‘To make a better world tomorrow’: St. Clair Drake and the Quakers of Pendle Hill

Introduction

Shortly after meeting St. Clair Drake in 1986, Cedric Robinson, the author of Black Marxism (1983), expressed regret for neglecting to include him in his groundbreaking study of the black radical tradition. ³ In Robinson’s view, Drake stood alongside the likes of Oliver Cromwell Cox, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, C. L. R. James and George Padmore in moving beyond the Eurocentric boundaries of Marxism to articulate, through a life of sustained intellectual and political engagement, an experientially informed critique of capitalism’s brutalities and encroachments across the Black Atlantic world. ⁴ Drake’s place in this tradition was first marked by his publication, along with Horace Cayton, of Black Metropolis (1945). An ethnography of a black community ‘in the final stages of the Depression and in the midst of the Second World War’, Black Metropolis gave rise to a social theory of a ‘metropolis within a metropolis’: the product of a colour line and pervasive discrimination, but a world distinctive in its attributes and belonging entirely to black people. ⁵ Formed against a longer history of neglect and inequality of opportunities in the larger city and nation, the socially constructed separate lifeworld of Chicago’s Bronzeville was one held together by the collective desires of black people and the racial constraints characteristic of early to mid-twentieth century America. By bringing anthropology home from abroad and refocusing its lens on a modern American city, this work, in its final analysis, questioned the meaning of democracy and social progress against the real attachments a population felt for a separate way of life and an institutional culture they believed to be essential for survival and getting ahead in a world controlled by whites. ⁶

Responsible for writing twenty-two of the twenty-three chapters, Drake, more than Cayton, was the main architect of this perspective in Black Metropolis, a fact never before acknowledged in discussions of this classic work. ⁷ Its emphasis on social organisation around caste and class concepts reflects the specific influence of social anthropology on Drake while a graduate student of William Lloyd Warner and Robert Redfield at the University of Chicago in the 1930s. As evidenced by the direct involvement of Cayton and the introduction by the novelist Richard Wright, Black Metropolis also locates Drake within the context of a vibrant Chicago renaissance that linked the University of Chicago to the black intellectuals, artists and activists that moved through the city’s Southside during the Depression decade. ⁸ In this sense, Black Metropolis can be read as an artefact from a particular era in Drake’s life history, revealing of the communities that formed him and the degree to which his profound insights were rooted in, and routed through, a reworking of anthropology and a black public sphere of political and intellectual consciousness.

Read alongside other major works in the body of Drake’s scholarship, Black Metropolis can also be said to reflect his sustained interest in the study of local black communities nationally and internationally over a period of nearly two decades. In other words, Drake’s observation of the black condition did not settle on Chicago, but grew from his previous involvement with the anthropologist Allison Davis in a study of white landowners and black tenant farmers in the declining cotton-producing region of Adams County, Mississippi in the early 1930s, and continued, after his study of black Chicago, through his examination of the small black diaspora community of Tiger Bay in Cardiff, Wales, prior to a wave of West Indian immigration to England in the 1950s and 1960s. ⁹ In the Deep South, Drake discovered how the majority of blacks were bound to the hardships, cultural politics and terror of living Jim Crow. In Cardiff, he chronicled how a community of Arab, Somali and West Indian seamen was formed by an imperialistic dialectic, in which rights and privileges enjoyed in the metropole were virtually non-existent in the colonies of the British empire. Taken together, all three studies offer a partial conception of an anglophone Black Atlantic world as a diverse, but interconnected socioeconomic entity, with Bronzeville representing one nodal point along a vexed and dynamic circuit that Drake traversed from the early years of the Great Depression to the dawning of African independence.

Well before the rise of a Black Atlantic paradigm in the field of British cultural studies, Drake underwrote a social theory of black communities that was ethnographically informed by the distinct relations and structures of power in, through and against which people lived, struggled and formed separate lifeworlds. ¹⁰ The careful distinctions he drew in the black conditions across this trilogy, however, did not obfuscate the extent to which ‘the story of Black Metropolis’ was, ‘with minor variations, the story of the Negro in a number of other places’. As he observed in the final paragraph of Black Metropolis, ‘the problems that arose on Bronzeville’s Forty Seventh Street encircled the globe’, informing (against systems of racial domination) the boundaries of diasporic communities, as well as ‘constant struggles for complete democracy’. ¹¹

While Drake maintained an interest in urban sociology and anthropology, especially as it pertained to studying the intersections of race, power and social unrest in the US throughout the civil rights and Black Power periods, he moved away from community studies as a mode of sociological investigation by the early 1950s, preferring instead to carry out, within the context of the sociology of knowledge and intellectual anthropology, studies on racial ideologies and structures of race and culture across Africa and the African diaspora. This shift in Drake’s research interests corresponded to his involvement in African affairs throughout the cold war years, social movements in the Caribbean during and after the period of West Indian Federation and, finally, to his pioneering place in the establishment of African and Black Studies programmes at Roosevelt and Stanford University respectively. Despite these changes reflective of his evolving concerns, however, Drake’s oeuvre remained unified throughout his life by the fact that he undertook both scholarly work and activist commitments with a view to producing knowledge uncompromisingly aligned with the promotion of social justice and human liberation, rooted in the expressive claims of the precolonial and modern ‘black folk’ communities he indirectly and directly encountered ‘here and there’ in Africa and the black diaspora. ¹²

