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Chapter 1 examines the Wheeler family in the decades after emancipation and highlights their educational accomplishments, which put them on a path toward middle-class respectability in the early part of the twentieth century. It underscores how their middle-class status and economic independence provided the Wheeler children with more of a level playing field when compared to the black masses, or as much as possible given the limitations of the Jim Crow South. Moreover, it argues that the ideological underpinnings of the industrial “New South” at the end of the nineteenth century offered black business leaders a similar vision of racial uplift through economic independence as a way to reclaim full citizenship. This first chapter sets the stage for understanding the close proximity Wheeler had to black business from an early age—the result of his father becoming an executive with NC Mutual—and why he chose a career in banking.

In contrast to white soldiers, who were largely able to take the concepts of manhood and citizenship for granted, soldiers in the United States Colored Troops (USCT) struggled to prove to society not only that they were men but also that they were worthy of the rights of citizenship. During the early postwar years, veterans of the USCT used their war service to great rhetorical advantage to access economic and political power. With the end of southern Reconstruction, this power gradually eroded; even as white veteran became more vocal about their service in the war, black voices had begun to fade. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, USCT veterans had lost enough of their social prestige that even black civilians such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper sought for new non-martial role models to aid in the cause of racial uplift.

This chapter argues that self-consciously respectable middle-class eaters aspired to dining practices that emphasized modernity, elegance, and food selections that did not bear the historical taint of slave rations. It situates the maneuverings of members of this group within the wider context of other Progressive Era attempts at food reform, which were often coordinated by self-proclaimed “domestic scientists” intent on practicing culinary social engineering. Uplift-oriented black eaters drew inspiration from their white counterparts but inevitably had an ambivalent relationship with white activists who were steeped in racism, conscious and otherwise, and who promoted, among other things, a rigorous training program for domestic servants, an occupational role that few post-emancipation African Americans were willing to celebrate.

Although Oscar Micheaux’s novel The Homesteader is clearly a western, it is also specifically an African American western, a revised version of the genre that is guided and informed by Micheaux’s belief in the goal of racial uplift. However, the promises of freedom, conquest, and transformed masculinity offered by the South Dakota frontier and the western genre seem available to the black man only through erasure—only if he assimilates thoroughly and abandons any sense of responsibility to others of his race. Micheaux’s protagonist Baptiste is caught between the conflicting goals of uplift and assimilation. Micheaux also uses the book’s primary settings (Chicago and South Dakota) to adapt the central structuring opposition of the western—the essential difference between the civilized East and the wild West—to articulate Baptiste’s sense of double-consciousness, his conflicting desires both to maintain and to erase his racial identity

This chapter examines Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s 2008 documentary film Trouble the Water. The filmmakers use unique documentary techniques that incorporate narrators’ engagement with the processes of their story’s publication. The film includes survivor Kim Roberts’ own footage, shot during Katrina on her handheld camera. Kim’s role as documentarian is foregrounded, and in some striking scenes she expresses her awareness about the value of her story and its likelihood of circulating among particular kinds of audiences. The filmmakers successfully integrate survivors’ own critiques of the discourses that typically represent them, and through this and other methods, create what Dominick LaCapra calls “empathic unsettlement.” However, the film’s optimistic conclusion evokes a dominant narrative of racial uplift, with a neoliberal twist that undermines the powerful work the film is otherwise performing.

This chapter examines W.E.B. Du Bois’s food politics by closely scrutinizing the health-related advice he gave to his daughter, Yolande Du Bois. This chapter demonstrates that Du Bois and many other middle-class race leaders, self-anointed or otherwise, took great pains to control their children’s diets and to impart the significance of making thoughtful food choices. Du Bois considered black bodies, particularly those of the elite members of the black community, as exhibits of black equality and saw the task of preserving the black body as one not only of enormous individual concern but of significance to the advancement of the entire race.

This introduction highlights how the current scholarly focus on radical women's activism often overlooks the important bridge-building activism of black moderate and middle class women such as those in the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). These black clubwomen were able to move between mainstream political and business leaders and marginalized activists who often demanded radical solutions to racism and poverty. Black middle class NCNW women not only engaged in community-focused racial uplift, but they also utilized a national network of professional and elite women to bring resources to those who could not attain them on their own. At times, the NCNW was hindered by its focus on respectability, which sometimes limited NCNW's criticism of the United States in order to build and maintain power in mainstream America.