Anthony Scally, Carter G. Woodson: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985), 9–10.

  59. 59.

    Association for the Study of Negro Life and History Inc. et al., Negro History Week; a National Celebration Annually Observed Everywhere in the United States the Second Week of February (Washington, D.C. 1926).

  60. 60.

    Milton Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 71.

  61. 61.

    C.G. Woodson, “Negro History Week,” The Journal of Negro History 11, no. 2 (1926): 241.

  62. 62.

    May Miller (Sullivan) (1899–1995) was from an educated family in Baltimore. She earned a BA from Howard and studied at American and Columbia Universities. During the Harlem Renaissance, she was an active member of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s literary salon and her own home in DC was a meeting place for other writers and poets including Zora Neale Hurston. James V. Hatch et al., eds., Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans: The Early Period 1847–1938 (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 334–35.

  63. 63.

    “Negro History Week-the Twelfth Year,” The Journal of Negro History 22, no. 2 (1937): 143.

  64. 64.

    Willis Richardson (1889–1977) was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. He published widely on the possibilities of “Negro Drama,” was supported by Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois in pursuing production of his plays, and was the first Negro playwright to have a nonmusical staged on Broadway. ———, eds., Black Theatre USA; Christine Rauchfuss Gray, Willis Richardson: Forgotten Pioneer of African-American Drama (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999); Fannie E. Frazier Hicklin, The American Negro Playwright, 1920–1964 (University of Wisconsin, unpub. dissertation, 1965).

  65. 65.

    Helen Webb Harris, “Genifrede: The Daughter of L’ouverture,” in Negro History in Thirteen Plays, eds. Willis Richardson, et al. (Washington D.C.: Associated Publishers, Inc., 1935); May Miller, “Christophe’s Daughters,” in Negro History in Thirteen Plays, eds. Willis Richardson, et al.; Willis Richardson, “Antonio Maceo,” in ibid.; John Frederick Matheus, “Ti Yette,” in Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro, ed. Willis Richardson (Washington D.C.: Associated Publishers, Inc., 1930). Matheus (1887–1992) was born in West Virginia and educated at Case Western Reserve University, the Sorbonne in Paris, and the University of Chicago. He earned a Master’s degree in Romance Languages and Education in 1921 from Columbia University and worked as a professor at Florida A&M. Of his plays,’Cruiter (1926) has received the most critical attention and is considered a fine example of a one-act “folk play.” Hatch et al., eds., Black Theatre USA, 239. His works on Haiti, Tambour (1929), Ti Yette (1930), and Ouanga: A Musical Drama of Haiti (1932) are less known.

  66. 66.

    Woodson, “Negro History Week,” 241.

  67. 67.

    David M. Guss, The Festive State: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 12.

  68. 68.

    Scally, Carter G. Woodson, 13.

  69. 69.

    Communist Party of the United States of America (New York), Educational Dept., Negro History Week 1953: Peace, Equality, 2nd ed. (New York: The Party, 1950).

  70. 70.

    Woodson refers to the play as “The Two Races” and does not name its author. Inez M. Burke, “Two Races,” in Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro, ed. Willis Richardson (Washington D.C.: Associated Publishers, Inc., 1930). In addition to the performance described by Woodson, there is photographic evidence by Villard Paddio that it was staged at the JW Hoffman Junior High School in New Orleans. Randall K. Burkett et al., “The Mind of Carter G. Woodson: As Reflected in the Books He Owned, Read, and Published,” ed. The Library of Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (Emory University, 2006), 77.

  71. 71.

    Carter G. Woodson, “Introduction,” Willis Richardson et al., eds., Negro History in Thirteen Plays (Washington D.C.: Associated Publishers, Inc., 1935), iii–iv.

  72. 72.

    “Three Historical Plays Merit High Praise History Week,” The Afro-American, February 23 1935. Randolph Edmonds, “Yellow Death,” in The Land of Cotton and Other Plays, ed. Randolph Edmonds (Washington D.C.: Associated Publishers, Inc., 1942), 180.

  73. 73.

    This runs regularly through Woodson’s writings. Woodson, “Negro History Week,” 240.

  74. 74.

    Scally, Carter G. Woodson, 9.

  75. 75.

    Association for the Study of Negro Life and History Inc. et al., Negro History Week, 3.

  76. 76.

    Woodson’s project was integrationist but it is simplistic to dismiss its radicality.

