March 31, 2000

How the 'Black Judas' Can Help to Reveal African-American History

By JOHN DAVID SMITH

I have spent the past 15 years on a biography of one of the most unsavory characters in American history. In 1901, with the publication of his The American Negro, William Hannibal Thomas (1843-1935) catapulted from relative obscurity to the center of the nation's discourse on race. In the crudest terms, he denounced African-Americans as physiologically, intellectually, morally, and culturally inferior to white people. Black, not white, people were the cause of the

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