A Leopard Doesn’t Want to Change His Spots: African American Views on Amalgamation in the Progressive Era

In 1910 anthropologist Franz Boas proposed ending racial strife by removing recognizable black identities from the American population via racial mixture. Wanting neither to offend a renowned ally nor to risk enflaming white hysteria over the mere specter of “amalgamation,” black Americans largely met Boas’s proposal with silence. Nevertheless, black views can be discerned through their responses to a similar proposal made the same year by a lesser-known anthropologist, John James Holm, as he solicited black endorsements. The ten black essayists within Holm’s book reveal a range of positions on racial mixture. Yet none endorsed Holm’s plan. Their responses suggest that Boas’s proposal and its disregard for legal wedlock would have garnered even less support. The indirect ways in which the black essayists made their views known on a controversial topic suggests a pathway for historians to restore black thought to a history in which they have been misrepresented and overlooked.