In January 1911, W. E. B. DuBois described his recent visit to Oberlin, Ohio, in the pages of the NAACP magazine, The Crisis. In an article that assessed racism in several northern locales, DuBois styled Oberlin, a place with as progressive a history as any American town, “the mystic city of the future” where thousands of black and white children might study, play, and walk together “on sacred ground, on ground long since consecrated to racial equality.” Jim Crow threatened that idealistic vision, and DuBois tasked the Oberlin College and community with a duty, born in the antebellum antislavery struggle, to keep up the “mighty battle for righteousness.” Oberlin fell short of that duty in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the erosion of this once-determined bastion against racial injustice into another American town divided by a color line is the subject of Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser's Elusive Utopia: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Oberlin, Ohio.
Kornblith and Lasser, both emeritus professors of history at Oberlin College and long-time Oberlin residents, examine the ways that the inhabitants of Oberlin, white and black, related to and acted upon their changing understandings of racial justice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first four chapters follow Oberlin's early history, from the community's founding in 1833, to its organically connected college's decision to admit men and women of all races two years later, through its development into a reformist stronghold, and into the vanguard of the antislavery movement in the decades before the Civil War. This is one of the most important stories of the antebellum era, and although Kornblith and Lasser are not the first to tell it, their account drills down deeper into the local story than most other scholars, and their quantitative analysis of census materials and tax lists add a valuable layer to the narrative of Oberlin's formative years.
The most important contribution of this work, and the bulk of the authors’ main focus, is in telling the story of the declension of postwar Oberlin from their early dedication to radial racial egalitarianism, from the founders’ utopian vision to the community's drift into the secular mainstream. The destruction of the slave power in the Civil War, emancipation, and the passage of the Reconstruction amendments to the constitution seemed to confirm Oberlin's egalitarian values, yet as the authors point out, those victories masked patterns of racial inequality that only deepened in the Reconstruction era and beyond.
The immediate postwar campaign for African American suffrage exposed latent divisions in the community and a widening difference (usually along racial lines) in the degrees of optimism that true democracy might obtain in postwar America. Yet the appearance of political equality, ostensibly achieved through the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, soon began to break along racial lines as political priorities differed among members of the community (specifically the urgency accorded to issues of race within the Republican Party). Racism was clearly a problem in post-Reconstruction America, but local whites increasingly viewed it as an irrevocable fact of American life. As it had outside Oberlin's border, a color line eventually crept across the town. The generation of Oberlinians who had earned the community's reputation for radical racial egalitarianism before the Civil War was passing on, or, as was the case with many of Oberlin's African American leaders, departing for well-earned opportunities elsewhere. Economic inequality between whites and blacks deepened. College leaders boasted of their school's movement in line with more “modern” institutions, yet modernity in contemporary American society had little place for African Americans. White Oberlinians did not publicly renounce their town's previous commitment to egalitarianism, nor did they undertake any concerted effort to drive people of color from the community. Rather, by turning a blind eye to the race “question,” the color line spread unchecked. The authors note little naked malice in whites’ neglect of African American interests, but conclude that the impact of their negligence was far from benign.
Even efforts more in line with early Oberlin's perfectionist bearing contributed to the backsliding in race relations around the turn of the century. A fervent temperance movement took hold in the town in the 1880s, and though ostensibly a color-blind reform, the campaign against the distribution and consumption of alcohol further undermined Oberlin's commitment to racial equality. If, as white temperance reformers argued, intemperance was the main cause of poverty, and poverty was a marker of personal inferiority, then Oberlin's black population, who other social and economic factors had already placed on the far side of a widening class divide, was further stigmatized. The authors well-demonstrate how respectability was racialized in Oberlin, further hardening the color line. As Oberlinians met the twentieth century, Jim Crow found a warmer welcome among their number than its African American residents.
Elusive Utopia is a beautifully written, impeccably researched and annotated contribution to the scholarship of the long nineteenth century in the United States. Authors Gary Kornblith and Carol Lasser have offered a robust assessment of the tenacious power of racism in post–Civil War America by charting the descent of Oberlin, Ohio, once perhaps the most progressive town and gown community in the nation and founded for a “peculiar people” to be a beacon of righteousness to the world, to the vulgar and crowded “nadir” of race relations in America a just a few decade later. This book is highly recommended for all who seek to understand the fraught evolution of race relations in late nineteenth-century America, and a reminder to readers today of the necessity of constant vigilance to avoid the pitfalls and missed opportunities of previous generations as we continue to seek genuine racial equality.
