Dr. Amy Gais

In May 1892, Ida B. Wells published her first anti-lynching editorial after three of her friends and neighbors—Thomas (Tommie) Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry (Will) Stewart—were brutally lynched in Memphis. Her first editorial was far shorter than her famous pamphlets and equivocates her critique of lynching as a technique of racial terror:

Eight Negroes lynched since last issue of the Free Speech. Three were charged with killing white women and five with raping white women. Nobody in this section believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men assault white women. If Southern white men are not careful they will over-reach themselves and a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women (Wells 2020, 66).

Decades later, in her autobiography, Wells describes herself as “hinting” at the “truth” in this editorial; lynching is not a justified retaliation against Black men for sexual assault but a tool of racial domination. Yet even her pithy insinuation did not protect her from harm. Many white journalists called for her death, a white mob ransacked her newspaper office, and Wells was “exiled” from her home. Well describes feeling angered by her choice to dissimulate, quickly followed by empowered since equivocation had not saved her. She had hedged her critique of lynching, but the editorial had still cost her so much. Once she was safe from threat in the North, she felt compelled “to tell the whole truth now that [she] was where [she] could do so freely,” publishing her more explicit and documentarian anti-lynching pamphlets (Wells 2020, 69).

Wells’s anti-lynching advocacy invites us to reflect on a widespread yet contentious tactic that many African American activists and intellectuals employed during Jim Crow—dissimulation. By dissimulation, I mean the practice of deliberately equivocating one’s political arguments in oppressive contexts. During the civil rights campaign to overthrow Jim Crow, many Black people modulated their critiques of racial oppression to evade the threat of white supremacy and resist racial oppression. Scholars of African American political thought often focus on the efficacy and ethics of dissimulation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but my book project recovers the personal repercussions of dissimulation on Black actors as they navigated the extraordinary circumstances of Jim Crow.

My book project, Freedom, Dissimulation, and Resistance in African American Political Thought, offers two interventions in the discipline of African American political thought, the first conceptual, and the second historical. Conceptually, I theorize dissimulation in African American politics by engaging with five influential Black figures—Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Anna Julia Cooper—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These iconic Black figures dissembled their critiques of racial injustice during Jim Crow, albeit with varying degrees of success as is evinced by threats made against Wells’s life and livelihood. After all, to condemn racial injustice in America meant, in practice, inviting violence against one’s physical body and the Black community. By showcasing how these figures conceive of the advantages and costs of modulating their critiques of racial oppression in their writings, including manuscripts, autobiographies, editorials, and speeches, I demonstrate that these figures are not merely concerned with the effects of dissimulation on the advancement of the civil rights campaign (i.e., whether it would further or hinder the social movement) or the ethics of dissimulation (i.e., whether it would undermine the moral standing of the actor). Rather, I show that these figures were also deeply attentive to the existential and psychic stakes of dissimulation.

The resulting book is a figure-driven narrative that tells the story of how five Black figures enlisted dissimulation to resist racial oppression and charts the complex relationship between the emancipatory and burdensome stakes of dissimulation. Through the lens of these five figures, I develop a conceptual paradigm of distinct modes of dissimulation in African American politics, ranging from Douglass’s use of equivocation to establish shared understanding among friends and intimates in the Black community to Cooper’s performance of traditional femininity to condemn gendered exclusion. Dissimulation empowers each of these figures at certain times in their lives, energizing their advocacy and generating solidarity among the marginalized. At other times, it restricts them by inflicting a mental burden on the political actor forced to conform. For Douglass, dissimulation allows him to build solidarity among the Black community. For Wells, it provokes her to embrace radical political action. For Washington, it allows him to speak directly to a targeted audience of white Americans. For Du Bois, it erodes his sense of agency and autonomy. For Cooper, it enables her to advocate for a more inclusive view of political resistance led by Black women.

Historically, I investigate different modes of dissimulation that Black men and women employed with a particular emphasis on the gendered nature of dissimulation. Influential work in African American political thought often frames these prominent Black figures as either embracing or refuting dissimulation, with Washington unequivocally on the side of dissimulation, for example, and Douglass and Wells fiercely condemning it. Yet my project offers nuanced portraits of these five figures engaging in dissimulation in complicated, messy ways and negotiating (and constantly renegotiating) their use of dissimulation over the course of their lives and careers. By considering more intimate and ambivalent writings, such as life stories and autobiographies, essays, speeches, and correspondence, this project broadens up of the archive in political theory beyond the political treatise to better understand the ideas of influential figures in African American political thought.

This comparative lens also allows me to showcase the distinct ways that Black men and women dissimulated in light of the unique challenges posed to their minds and bodies in Jim Crow America. For example, I compare Booker T. Washington’s speeches to white and Black Christian churches in the North, reconstructing which arguments he modulated in light of the racial composition of his audience. I also chart how Black women employed comportments and tactics distinct from their better-known male counterparts in African American political thought, such as Ida B. Wells’s use of a pen name ‘Iola’ in her early editorials and Anna Julia Cooper’s performance of traditional femininity in her essays on Black leadership and educational reform.

This research builds on the work of scholars of African American literature and political thought, social movements and the civil rights campaign, Black feminism, Indigenous studies, and historians and sociologists of Jim Crow that document the behaviors that marginalized people enlist to survive and resist oppression.

Thus far, I have finished an initial article in this project, “‘To Tell the Truth Freely’: Ida B. Wells on Sacrificial Death and Political Resistance,” under review at American Journal of Political Science.

Abstract: A courageous agitator, Ida B. Wells is known for her principled commitment to racial justice and reluctance to consider concessions in her anti-lynching advocacy. Yet this article argues that Wells negotiates her political principles, specifically her commitment to sacrificial death in political resistance, given the constraints she faces as a Black woman advocating for racial justice in Jim Crow America. Wells links Black leadership with sacrificial death, but she qualifies this view of political resistance when confronted with threats against her own life and the Black community in Memphis. By examining Wells’s theory of political resistance and Black leadership in her political pamphlets alongside her reflections on her anti-lynching advocacy in practice in her autobiography, this article reflects on how marginalized individuals manage competing political principles under oppressive conditions.