William Hannibal Thomas

William Hannibal Thomas (4 May 1843 – 15 November 1935) was an American teacher, journalist, judge, writer and legislator. He battled racism throughout his life. In 1861, he was rejected entry from the Union's Army until 1863 when he served, and was wounded by gunshot, leading to the amputation of his right arm. He published "Land and Education," in 1890, promoting avenues for Black people to obtain land and largely criticizing white people for troubles brought onto Black people. He garnered heavy attention from the Black community when he published his most famous work, The American Negro, which took a large conceptual leap from his earlier work, shifting failures of the Black community onto themselves.

Biography

Early life William Hannibal Thomas was born in Pickaway County, Ohio. His family had been formerly enslaved, although Thomas insisted that "most of his ancestors were white." Fearing for the stability of the young university, members of the board of trustees offered to pay Thomas' tuition if he were to transfer to Oberlin. Thomas refused to leave Otterbein, even with the threat of being expelled. "That there was substantial ground for uneasiness on the part of the college authorities is fully borne out by the fact that a number of students from Virginia and elsewhere left the school for good the following week. With their departure, however, the excitement subsided as quickly as it had arisen, and I met with no further trouble. Thereafter the students treated me in a manly fashion; each of the literary societies offered membership to me... A significant feature of this experience was the attitude of the young women students toward me, who, with rare exceptions, were uniformly courteous in intercourse; in fact, it was the outspoken words and courageous acts of several of these young ladies, especially one from West Virginia, that effectually held in check the mob spirit of the male students." After the war, he attended Western Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania.

The Newberry Observer said that he lived in Newberry County, South Carolina. "Thomas, William Hannibal colored, was a one armed Trial Justice who held hearings in Newberry during the days of radicalism. He had an office upstairs at the western end of Law Range. He was a smart man, a mulatto of good education, a veteran of the Union army. In 1877 a warrant was issue against him and he skipped town. He now lived in Ohio and had written a book about the American Negro. It was very derogatory. Newberry Observer 3/21/1901"

Career Thomas wrote correspondence for the A.M.E. Church's national newspaper The Christian Recorder from 1865 to 1870 and published 28 articles during that time. He provided his opinions on black life and issues including religion and politics.

Thomas founded his own journal, The Negro. He also wrote The American Negro (1901), a bombastic work published by the Macmillan publishing company. He wrote that it was not skin color but the black population's traits of character and behavior that were the cause of prejudice. "The negro", he wrote, was "an intrinsically inferior type of humanity." He declared that the black individual in America was slowly and steadily deteriorating, and was "immersed in poverty, steeped in ignorance, stifled with immorality, inherently lazy, and a born pilferer." His writings were used by white racists to support their own ideas of "white superiority and black inferiority."

Several black intellectuals such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles W. Chesnutt, attacked the author and sought to suppress his book.

Critics

Booker T. Washington In response to Thomas's book, The American Negro, Booker T. Washington criticized Thomas in his characterization of Black people and the evidence he provided. Washington started with the assertion that Thomas identifies himself as part of the negro but writes as if he were not apart. Washington rebuts Thomas's claim that Black people have been largely unsuccessful when it came to land ownership with statistics from Virginia and Georgia which showed rise in land ownership from Black people, and that Thomas would have the race rely too heavily on the government to distribute land at the jeopardy of the Black individual's independence. According to Washington, "The author of this book condemns practically every method that has been used for lifting up the negro; everything is wrong except that which he advocates, but which he himself, it seems, has failed to put into practice anywhere in the South. He advocates industrial education all through his book, yet condemns it as it now exists in many negro schools at the South." Washington continued to point out what he believed to be contradictions in Thomas's argument, such as the claim that the negro code did not allow for games involving chance yet later in the argument made claims that a severe character flaw of Black people was their indulgence of gambling. Du Bois claimed that the pressures and stresses of Black life had an effect on Thomas, one that, "tends to develop the criminal or the hypocrite, the cynic or the radical." The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become: A Critical and Practical Discussion. (1901) The American Negro is a book published in 1901 which discusses Thomas' views of Black people and what ought to be done by Black people to uplift them. Among other things, Thomas recommends assimilating as much as possible with white society. He believes that this will help Black people profit in an economic sense as well as a spiritual one. Thomas encourages a Christianity which resembles white worship and discourages worship practices typical of Black communities. The American Negro contains white supremacist messaging and a general distaste for the Black community, especially that of the south, which caused backlash from Thomas' contemporaries.