The “science” of race anxiety: a history

All who saw the torso had a different theory about its race — based both on the hue and the “rounded shape” of the shoulders. A number of spectators believed the victim to be Chinese: “The back showed that the man had very high shoulders. There is a natural hollow at the base of the neck, between the shoulders, as large as a man’s hand and the humped shoulders make the cavity look deeper. The back looked more like the anatomy of a Chinaman than that of any other race.” Others argued that it had to be the torso of an Italian or a Portuguese. On Friday, fifty-three-year old Evan J. Groom, the coroner’s physician, examined the trunk, which lay in a “rough box at Rue’s undertaking establishment,” for clues about the victim’s race. Not only did he conclude that the torso was evidence of a homicide but he also asserted that it belonged to “a negro” — someone between the ages of twenty-five and thirty who weighed 125 to 130 pounds, with “one-fourth white blood.” Based on “a close examination of the skin,” he claimed that it contained evidence of “pigments that are found only in the skin of the African.” Groom’s racial metrics gestured toward the larger social issues surrounding the case and the era.

Anxieties about race and racial social hierarchy profoundly shaped the post-Reconstruction period.

Whites feared the racial transgressions that the abolition of slavery and newly conferred black citizenship might encourage. Whereas slavery and indentured servitude had kept blacks geographically confined and under the control of local whites, the Thirteenth Amendment, and subsequent amendments guaranteeing blacks citizenship and access to due process of law, diminished white oversight. This legislation gave all blacks freedom and an unprecedented measure of spatial mobility, but certain light-skinned blacks could also potentially pass as white among the general population. Or so many feared. Moreover, increasing numbers of European immigrants also raised questions about whiteness; Irish, Italians, and Poles all represented ethnic others that proved almost equally as troubling as blacks to native-born whites. Quantifying whiteness, and further cementing its purported superiority, then, renewed scientific interest in discerning the biological origins of race.

Skin pigmentation figured centrally in those discourses, and Dr. Groom’s examination of the torso reflects his own foray into race science. To be sure, speculation about the origins of blackness had long run the gamut — everything from blackness being contained in the blood to being a product of the liver. But all theories held to one guiding principle: the existence of unequivocal racial distinction. Few have expressed it more precisely than Thomas Jefferson in his 1783 treatise, Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson asserted, “Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membranes between the skin and the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the color of the blood, the color of the bile or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature.” However, even as proponents advanced this notion, the presence of white blacks fundamentally undermined it. From those blacks who suffered from skin diseases such as vitiligo and albinism to African Americans whose mixed blood allowed them to pass for white, their existence troubled notions of fixed racial differences.

Yet blacks with vitiligo or albinism tended to be easily dismissed by mainstream whites. Even with white skin, their features and hair texture typically rendered them quickly identifiable as “Negro.” Moreover, many of them ended up in vaudeville shows, becoming spectacles that could be ridiculed and thereby rendered less intimidating. However, “miscegenated” blacks proved infinitely more troubling. Mixed people embodied taboo racial and sexual transgressions that represented unnerving challenges to the purity of whiteness. That blacks and whites could successfully breed at all countered racist propaganda that depicted blacks as a less evolved species. The term “mulatto” rooted in the Spanish word for mule (the sterile progeny of a horse and a donkey), reinforces those racist ideas and helped spawn scientific discourses that marked mulattoes as particularly degenerate. The prospect of race mixing both sparked and renewed provisions against intermarriage in states such as Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, and Arizona during the Civil War, while states like Georgia and Maryland updated preexisting laws in 1866 and 1867, respectively. States such as Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, and North Carolina enacted laws in the postwar years. The spate of laws underscored growing fears about miscegenated blacks.

Blacks who could pass also troubled whites because their presence stirred fears that the reverse might also be possible. If blacks could essentially be white, might it not be possible for whites to become black? An 1880 news article claimed to have proof of just such a horror. Titled “A Black White: A Beautiful Baby Made to Look like a Negro,” the Philadelphia Times piece suggested that an otherwise healthy white baby’s fine brown hair “grew stiff and jet black.” It further charged that his “eyes grew darker, so that the line between the pupils and the iris could not be distinguished.” In spite of medical treatment the boy’s condition worsened until “he became as black as a full blooded negro.” Depicting blackness as a potentially contagious disease revealed the height of white social paranoia as well as the role that science and medical research could play in stoking those fears. At the same time, racial science had the potential to become a more effective regulatory institution than enslavement because it could assert and, ideally, prove biological differences between the races. This scholarship could further attest to the superiority of whiteness under the guise of scientific neutrality. It had the potential to provide much-desired clarity in a moment of otherwise-fuzzy notions of race and ethnicity.

Given his approach to determining the victim’s race, Dr. Groom apparently subscribed to the belief that the origins of skin color difference could be found in the “epithelial cells.” This would have been one of the three prominent schools of thought; the others theorized that the origins lay in connective tissues or that it stemmed from both connective tissues and the epidermis. Moreover, his confident declaration about the race of the torso seemed geared toward reassuring the public that racial differences could be discerned and that science was capable of doing so. In service of that goal, he had conducted microscopic studies of the torso’s flesh. Groom’s observation of black “pigment granules” most likely represents a combination of the contemporary scientific discourse and his firsthand observations of the skin of black cadavers in medical school. Black corpses were often used for medical and scientific research, since cutting up these bodies was less jarring to the public than the wholesale mutilation of white corpses; many still believed that anatomical science fundamentally defiled the dead. Early autopsy manuals would have aided Groom as well, since their descriptions of the corpses’ pallor likely helped him distinguish between early decay and the actual hue of the cadaver’s skin. Yet despite the potential benefits that such knowledge could offer, an uneasy relationship existed between medical science and policing. Rather than trusting physicians and anatomists, investigators tended to rely on what they could see and, in this case, what they saw confused them. Although Dr. Groom appeared certain about his findings, Coroner Silbert, the district attorney, and the police chief still had their doubts. As part of their investigation, Silbert recruited local blacks to help in the identification process. Specifically, he brought two black women into the undertaker’s chamber and compared their skin to that of the torso. The investigators also asked the women about whether they thought the corpse belonged to a black man. One of the women explained, “White folks look so much like colored folks nowadays, hard to tell the difference.” Indeed, these were confusing times.

As Silbert prepared for the coroner’s inquest on Saturday, which would be held in Silas Hibbs’s home, his chances of solving the case seemed nearly impossible. Although he had recovered significant clues, the evidence proved little. Even Dr. Groom’s finding that the man did not die a natural death, while confirming what many suspected, ultimately did not bring investigators any closer to figuring out the victim’s identity, much less the identity of his assailant. In light of these grim prospects, Samuel Rue of Mill Street, a carpenter and the local undertaker, buried the remains in Potter’s Field on Saturday morning. Interment was a rather simple affair: “A plain, pine wood box, a deep hole, three feet by two, and all was over.” It was a quiet burial for what would quickly become one of Philadelphia’s most sensational murder victims.