Sociological Discourses on Color, Class, and Gender, from Depression to World War II

This chapter daws on three published sociological works: Franklin E. Frazier’s, Negro Youth at the Crossways (1940), Charles S. Johnson’s, Growing Up in the Black Belt (1941), and Charles H. Parrish’s, Color Names and Color Notions (1946). These sociological views on color showed brown identity as an emergent social ideal and image of African America, and in varying degrees drew crucial connections of brownness to values associated with an ascendant middle-class status. These sociologists are presented as racial liberals who offered concrete and critical assessments of the rising idealization of brown complexions among African American youth coming of age between the Great Depression and World War II.

“Of the Brown-Skin Type”

This chapter explores three brown-skin types that arose as a dynamic visual and literary repertoire in Harlem Renaissance print culture. The first image of the “brown Madonna” is studied as one representation at odds with modern gendered identities; the second trope, the “brown-skin mulatta,” is studied as a popular device that conveyed a series of anxious distortions onto the “mixed-race” body. Lastly, the more nuanced and diverse image of modern brown womanhood appears as an uneven eruption of class, race, and national identifiers of African-descended and “other” women of color not born in the United States. All three tropes are interpreted as separate and distinctly powerful manifestations of New Negro womanhood to highlight the differently sexed, classed, and gendered meanings accorded to brown complexions in the modern environment.

Brown Beginnings

Chapter 1 explores the life of Elise Johnson McDougald, a Harlem educator, essayist, and social investigator. It studies her public and private writings, including a scrapbook she maintained as a record of her accomplishments. As a prominent educator and as a middle-aged woman, McDougald was a figure transitioning between the “woman’s era” and that of the “new woman.” For this and other reasons that emerge in the chapter, this chapter questions why she came to embody the “brown beauty” of the New Negro woman.

Introduction

This book interrogates the multiple meanings of brown as reference to physical complexion in the representation of African American womanhood during the interwar years. It questions how and why color in general and brownness in particular came to intimate race, class, gender, and sex identity as one prominent response to modernity and urbanization. This book shows that throughout the interwar years, diverse sets of African American women and men, all of whom can be defined as middle class within this constituency’s widely varying class membership, privileged brown complexions in their reworking of ideas, images, and expressions to identify the representative bodies of women as modern New Negro women.

Epilogue

This epilogue reemphasizes the arguments in the book. Brown-skin models acquired significant social status as African American women on an expanded global stage between 1945 and 1954—a short but critical period that marked the end of World War II, the hardening lines of Cold War politics, and the significant victory of Brown v. Board of Education that, in 1954, made segregation illegal in public schools. Indeed, during this short period and turning tide, a powerful iconography of beautiful brown women emerged to represent African-descended people in the United States by recasting beauty as a democratic right and function. Brown beauty was formalized, both at home and abroad, as a consumerist symbol of women’s successful negotiation of the trials of race, sex, and womanhood in the postwar nation, still half-segregated.

Browning the Dark Princess

Chapter 5 explores how brownness appeared in Harlem Renaissance fiction as an index of growing sentiments around transnational activism. Focusing on W. E. B. DuBois’s novel, Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), this chapter analyzes the novel’s narrative device of brownness with a focus on the representation of an Asian Indian princess as the main female protagonist and love interest of the African American male hero. This chapter also explores DuBois’s intellectualizing on the “race concept”; it highlights the political, social, and legal shifts in understandings of race while considering how these meanings shaped views of New Negro womanhood.

To a Brown Girl

This chapter explores a selection of writings of thirteen poets who all published in important middle-class literary journals of the Harlem Renaissance. Their works appeared in the Crisis, Messenger, and Opportunity, as well as in major anthologies of the era. Together, they present compelling collective expression of the frustrations, expectations, and desires of modern African American womanhood. Neither a collective movement nor an explicitly designed political expression, this range of women’s verse nonetheless showcases the contested gender politics of the era. Women’s poetry celebrated and critiqued the role of complexion in general, and brownness in particular, in determinations of women’s beauty, social worth, and sexual respectability.

Beautiful Brown Skin

Chapter 2 studies the rise of consumer advertising with a focus on two products geared toward girls and women. The chapter examines advertisements for dolls and for cosmetics that circulated broadly throughout the 1920s in mass media newspapers and literary magazines. Such analysis finds the rise of a consumer-based discourse on brown beauty that linked displays of brown beauty with the New Negro ideology of “race progress.”