On a more personal level, Drake’s scholarly and political commitments were born from an awareness of himself as a ‘Pan-African Diaspora product’, whose own lineage and early life history, he believed, made him a partial insider to the social realities of multiple black communities in the Caribbean and the US. ¹³ His father, John Gibbs St. Clair Drake, was from Barbados, a colony with a small open economy in a worldwide capitalist system that gave rise to a tradition of West Indian migration. Forced to take to the high seas to earn a living, the elder Drake disembarked at the turn of the last century in Norfolk, Virginia, a port city whose centuries-old Afro-American population came in by way of that very same water route that opens up to the Atlantic world. Drake’s mother, Bessie Lee Bowles, was a native of Staunton, Virginia. According to Drake, ‘her people were slaves’, and his grandmother, Mary Bowles, was an illiterate domestic worker ‘born a year or two before slavery was abolished in this country’. Sometime in 1908, Drake’s parents met as students at the Virginia Theological Seminary and College, an independent black Baptist college in Lynchburg. In April 1910, they were married. Nine months later, Drake was born in Suffolk, Virginia, where his father was a preacher at the First Baptist Church in nearby Harrisonburg. ¹⁴ Throughout his life, Drake considered himself a product of these cross-currents in the black diaspora. In the general flow of human history, his birth was the outgrowth of post-emancipation black migrations driven by economic dislocation and the boom of distant markets, which resulted, at the Virginia Seminary, in the convergence of differently situated black communities with roots in the centuries-long history of racial slavery in the Americas.

From 1916–1927, Drake’s early life history was also informed by a series of migrations: first to Pittsburgh, in the era of the Great Migration; then to Barbados with his father for a year; and, finally, after his parents divorced, back to his mother’s native Virginia, where he would eventually enrol as a student at Hampton Institute, Booker T. Washington’s alma mater. While Drake was at Hampton, his father, like several other black clergymen from the Virginia Seminary, became active in Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), becoming International Organizer in 1924 and eventually head of UNIA’s short-lived Liberty University in Jamestown, Virginia. Drake himself became part of a historical moment that saw students from across the South, Northeast and as far away as East Africa converge on Hampton’s campus to challenge and eventually overthrow a system of education based on industrial and agricultural training. Drawing from the ethos of the Garvey movement, the New Negro movement and the struggles of an early civil rights movement, the Hampton student strike of 1927 dramatically transformed the culture of education to reflect the higher aspirations of black youth, who, in the aftermath of the Great War, demanded all the benefits and privileges promised by modernity. ¹⁵

For Drake, the world created by the Hampton student strike set him on a lifelong path of social activism characterised, in its earliest years, by his particular commitment to ‘study, understand, and change the odd world of Jim Crow’. ¹⁶ A few years after graduating from Hampton, this commitment carried Drake into the Mississippi Delta and then along a route of black migration to Chicago’s Bronzeville. Following the second world war, it carried him again across the Atlantic to the seaport community of Tiger Bay in Cardiff, Wales, and eventually to Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana. Following the demise of the Pan-African dream, with Nkrumah’s overthrow in 1966, Drake returned to the Caribbean and eventually back to the US, during and after the civil rights movement. His participant observation of black condition(s) in each of these settings gave rise to a rich body of scholarship that challenged established knowledge and foreshadowed new approaches to the study of race and racism in the modern world. However, while Robinson has made it clear that Drake merited a place in the black radical tradition, the fact remains, even after his passing from the scene, that few beyond those interested in the black experience in Chicago or Diaspora Studies have a full awareness of Drake and the profound significance of his works.

The issue of Drake’s neglect speaks to the myriad challenges that beset his recovery, most apparent of which is the sheer dearth of sources. In the absence of memoirs, critical biographies and an easily accessible collection of works, the meaning of his life is one that remains largely undocumented, unexamined and, quite literally, buried in the archives, deep inside unpublished manuscripts, field notes, lectures, speeches, reams of correspondence, editorials and article-length writings. Most of the latter, which appeared, at one time or another, in numerous academic journals, popular magazines and edited volumes, have long since gone out of print. Even those works remaining in the public domain, particularly Black Metropolis and Black Folks Here and There, Vols 1&2 (1987, 1990) offer only a partial glimpse of Drake’s discursive voice and tone at two specific historical moments.

Complicating this glaring problem of silence is Drake’s well-known self-effacing practice in his own lifetime of resisting numerous efforts to honour him. Believing he had not made any meaningful contributions to the fields in which he was trained, Drake preferred instead to be remembered as an activist, who had long since traded the careerist aspirations of an academic to work in the interest of freedom-seeking people, struggling against and living within colonial and segregated systems in the age of the ‘American century’. ¹⁷ This is what guided his movements through the Black Atlantic world to lay bare, at the end of his life, a system of racial subordination peculiar to the history of modern capitalism.

In recent years, several arguments have been made for Drake’s recovery, the most salient of which have come from sociologists, anthropologists and intellectual historians. A former student of Drake’s at Stanford University, Faye V. Harrison, for example, sees such a project as essential for re-historicising anthropology and decentring the axis of disciplinary authority in the field. In the history of sociology, James McKee has made a similar argument, noting that the real significance of Drake’s work in the 1930s and 1940s was to be found in his rich description of a black community, which dissented from the accepted account of the ‘ghetto’ advanced by students of Robert Park and the Chicago School of Sociology. Finally, the historian Wilson J. Moses heralded Drake’s last publication, Black Folks Here and There, as one of the most impressive (and ignored) models of black studies scholarship published in the last century, representing, in his view, a critical intervention in larger debates about New World slavery and the re-emergence of essentialist currents relative to the rise of Afro-centrism in black studies in more recent history. ¹⁸

With 2011 marking the centenary of Drake’s birth, this article begins the project of rehabilitating the legacy of one of the most underrated minds of the twentieth century. Specifically focused on the period between 1931–1935, what follows is a chronicling of Drake’s movement through the intellectual, spiritual and political universe maintained by the Quakers of Pennsylvania. In this most unlikely of places, Drake attached his commitment to black liberation to a radical vision of a world without social hierarchies, injustices and wars. His experience suggests that black intellectual encounters with non-violence, as a philosophy and strategy for effecting social change, occurred well before the emergence of the modern civil rights movement, and that the interest of the Quakers in the condition of black people went well beyond the anti-slavery struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to intersect with radical ideas and political traditions in Depression-era America. Marking his entry into the field of anthropology, Drake’s movement beyond the world of Pendle Hill, the Quaker training centre (in 1935), is suggestive of his continual search for the most effective means by which to transform society from the point of the communities he encountered in the black diaspora.