  77. 77.

    Pérez, The War of 1898, x.

  78. 78.

    Arthur A. Schomburg, “The Negro Digs up His Past,” Survey Graphic (1925): 670. Schomburg (1873–1938) was born Arturo Alfonso Schomburg in Santurce, Puerto Rico.

  79. 79.

    Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, updated ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 46.

  80. 80.

    Association for the Study of Negro Life and History Inc. et al., Negro History Week, 1.

  81. 81.

    Woodson, “Negro History Week,” 241.

  82. 82.

    Trouillot, Silencing, 26.

  83. 83.

    Scally, Carter G. Woodson, 14.

  84. 84.

    Association for the Study of Negro Life and History Inc. et al., Negro History Week, 2.

  85. 85.

    First published in 1922 and in its 6th edition by 1940.

  86. 86.

    Scally, Carter G. Woodson, 12.

  87. 87.

    Eric Hobshawm et al., eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

  88. 88.

    Mariola Espinosa, Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878–1930 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

  89. 89.

    “The Yellow Scourge in Cuba,” University of Virginia Health System, http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/library/historical/medical_history/yellow_fever/cuba.cfm

  90. 90.

    Edmonds, “A Word,” vii.

  91. 91.

    “Barton Maclane,” (IMDb).

  92. 92.

    Sidney Howard et al., Yellow Jack: A History (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1933), iii, x.

  93. 93.

    George B. Seitz, “Yellow Jack,” (Hollywood: MGM, 1938). “Yellow Jack,” (IBDb).

  94. 94.

    Richardson et al., eds., Thirteen Plays, iii.

  95. 95.

    Ibid.

  96. 96.

    Edmonds, “Yellow Death,” 180, 85.

  97. 97.

    By New Negro movement (with a lower case “m”) I refer to a cultural movement from 1892 to 1938 (following Gates’s periodization). Henry Louis Gates et al., eds., The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). I use the term New Negro Movement (upper case “M”) to refer specifically to the organization established from 1916 to 1917 by Hubert Henry Harrison. Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Gates writes, “Alain Locke’s appropriation of the name in 1925 for his literary movement represents a measured coopting of the term from its fairly radical political connotations […].” Gates, “The Trope of a New Negro,” 135.

  98. 98.

    Edmonds, “Yellow Death,” 196–97.

  99. 99.

    Ibid., 196.

  100. 100.

    Willard B. Gatewood, ‘Smoked Yankees’ and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898–1902 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 39.

  101. 101.

    Edmonds, “Yellow Death,” 186–87.

  102. 102.

    Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7.

  103. 103.

    Espinosa, Epidemic Invasions, 9.

  104. 104.

    Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 88–89.

  105. 105.

    Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 41.

  106. 106.

    Philip S. Foner, Antonio Maceo: The ‘Bronze Titan’ of Cuba’s Struggle for Independence (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977); “The Spanish-American War,” Library of Congress Hispanic Division, http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/trask.html

  107. 107.

    Richardson, “Antonio Maceo,” 15.

  108. 108.

    Ibid., 5, 11.

  109. 109.

    Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism, 95.

  110. 110.

    Helg, Our Rightful Share, 40.

  111. 111.

    Ibid.

  112. 112.

    Sandra Gunning, “Nancy Prince and the Politics of Mobility, Home and Diasporic (Mis)Identification,” American Quarterly 53, no. 1 (2001): 33.

  113. 113.

    Ibid.

  114. 114.

    Kenneth W. Warren, “Appeals for (Mis)Recognition: Theorizing the Diaspora,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan, et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 393.

  115. 115.

    Gatewood, Black Americans, 161.

  116. 116.

    Following Helg, I use, “Afro-Cuban.” Helg, Our Rightful Share.

  117. 117.

    Lynch, qtd. in Gatewood, Black Americans, 171–72. Lynch (1847–1939) was born into slavery and freed in 1863. He was the first Negro speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives (1873) and was elected to the US House of Representatives twice (1874–77, 1880s). “Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774-Present” http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=L000533

  118. 118.

    ———, ‘Smoked Yankees’.

  119. 119.

    ———, Black Americans, 175–76.

  120. 120.

    Langston Hughes, “Havana Nights and Cuban Color Lines (1930),” in The Reader’s Companion to Cuba, ed. Alan Ryan (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1997).

  121. 121.

    Ibid., 87.

