David Gilbert is an assistant professor of U.S. history at Mars Hill University, in Asheville, North Carolina. His manuscript, The Product of Our Souls: Ragtime, Race, and The Birth of the Manhattan Musical Marketplace, was published by UNC Press in 2015 and has received the American Library Association Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title.

“Ragging Uplift in the Hotel Marshall: The Politics of Black Respectability and White Reformers in Ragtime Era NYC”

This talk explores African American musicians’ and stage performers’ challenges to both black leaders’ uplift ideology and white reformers’ racist urban policies and policing. As W.E.B. Du Bois and the members of what he named the “talented tenth” sought to undermine white Americans’ stereotypes of blacks as backward, uneducated, and racially-inferior people, they advocated for Victorian-era models of hard-working, moral, and “cultured” citizenship. The vaudeville performers who integrated New York City’s Broadway Ave. between 1900-1911 and lived and worked in Midtown Manhattan’s Hotel Marshall did not reject this strategy as elitist, but they did not fit Du Bois’s ideal due to their class, background, and their ragtime professionalism. They “ragged” uplift and respectability, putting their own spin on black cultural representation in America’s leading commercial marketplaces. As they did so, they caught the eye—and ears—of New York’s social reformers who associated black ragtime song and dance with illicit nightlife and interracial sex.

White Progressive-era politicians and reformers sought to curtail African American cultural spaces like the Hotel Marshall and, especially, the interracial interactions that frequently took place there. The Committee of Fourteen, for example, policied New York’s Black Bohemia and Tenderloin district—the neighborhoods where most African Americans lived and leisured prior to their move to Harlem during and after World War I—and railed against the rise of blacks’ interventions in American popular culture. This paper discusses these events and argues for new ways to understand racial representation and the fluid notions of class in African American communities in the early twentieth century.