OPEN IN VIEWER

St. Clair Drake, photographed in 1971 by Allen Weber, courtesy of Roosevelt University Archives.

Dodging through Dixie on the Peace Caravans

In 1931, a teacher at Hampton Institute who often ‘liked to talk about peace’ encouraged Drake to take part in an experiment then being planned by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in the summer of that year. ¹⁹ Having just graduated from Hampton, Drake liked the idea of an adventure that would take him out of Virginia and into the Deep South. For this reason, he, along with Enoch Waters, Drake’s junior at Hampton, decided to join the first wave of thirteen Peace Caravans sent out by the AFSC. Their task: to travel across the country to ‘explain the traditional Quaker position against violence’ and to convince those they encountered along the way of the social and economic advantages of supporting a movement then underway for the finding of ‘peaceful solutions to international disputes’. ²⁰ Their more purposeful goal, as Drake explains it, was to ‘make speeches, hand out leaflets’ and help collect one million signatures from ‘free thinking citizens of the South’ in support of the first World Disarmament Conference, which was scheduled to convene among member states of the League of Nations in Geneva early the following year. ²¹

In preparation for their mission, Drake and Waters spent two weeks at Haverford Institute of International Relations, studying the Quaker position on war and non-violence in workshops conducted by such ecumenical pacifists as Douglass Steere, Clarence E. Pickett (of AFSC) and Helen Bryan, director of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), based on the campus of Swarthmore College. ²² As Drake recalls, this was a time when change was in the air. Gandhi had just travelled to London to attend the Roundtable Conference, and the prospect of constitutional reform in British India gave rise to the question of how to apply his technique of non-violence in a movement to ‘change the relations between whites and blacks’ in the US. ²³ On two separate occasions during their training, Drake and Waters joined a group of fellow trainees in the application of non-violent strategies to ‘the problems of labor and black people’. They participated in a sit-in demonstration at a diner that refused service to black customers and picketed the Drexel Bank building in downtown Philadelphia for investing in the coal mines of Harlan County, Kentucky, the scene of ‘bloody Harlan’ in 1939. ²⁴ For his involvement in the last act of civil disobedience, Drake and several of his Quaker friends were arrested. This was, as he recalled, his ‘first foray into social action’ and his first ‘lesson on how the courts and police operate’. It was also the beginning of Drake’s experimentation with non-violence, occurring, as he pointed out, ‘decades before Martin Luther King, Jr. adopted Gandhism’ as the guiding philosophy of the civil rights movement. ²⁵

Completing their training at Haverford well-versed in the tenets of Quakerism, Drake and Waters secured a sponsor in Mary McLeod Bethune a year before she was appointed to head Franklin Roosevelt’s Black Cabinet. Spending a portion of their funds to purchase a used Dodge Sedan, Drake and Waters set out on their six-week journey of peace. ²⁶ They were the first and only black participants in the Caravan movement that year and the only team assigned to travel exclusively into the segregated South. ²⁷ They visited black churches, schools, teachers’ meetings and social clubs in Georgia, Alabama, the Carolinas and Drake’s native Virginia. They spoke at Hampton, Tuskegee and Virginia Union University and before religious bodies like the Virginia Baptist General Association Conference in Richmond which, over half a century earlier, had founded the Virginia Baptist Theological Seminary in Lynchburg. ²⁸ In front of all-black audiences, Drake and Waters urged preachers, teachers and community leaders to ‘mold minds under their influence into instruments which will guarantee perpetual amity in international relationships’ and ‘awaken a wholesome respect for all nations and races’. ²⁹

In their role as messengers of peace, Drake and Waters easily drew the suspicion of city police officers and county sheriffs, who, believing them to be agitators and propagators of communist philosophy, repeatedly subjected them to unwarranted searches and interrogations. ³⁰ Staying one step ahead of local authorities and restricting their movements to a network of black religious and educational institutions, Drake and Waters ‘dodged’ their way ‘through Dixie’ by moving through black communities, completing their mission unharmed by summer’s end. It was, as Drake remembered, a ‘risky business’, but one that made an indelible impression upon his understanding of the black condition beyond the boundaries of the Upper South. His wanderings behind the Cotton Curtain at the time of Scottsboro and shootouts between landlords and communist-led sharecroppers sensitised him to the great issues involving war and peace, and sharpened for him the meaning of exploitation by making visible the ‘heavy hand of racism and caste’. Several years later, Drake would return to where he had first ‘looked the ugly monster of Deep South “nigger hatred” in the face’. ³¹ That he would do so not as an itinerant missionary of peace, but as a teacher, social researcher and community organiser was partly the result of his experiences with the Quakers, whose turn it was, after his graduation from Hampton, to stamp their impression on his intellectual identity. ³²

