Noble Negroes

On the dangers of allowing historical figures to become symbols and sedatives

Lifting the Veil of Ignorance, a statue of Booker T. Washington on the campus of Tuskegee University

I wonder if there is any space in our understanding of American history for actual black people rather than Noble Negroes. 

Noble Negroes are carbon copies of real people who have had their imperfections, which is to say their humanity, sanded away like bothersome splinters so that they can smoothly glide across the mind of any American without causing much of a fuss. Martin Luther King, Jr. is of course the most famous example, but pretty much any black figure who makes their way into a history book has undergone this transformation. They live on through a curated set of words and actions plucked from their original context to serve a new political cause. 

Noble Negroes lack agency and self-determination. They are either heroically serving as the “conscience of America” on the orders of God and/or the Declaration of Independence, or they are helpless buoys being swept away by the current of racism–sometimes insidiously systemic, sometimes fantastically violent. Their fate is to suffer and be all the more noble for it. That was always my disconnect from the oddly sterile Civil Rights Movement history beamed into my brain in my hometown of Montgomery, Alabama–all the suffering and sacrifice sapped of any of the courage and camaraderie and inner conflict it must have engendered. 

Noble Negroes were invented by white people, who long ago spun tales of simple happy field slaves and obedient house niggers. Later, black people adopted the Noble Negro archetype out of necessity as they walked an uncharted path toward equality in a darkening political landscape. Booker T. Washington was the Noblest of them all, predicting that white people would respect hard work and efforts at personal financial betterment. “Students of the race problem are beginning to see that business and industry constitute what we may call the strategic points in its solution,” he wrote in his 1907 book The Negro in Business. “From them we shall gradually advance to all the rights and privileges which any class of citizens enjoy.” W.E.B. Du Bois, Washington’s ideological rival, also invoked the Noble Negro, when he preached utter black devotion to the war effort during World War I. “Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.”  

There is no more noble goal in the American imagination than getting rich, and no more noble sacrifice than dying for your country–for an idea bigger than us all. But where these men faltered was in judging white America by its stated ideals rather than its actions. Washington died still committed to the Noble Negroes bit, while Du Bois found the charade untenable and eventually renounced capitalism, American imperialism and his own U.S. citizenship. Jim Crow became more entrenched while both men were at the peak of their influence. 

Noble Negroes become easier to weaponize against black people the more ennobled they become. Martin Luther King, Jr. used non-violence as an organizing strategy. He peacefully disrupted white comfort, provoking a violent backlash that exposed the hypocrisy at the heart of American democracy during the dawn of mass media and the Cold War. But MLK the Noble Negro is invoked by lawmawkers to shut black people up as they pass laws limiting what students can learn about the man himself and the dark history that preceded him. 

Following desegregation, Noble Negroes again became a tool of the ruling class. They were smiling, silent and nameless, in urban renewal brochures and Coca-Cola advertisements. They were becoming the First in every occupation, creative endeavor, and sport, building a diversity pool a mile wide and an inch deep. While these individual people went about their lives, their Noble Negro doppelgangers became a series of factoids that could be readily summoned as a counterargument to claims that racism still existed–and black people allowed themselves to become too invested in the symbolism of their success. 

The Noble Negro and the actual black person they mimic are not the same, but they can become deeply intertwined. People with power and money will try to convince black people to become Noble Negroes in order to accrue more money and power for themselves, or for their bosses, or for their political party of choice. It may not even be conscious, but in this era of memes and virality, it can quickly become pervasive. In January 2021, after the Congressional runoffs in Georgia secured control of the Senate for the Democratic Party, liberals cast former state gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams as a superhero and patron saint because of her get-out-the-vote efforts. Abrams herself pushed back on the characterization and the “trust black women” meme. “Black women have been instrumental,” she said, “but I chafe at this idea that we then objectify one group as both savior and as responsible party.”

The Black Lives Matter movement seemed to signal a break from the Noble Negro trope. There was no leader to deify and the victims of police killings that sent people surging into the streets came from a variety of backgrounds and circumstances. The problem was the system, it soon became clear, not the individual encounters. But ironically, it was the outpouring of passion and protest following the murder of George Floyd that created an opening for the Noble Negro to return. The stewing unrest of the previous decade finally found a focal point to absorb all the grief, anger, and demands for change.

This seemed powerful in the moment, but where are we now? “After George Floyd” is often used as shorthand for a dreamlike summer where anything seemed possible. His murder is already being historicized by politicians–Happy George Floyd Remembrance Day–which is another way of saying it is now safely in the past. Last year Nancy Pelosi thanked George Floyd for “sacrificing his life for justice,” which we all know is not what happened at all, but is an accurate rending of how corporate marketing, hashtag activism and actual boots-on-the-ground organizing have all become mixed up in a stew we call “justice.” George Floyd the man is dead, but the Noble Negro lives on. 

We live in an age of addiction to symbolism, representation, and grand heroic narratives as the levers of power become more complex, bureaucratic and fundamentally ungovernable. In that context a Noble Negro is a dangerous sedative. We need our wits about us. I now realize I began this journey in Tulsa intending to tell a story about Noble Negroes. It wasn’t a conscious decision—in fact, one reason Greenwood’s story interested me was because it took place in between our twin anchor points for understanding black history, the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. But in reality, I wanted to tell a story about unbridled and unprecedented black success and solidarity. I was craving a story even more noble than the ones handed down to me as a child of Montgomery. Black people who had defied the odds by creating a utopia, both wealthy and equitable, just 50 years removed from enslavement. It’s personally inspiring and it sells–isn’t that a wonderful coincidence? 

The facts were stacked against this vision almost from the beginning. I quickly learned most black people in Greenwood did not get to enjoy the wealth of “Black Wall Street.” I learned that the leaders of the community did not all get along, especially when it came to who was at fault for the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921. I learned about the complicated relationships successful black people had with the white power structure and the fact that every person had their own line between looking out for their community and looking out for themselves. Why, none of this seemed very noble at all. But it certainly seemed human, and intuitively it aligned with the way I know communities I’ve been part of actually function.

That’s a good thing. As I dug more, I saw conflicts and contradictions that reminded me of my own time–even of my own family. And I pushed through the nagging self-doubt that this wouldn’t be what people wanted to read because I recognized, eventually, that it was something I wanted to see more of myself. People working through real problems, with all the messiness and personal introspection that requires. I’m tired of Noble Negroes. I want to know how those that came before me actually lived.

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This has been a dispatch of Run It Back, my regular newsletter about neglected black history. For the last few years I have been working on a book about Tulsa’s Greenwood District (a.k.a. Black Wall Street) for Random House. It’s almost done, and I’m excited to share it with you. The newsletter is free. The book drops next year. See more updates on the Run It Back Instagram page.