  122. 122.

    José Martí, “Our America (1891),” in Our America by José Martí: Writing on Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence, ed. Philip Foner (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977).

  123. 123.

    Qtd. in Jill Lane, Blackface Cuba, 1840–1895 (Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 2.

  124. 124.

    Ibid., 5.

  125. 125.

    Helg, Our Rightful Share, 3.

  126. 126.

    Ibid.

  127. 127.

    Ibid. While I point to some differences between racial structures in Cuba and Haiti, my purpose is to analyze how images of Cuba and Haiti mediated/were mediated by US racial taxonomies.

  128. 128.

    Gatewood, Black Americans, x.

  129. 129.

    According to the OED, “mulatto,” refers to a person with one white and one black parent, or more commonly to someone of mixed race “resembling” a mulatto; “quadroon,” refers to the offspring of a white person and a mulatto; “octoroon,” to a “person who is by descent seven-eighths white and one-eighth black; a person with one white parent and the other a quadroon.” Except for “mulatta/o,” which remains in usage to some degree, these terms are part of a colonial racial taxonomy that had many more divisions than biracialism.

  130. 130.

    Anne Fleischmann, “Neither Fish, Flesh, nor Fowl: Race and Region in the Writings of Charles W. Chestnutt,” African American Review, 34, no. 3 (2000): 461–473. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2901384

  131. 131.

    Carter G. Woodson, “The Beginnings of the Miscegenation of the Whites and Blacks,” The Journal of Negro History 3, no. 4 (1918): 349.

  132. 132.

    Bárbara C. Cruz et al., “The American Melting Pot? Miscegenation Laws in the United States,” OAH Magazine of History 15, no. 4 (2001): 80–81.

  133. 133.

    Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Diana Rebekkah Paulin, Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

  134. 134.

    Guterl, Color of Race, 166.

  135. 135.

    ———, “The New Race Consciousness: Race, Nation, and Empire in American Culture, 1910–1925,” Journal of World History 10, no. 2 (1999): 351. ———, Color of Race.

  136. 136.

    William A. Edwards, “Racial Purity in Black and White: The Case of Marcus Garvey and Earnest Cox,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 15, no. 1 (1987).

  137. 137.

    Harrison, When Africa Awakes [1920], 65.

  138. 138.

    Guterl, Color of Race, 139.

  139. 139.

    Ibid., 142.

  140. 140.

    Shepperson, “Pan-Africanism,” 347.

  141. 141.

    Edwards, “Racial Purity,” 123–24; Guterl, Color of Race.

  142. 142.

    Edwards, “Racial Purity,” 123–24.

  143. 143.

    Ibid., 127.

  144. 144.

    Brenda Gayle Plummer, Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992).

  145. 145.

    Ibid., 122–23.

  146. 146.

    Ibid., 2. ———, “The Afro-American Response to the Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934,” Phylon 2005, June 4 (1982).

  147. 147.

    Langston Hughes, “White Shadows in a Black Land,” The Crisis 39 (1932).

  148. 148.

    Miller, “Daughters,” 245.

  149. 149.

    Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 3.

  150. 150.

    Paulin, Imperfect Unions, x.

  151. 151.

    Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

  152. 152.

    “‘Cuba’—a Drama of Freedom Presented by Local Talent.”; Riehle, “‘300 Afro-American Performers’,” 17; Nelson, Fredrick L. McGhee, 61.

  153. 153.

    Edmonds, “Yellow Death,” 196.

  154. 154.

    William Pickens, The New Negro: His Political, Civil and Mental Status, and Related Essays (New York: Neale Publishing Company, 1916), dedication page.

  155. 155.

    “Bi-Racialism: The Key to Social Peace,” in Lothrop Stoddard, Re-Forging America: The Story of Our Nationhood (New York: Scribner’s, 1927).

  156. 156.

    ———, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (New York: Scribner’s, 1920).

  157. 157.

    Guterl, “New Race Consciousness,” 350. ———, Color of Race.

  158. 158.

    ———, “New Race Consciousness,” 350.

  159. 159.

    Du Bois, “Conservation.”

  160. 160.

    Ibid.

  161. 161.

    Ibid.

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    Shannon Rose Riley

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Riley, S.R. (2016). Re-Racing the Nation: From Cuba—A Drama of Freedom to the Cultural Performance of Negro History Week. In: Performing Race and Erasure. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59211-8_4

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