The view from Pendle Hill

After his time on the Peace Caravans, Drake was given a scholarship by the Joint Committee of Race Relations (JCRR) to attend Pendle Hill Graduate Training Center in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. ³³ Established by the religious order of the Society of Friends a year before Drake’s arrival, Pendle Hill was an institution dedicated to the advancement of Quakerism in the study of social conflict through engendering, among its students, an ‘equality of respect and recognition for their fellow man’. As one student remarked, no other institution ‘offered the same freedom coming from its leisure, the same family relationships coming from its size, and the same view or spirit coming from its basis of worship’. ³⁴ Pendle Hill’s policy of openness without regard to race, religion or political persuasion made it attractive to a ‘wide variety of Left-leaning intellectuals’, who were, like the British socialist Thomas Hodgkin, intent on learning how to transform society in accordance with this vision. ³⁵ This fusion of the secular and the sacred enabled students to feel as if they could see historic transformations taking place in the world outside. ‘We have [the] ability’, one student proclaimed, ‘to see the whole world and the people dwelling [therein] … We have a vision of the past … of things to come’ that could scarcely be acquired in ‘the valleys that are our homes’, where ‘on one side prejudice cuts us off, on another the skyscrapers of materialism, and on still another plain bodily fatigue.’ At Pendle Hill, students were free to contemplate the evils of capitalism and human suffering and dream of a future where peace reigned supreme. ³⁶ What Drake carried away from such an experience was a generalisation that he found no reason to subsequently change; that ‘the immoral condition created by racial discrimination was the result of economic forces in a capitalist society’. ³⁷

The first black student to be admitted to Pendle Hill, Drake pursued a year-long course of study that moved him to see how economic factors were ‘decisive in changing the status of Negroes’ and how such change only occurred when ‘economic interests, as expressed through politics, came to coincide with the agitation of idealists and humanitarians’ working together. Drake learned that non-violent coercion, as motivated by a Christian love ethic, could be essential to building coalitions around the fight for the ballot, the struggle against lynching and the breaking down of Jim Crow laws. ³⁸ Along with most of his white peers, he came to share in a vision of society free from the domination of race and class interests. Although it would assume different forms across many and varied social contexts in subsequent years, the essence of this vision would forever remain the same for Drake, leading him to conclude, nearly half a century later, that while Hampton Institute gave him ‘basic technical skills’, the intellectual culture of Pendle Hill in the early 1930s radicalised him by giving him ‘a new view of the world’. ³⁹

For Drake, Pendle Hill made visible the world and its discontents. It imparted to him the philosophical and ethical foundation on which he based some of his earliest moral critiques of American society and made clearer his purpose and responsibility for struggles for democratic reform. ⁴⁰ He became familiar with India’s non-violent movement against British colonialism and heard accounts of its happenings directly from a representative sent to them at the request of the Mahatma himself. ⁴¹ He also remembered being visited by socialists and communists, from whom he learned the words of ‘The Internationale’, which, as he recalls, we liked, since ‘it fit with our idea of a better world tomorrow’. Then there were the philosophers, evangelists and pragmatic mystics whose promise of a New Jerusalem in the here and now necessitated ‘good works among enlightened men’. ⁴²

It was at this point that Drake also came to reject the Baptist fundamentalism of his parents, falling instead under the influence of ‘the humanist wing of the Society of Friends’. This conversion he welcomed if for no other reason than it provided his new-found ‘agnosticism with a philosophical rudder’ akin to the ‘teachings of the Stoics’. ⁴³ He read Toyohiko Karagawa and Albert Schweitzer and discovered from them that, ‘the will of the Divine was in rational minds working together in bringing a better world into being’. From Irving Babbitt, Drake came to believe it incumbent upon morally informed intellectuals to gain control of American life and forever condemn to history the social and economic forces that threatened to ‘render civil society chaotic and meaningless’. ⁴⁴ Drake also attended lectures given by Reinhold Niebhur, who impressed upon him the value of non-violent civil disobedience in forcing fundamental structural reforms in society, while his reading of William Booth’s empirical analysis of widespread poverty in nineteenth-century London strengthened the Quakers’ moral condemnation of social misery in modern capitalist economies. ⁴⁵

Relating to the deepening economic crisis in American society, Drake embraced a materialist interpretation of history, in general, and the so-called Negro problem, in particular. The only classic Marxist text to make any lasting impression on him during this period, Drake recalled, was the Communist Manifesto, which ‘reinforced the words of the International’. ⁴⁶ But the implicit atheism of communism, with ‘its creed of violent revolution’, failed to entice Drake into the ranks of the Communist party. ⁴⁷ Despite his agnosticism, he was the son of a Baptist minister and a freshly converted New Humanist, who believed that non-violent coercion was motivated by a divine spirit. While the communists’ vision of a ‘better world tomorrow’ appealed to Drake, their method of bringing it into being was, as he wrote in the Afro, at odds with ‘the ways of Jesus, Gandhi, love, and manly fortitude’. Nevertheless, Drake believed that communism did demand that, ‘Christianity not stand still in the face of social and political injustice’. To be relevant to the black community, Drake argued, Christians had to act as non-violent revolutionaries against the epidemic of racial violence, segregation and other evils endemic to a capitalist society. ⁴⁸

Finally, Drake’s understanding as to how best to bring about the type of change envisioned by the Quakers of Pendle Hill found meaning in the poetry of the Victorian socialist William Morris. From Morris’s ‘A Dream of John Ball’, which remained his favourite poem, Drake drew a conception of social change that was cognisant of its forward and backward momentums. ‘I pondered all these things’, wrote Morris, ‘and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and, when it comes, it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name’. ⁴⁹ For Drake, Morris’s poem expressed optimism, in the possibility of individuals changing their circumstances, and pragmatism, in knowing that progressive change in society did not unfold overnight, but in small increments over a protracted period of time. Moreover, the poem captured for Drake a dialectical understanding of reform movements in society and his own dissatisfaction with racial and class exploitation. As Drake remarked, Morris’s words

urged upon us the need to analyze the past, to criticize means and ends, and to rededicate ourselves to basic values. They spurred us on to recapture that enthusiasm we all had in the past toward what was future then, but is now our present. ⁵⁰

In the years following his time with the Quakers, Drake continued to draw inspiration from this poem, never succumbing to the hopelessness and cynicism usually born from repeatedly witnessing the rise and fall, gains and losses, of democratic struggles.

An introduction to race and class at Pendle Hill

While studying at Pendle Hill, Drake consumed a range of literature that bore out new perspectives on race and class in anthropology, sociology and history. Among the more memorable for him were works by the Jewish German-born émigré Franz Boas, the radical socialist critic Randolph Bourne and W. E. B. Du Bois, who, then in his sixth decade, ranked among America’s most pre-eminent intellectuals. ⁵¹ In The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), Boas offered Drake an explanation of racial inequality that ‘shifted the burden of proof to the biological determinists in the great debate about Negro capacity’. While not expressly political, Boas’s theory of cultural relativism challenged what Drake saw as the ‘biased and derogatory fashion in which African cultures had been dealt with in the literature’ of the times, thereby supporting the claim held by many New Negro intellectuals that ‘Negroes were not biologically inferior’. Through Boas, Drake came to see a place for anthropology in the cause of black liberation. ⁵² In Bourne’s ideas on cultural pluralism, Drake recognised a viable alternative to a vision of America as a melting pot, making possible the ‘positive acceptance of … an explicit philosophy supporting the creation of a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural democracy’. ⁵³ Bourne’s ideas on race and culture enabled Drake to imagine social ‘integration without complete deracination’ and the building of interracial coalitions of protest without losing sight of the needs of the black community. ⁵⁴

Of this group, however, none influenced Drake more than Du Bois, showing him that contributions to the liberation of black people need not compromise a high level of scholarship. ⁵⁵ Drake considered The Philadelphia Negro (1899) a model of social scientific research. Du Bois’s pioneering analysis of social class and use of ecological mapping techniques served to locate, for Drake, white working-class racial antipathies at the centre of the Negro problem. Specifically, Du Bois demonstrated how the economic rise of black people living in the slums of South Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century was partly hindered by a widespread inclination on the part of white workers to shut against the black working class the ‘many doors of advancement open to the talented and efficient of other races’. ⁵⁶ Similarly, in Black Reconstruction (1935), published nearly four decades later, Du Bois rearticulated for Drake the way in which ‘anti-Negro labor rivalry … kept the labor elements after the war from ever really uniting … to increase labor’s power’ through embracing the cause of ‘Negro suffrage and Negro economic stability’. ⁵⁷ Although particularly deleterious for former slaves, the rise of Redeemer governments across the South also made vulnerable the white working class, who could not conceive, in their condition as workers, a common ground with those so long held in bondage. ⁵⁸ From Du Bois, therefore, Drake could conclude that the building of working-class coalitions would be beset by challenges rooted in a long history of white working-class racism and the equally entrenched suspicion among black workers.

Through his interrogation of race and class concepts at Pendle Hill, Drake eventually came to recognise the transformative potential of working through Roosevelt’s New Deal establishment to unite black and white workers across a chasm of misunderstanding and a history of interclass rivalries. In a letter to Lorenzo White of the Hampton Institute, Drake inquired into the possibility of joining the National Youth Administration (NYA) to, in his words, ‘help train and place Negro and white youth in industry and schools’. ⁵⁹ In Roosevelt’s New Deal, Drake saw an opportunity to participate in a second Reconstruction that would, this time around, awaken class consciousness by genuinely addressing the economic problems at the centre of black social misery. ⁶⁰ This concern was shared by a generation of black radical intellectuals, who were themselves being mobilised by the crisis of the Great Depression around the New Deal.

Concentrated mainly at Howard University in the 1930s, this group of black professors benefited from Howard President Mordecai Johnson’s indefatigable defence of academic freedom to achieve, according to Drake, ‘high visibility as spokesmen for the black masses’. ⁶¹ They condemned all forms of racial segregation and violence and were optimistic about the emergence of Popular Front socialism, based on securing economic and political justice for the working class. They considered inequality between blacks and whites as a manifestation of capitalist economies and envisaged the creation of a truly liberal democratic society through the building of interracial working-class coalitions. As Jonathan Scott Holloway remarked of Abram Harris, E. Franklin Frazier and Ralph Bunche in particular, they proffered a ‘worldview with a biracial workers’ movement at its core’ that worked against the divisive ‘racialist thinking of representative leadership figures and cultural New Negroes’ of the Harlem Renaissance. ⁶²

Those in this group that most influenced Drake were described by him as ‘Marxists of the chair’, who were virtually unanimous about analyses that gave him and many of his contemporaries satisfactory answers for the reasons behind the stock market crash of 1929 and ‘why what had been a prosperous industrial system ground to a halt with over fourteen million people unemployed’. ⁶³ Like those black socialists who rode the crest of black urban migrations to form the African Blood Brotherhood and Messenger groups in the mid-1910s, these university intellectuals, Drake recalled, affiliated to one Marxist political tendency or another. ⁶⁴ However, unlike Doxey Wilkerson and Alpheus Hunton (who, according to Drake, became prominent figures in the Communist party), most of these black university intellectuals refused to subordinate their concerns to the party’s agenda, desiring instead to remain free enough to move into organisations like the National Negro Congress (NNC) and, through the Joint Committee on Recovery (JCR), into the folds of Roosevelt’s New Deal establishment. ⁶⁵

The shifting concerns of black intellectuals were symptomatic of the age. According to Drake, ‘those that tried to realize the values embodied in the New Negro Movement of the twenties’ suddenly found themselves, when the Depression struck, very ‘self conscious about their obligations to the masses … We, as their students’, Drake recalled, ‘shared these concerns as members of that tiny college-trained group that had emerged in the sixty-odd years that had elapsed since slavery was abolished’. ⁶⁶ If Drake had once believed that the responsibility of the ‘college educated Negro’ to the black masses of the South was that of an enlightened culture bearer, his perspective evolved in the early 1930s to reflect the moral and political imperatives of the Quakers and black radical intellectuals, who, together, offered him a conception of the black condition that necessitated the building of effective coalitions between black and white workers. ⁶⁷

Beyond the boundary of Pendle Hill

From his year-long course of study at Pendle Hill, Drake discovered his purpose in life, deciding, at this point, that he wanted to devote himself to the creation of a just and more democratic society. He imagined his was to be a life devoted to the ‘amelioration of social conditions as they existed among the laboring masses in this country’, black and white. ⁶⁸ Towards this end, he took a teaching post at Christianburg Normal and Industrial Institute in Cambria, a Quaker-sponsored boarding school for black youth in the state. For the next three years, he taught civics, biology and maths at Christianburg and spent his summers residing at the Bedford Street Mission Settlement House in downtown Philadelphia. Here, he recounts, he worked on several pioneering community projects sponsored by the AFSC. For example, he helped build recreational centres for the children of textile workers in Kensington and South Philadelphia and participated in setting up two of the first Quaker work camps in the country. At one work camp, Drake assisted in digging a reservoir as part of a rural housing project for coalminers and, at another, he constructed housing for members of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). ⁶⁹ However, Drake was soon ready to cast off his role as teacher and become involved in what he believed was a revolutionary struggle then taking hold in the South. It was a decision made easier by his coming conflict with the Quakers.

From 1931–1935, Drake wore the hats of student, lecturer and proletarian missionary in institutions and organisations affiliated with the Quakers. From this, he developed what he described as ‘a habit of thinking in terms of class as well as race’, and gained a sense of social justice that rested on his synthesis of ethical precepts found in Christianity, socialism and New Humanism. ⁷⁰ With the Quakers, he came to share a belief in the possibility of a world free from war, exploitation, and race and class hierarchies. Hence, he worked among those most alienated by these issues as a work camp volunteer in Kensington and South Philadelphia and a secondary ‘country school teacher’ in southwestern Virginia. In the early years of the Great Depression, it was the Quakers who coloured Drake’s view of the world and involved him in efforts to remake it in a pattern consistent with their vision of a New Jerusalem in the here and now. Constrained neither by faith, nor ideological loyalties, however, Drake eventually came to outgrow the Quakers for reasons that flowed from the inability of this community fully to overcome what he saw as the problems of racism in American society and fascism across the globe. ⁷¹

And, although inspired by the Quakers, Drake soon found himself at odds with their rigidity on the question of non-violence. As early as 1931, while working on the Peace Caravans, Drake had begun to question the Quaker commitment to non-violence. The limitations of their stance on this issue were made apparent to Drake when he and Waters had occasion to speak before black churchgoers in rural Georgia:

One day I was speaking on the topic of peace at a black church in Georgia … an old man got up. He said, ‘young man, you’ve been talking about peace. Are you sorry they fought the Civil War?’ Well he had me there. Since the Quakers believed in complete and absolute non-violence, I was not prepared to join the Society of Friends. They could not support my position on the Spanish Civil War. I wanted to see the loyalists win and I couldn’t support their position, which was sending food over to be distributed to both sides. The Quaker position just was not mine. ⁷²

From this experience, Drake came to believe that democratic struggles across the globe warranted, at times, a flexibility of action and strategy and considered the Quakers’ unyielding devotion to non-violence as untenable and impractical. Although morally committed to non-violence, Drake made room for the possibility of violence should the ‘creation of a better world tomorrow’ demand it. Since this perspective went beyond an abiding commitment to pacifist principles, Drake saw the Quakers as limited in their potential to support social movements predicated on the realisation of greater democracy ‘by any means necessary’. ⁷³

Then there was the matter of what Drake considered to be the Quakers’ indefensible support of racial segregation in the area of education. In his first year at Pendle Hill, while conducting research on Philadelphia’s public school system for the Committee on Race Relations (CRR), Drake relayed to Du Bois that the Quaker city schools were ‘drifting toward a segregated system’. ⁷⁴ For Drake, who experienced the indignities of Jim Crow first-hand, ‘racial segregation, no matter how mild, was an affront barely tolerable’, least of all from the Quakers. Such, however, was the condition at Christianburg Institute when he taught there between 1932 and 1935. ⁷⁵

Founded in 1866 by the Friends Freedmen’s Association (FFA) of the Society of Friends, Christianburg was contracted by the state of Virginia to ‘run a boarding high school exclusively for black students’. ⁷⁶ The institution’s mission, as stated by FFA founding president, Elliston P. Morris, was to provide ‘vocational training to Negro youth’ and ‘to see a Hampton, or Tuskegee school’ duplicated at Christianburg. The irony of this arrangement was not lost on Drake: ‘Black students were receiving a private boarding-school education at the state’s expense’, and the Quakers were betraying their vision of a world without racial hierarchies by entering into an immoral relationship with southern segregationists in order to, in his words, keep schools separate. ⁷⁷ For him, the latter was more than a simple case of shortsightedness on the part the Quakers; it was an irreconcilable tension that contravened interracial struggles for economic justice and political democracy in the southern US.

The limitations of the Quakers also extended to what Drake considered to be the general deficiency of the peace movement to build an interracial working-class coalition during this period. Less than a year after leaving Christianburg Institute to join Davis on a research project then taking shape in Mississippi, Drake found time to take stock of this movement’s relationship to the black community and published an article entitled ‘Communism and peace movements’ in the Crisis. In it, he argued that pacifists’ and communists’ campaigns to recruit black people into their ranks were destined for ruin because they were unfamiliar with ‘Negro society, its stratifications and peculiar relationship to white society’. To expect ‘the Negroes’, as inferred by their entreaties, ‘to act as a homogeneous, proletarian class’ and rally to the cause of peace and economic justice with white workers was to deny the existence of competing economic interests within the black community. That black people would respond en masse to calls to ‘unite firmly and irrevocably behind a program for complete political, social and economic equality, an end to discriminatory practices, and for self-determination’ in the Black Belt was, to Drake, an idea that ‘Marxian realism would never predict, nor non-Marxian realism permit’. ⁷⁸ First, Drake shared Davis’s view that the ‘grasping and spiritless’ black bourgeoisie ‘lived in a cultural vacuum … devoted only to fatuities … and disconnected from the day-to-day travails of the black masses’. ⁷⁹ How, therefore, he asked, could they be ‘expected to fall in line with working class Negroes’? Second, Drake was convinced that the black working class could not be expected to unite with white workers, prompted only by the visions of a proletarian utopia promised in the speeches, articles and mythology of the communists. Moreover, Drake believed that the white working class could not be expected to put aside its age-old animosities towards black workers in the cause of economic justice. ⁸⁰

Nothing in his study of the American labour movement up to this moment suggested to Drake that a sustained interracial working-class alliance under the banner of communism or pacifism was possible. In response to the anti-war position of the white southern-born communist Harold Preece, who berated black Americans in the pages of the Crisis for ‘being hoodwinked by specious patriotism’, Drake simply posited that pacifists and communists alike could expect little else from the black working class. ‘What would they have Black America do when the nation starts down the road to war?’, he asked. ‘Was it not the Federal government and the capitalists’ who, despite their ulterior motives, occasionally offered to ‘Negroes measures of protection that local governments and white workers too often did not?’ For the black working class to believe that it ‘had nothing to lose but its chains’ was, in Drake’s mind, to ignore its deeply rooted and not totally misplaced distrust of the white working class. ‘Negroes’, as Drake asserts, ‘were indeed interested in helping white workers thwart Mussolini’s Caesarian dream of grandeur, but they undoubtedly [needed] to be sure that white workers were really anxious to confound “The Duce”.’ The possibility of ‘a hungry, white proletariat’ taking the jobs of ‘Negro longshoremen in New Orleans’, who ‘refused to handle cargoes bound for Mussolini-land’, was, to Drake, a not unreasonable hypothesis. These feelings, informed as they were by being the object of white working-class hostilities, made the ‘bringing of the Negro worker to the place where he would be willing to risk participation in a class war rather than in a nationalistic war a long time in coming’. ⁸¹

The three major tendencies Drake identified as representing the peace movement differed from each other only ‘in the objects for which they were, in the last analysis, willing to fight’, and, as far as he was concerned, none had ever expressly elected to do so for black people. There were those pacifists whose ranks were swelled with ‘Quakers, Mennonites’ and a ‘growing number of Methodist youth’, who believed in ‘absolute resistance to war’ and expressed, in Drake’s view, ‘an unqualified refusal to aid or abet any type of armed conflict, whether it be racial, national, or class’. With the Marxists and Orthodox Christians, they agreed in the inevitability of war and saw no reason to participate in something that would prove so futile and disastrous for the victors or vanquished, the attackers or defenders, and the government or proletariat. ⁸² From them, Drake believed, armed revolutionary struggles against fascism could expect little. Then there were those that Drake described as representing the real pacifists. They ‘loved peace’ so much that, ‘in times of crisis’, they ‘signed treaties with the warmongers’ and ‘supplied them with the necessary idealistic deodorants to sprinkle on their putrid purposes’. In times of war, Drake argued, ‘they supported disarmament, the League of Nations, the World Court, and peace education’. When Congress sanctioned war, however, they became ‘true patriots, calling off the fight against it’ only to now ‘support the war to end all wars’. ⁸³ Finally, on the extreme radical fringe of the peace movement, were the communists, who believed, according to Drake, that ‘no capitalistic world’ could be ‘a peaceful world’. Rather than fight in ‘battles for King Capital and his imperialistic country, the Reds’, Drake argued, sought to ‘turn his wars into revolutionary struggles in the name of an aroused proletariat’, becoming advocates for the use of the general strike and for efforts to ‘bore from within the army and industry in attempts to sabotage war’. As with the real pacifists, so too would ‘the Reds resort to arms’, but only if ‘the survival of the Soviet Union was at stake’. ⁸⁴

Beyond these ideological and political tendencies, Drake considered that all pacifists acted of one accord in treating the concerns of black people as secondary. Their frustrated efforts to create an interracial movement for peace among the working class during this period lay not, as many claimed, in ‘the spectacle of Negroes’ blindly ‘flocking to the colors when the war drums rolled’; instead, it was symptomatic of what Drake conceived then as the failure of groups within the peace movement to recognise the existence of competing economic interests within the black community and the true nature of the historical relationship between white and black workers in the US. Any hope of organising an appreciable number of Negroes into the peace movement, Drake reasoned, required an organic connection to the black community and the recognition of those social dynamics that impeded interracial coalition-building projects in support of democratic struggles at home and abroad. ⁸⁵

Although the Quakers laid claim to a rich anti-slavery tradition and expressed a desire to create an interracial movement for peace during the Depression, they were, in Drake’s mind, ineffective as compared to the ‘Socialists and Communists who were organizing the unemployed and the sharecroppers – black and white together – in the South’. ⁸⁶ Scottsboro, Angelo Herndon, and the Southern Tenant Farmers (STFU) were, to Drake, important symbols in the building of an interracial labour struggle. ⁸⁷ They best explained the ‘ruthless economic and social persecution of Negroes’ and provided leftwing organisers with the opportunity to sway the political allegiances of this segment of the southern population. For this reason, Drake was interested in the activities of the communists in the South and in what they had to say about the Depression, racial discrimination and the abolition of both. ⁸⁸ Beyond this, however, Drake’s interest in the Communist party did not go.

Like the Quakers’ unquestionable devotion to non-violence, the Communist party’s potential for bringing black people into the fold of the worldwide proletariat struggle was limited by what Drake interpreted as its complete and absolute subordination to the policies of the Soviet fatherland. Drake considered communists to possess foreign loyalties that were potentially dangerous in their outcome for black people; after all, Drake wrote, it was ‘black people that would run the risk of becoming the butt of white vigilante terror’ in the South, based on the mere suspicion of associating with outside agitators. Against such forces, the power of moral suasion and the geopolitical influence of Stalinist Russia could do little. Drake was convinced that ‘Negroes sensed this before the first slacker got lynched’. Until the condition of black people became the express concern of the communists, pacifists and a ‘large group of whites, preferably working in unions with Negroes’, those most disadvantaged by segregation in the South could not be expected to ‘risk persecution from Uncle Sam and an unfriendly white citizenry’ at the same time. ⁸⁹ In this way, Drake considered the unwavering ideological and national sympathies of the pacifists and communists as unrealistic and dangerous alternatives for the masses of black people existing on the margins of Jim Crow society in the early 1930s.

Drake soon came to believe that the best possibility for ameliorating conditions in the South rested not with one single group, but in some broad united front organisation that was willing to ‘subordinate … its communist leadership’ and ‘work through its safe affiliates’ to ‘broadcast some seed that may strike fertile soil’ in the struggle for real democracy and world peace. While working with the Quakers, Drake was optimistic about the emergence of several such organisations in the South. In the rise of the Southern Conference of Human Welfare, the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the National Negro Congress, for example, he observed how blacks and whites seemed to be coming together to dedicate themselves to combating racial discrimination, exploitative working conditions, lynching, and the rise and imperialist aspirations of fascist regimes in Europe. ⁹⁰ At least in the early years of their existence, none had explicitly allied themselves to the Communist party, and all, in Drake’s view, were directly concerned with the black condition in the US and committed to the preservation and extension of democratic governments throughout the world. Moreover, they operated within the orbit of the Popular Front, which fitted with Drake’s understanding of social change as occurring through broad-based coalitions of protest.

Conclusion

In 1935, Drake’s intellectual movement beyond the boundaries of the Quakers coincided with his physical relocation to the Deep South, when Davis invited him to join his study of a racially segregated community tied to the production of cotton in and around Natchez, Mississippi. Well beyond his native Virginia and the relative safety of Pendle Hill, Drake found himself at ground zero of a revolution he believed was then under way in America. His optimism came from witnessing the activities of communists, who were working through broad-based coalitions with black sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the South, and from his real commitment to bringing about ‘a better world tomorrow’, born from his short, but meaningful, movement through the Quakers in the early years of the Great Depression.

From the Quakers, Drake developed a wider appreciation and understanding of the world around him, illuminating the overlapping history of specific struggles against fascism, colonialism and racial discrimination. For students of the black radical tradition, Drake’s experiences during this period also point to alternate spaces wherein black intellectuals grappled with race and class concepts with a view to understanding the black condition in capitalist economies. This experience informed Drake’s conception of social change, which forever emphasised the necessity of working through coalitions unified across racial lines by a common moral imperative and a vision of society tied, in part, to the liberation of black people from the structural constraints of capitalism. Drake’s eventual break with the Quakers, which also marks his entry into the field of anthropology, is suggestive of his search for the most effective means by which to transform society along these lines.

After moving beyond the universe of the Quakers at Pendle Hill, Drake seized upon a stream of anthropology, driven by British structural functionalism, as a potentially useful weapon with which to dismantle racism. By bringing anthropology into the American South to chronicle the nature of black social existence, a task that Drake was specifically assigned to carry out among the lowest class of the lower caste, the Deep South study, as it became known, would offer him a deeper, ethnographically informed understanding of racism’s structural dynamics, as well as a blueprint for how best to get involved. Though not yet fully documented, Drake’s specific contribution to Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner and Mary Gardner’s Deep South (1941) underscores this study’s activist dimension. Predating the rise of liberation theology in Latin America in the 1950s, Drake fused social justice and anthropology within a moral and ethical framework informed by his time at Pendle Hill. By organising a national anti-lynching crusade as a member of the NAACP’s Youth Council, and working on an interracial farmers’ co-operative in the Mississippi Delta under the auspices of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Drake distinguished himself from the rest of the research team by stepping outside the study to incorporate its findings into a direct challenge to the caste-enforcing systems of extra-legal violence and landlord-tenant relations. In pursuit of a world without social hierarchies, injustices and wars, Drake blurred the boundaries between the objective social scientist and the socially committed activist, becoming in himself an alternative model of black intellectual engagement.

Drake’s experiences at Pendle Hill remain instructive for progressive concerns in the historical present. In imagining his response to the current crisis of worldwide capitalism, he would undoubtedly lament that even in a seemingly fairer, some say, ‘post-racial’ America, there still remain vast inequalities. However, he would warn against giving in to the politics of hopelessness, characterised by the surrendering of a shared commitment to ending America’s militaristic adventures overseas and narrowing the gap between rich and poor. The latter he would easily recognise as being disproportionately black, and, in other parts of the world, concentrated in regions of the global South. With a view to rising above the vulgar, divisive and almost fanatical public discourse characteristic of our own times, Drake would turn our attention to the words of Morris and call for the steadying of young minds to study the persistent structural problems of capitalism, and locate social movements on the ground, based on broad coalitions, that could undergird a truly transformative vision of a world without wars, hierarchies and injustices. This is the hallmark of the black radical tradition chronicled by Robinson, of which, I believe, Drake was a uniquely profound, ethnographically informed exemplar.