TRYING TO UNDERSTAND HISTORY'S 'BLACK JUDAS'

Not long after leaving his teaching job in the Southeast history department 18 years ago, Dr. John David Smith began trying to figure out why a man so hated his origins that Booker T. Washington called him "a man without a race."

The resulting book, "Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro'," has been nominated for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.

Wednesday night at Crisp Auditorium on the Southeast campus, Smith discussed the subject of his book in a lecture titled "How I Became a Doubting Thomas' and Came to Know Black Judas." The talk was the first Veryl L. Riddle Distinguished History Lecture.

A Southeast alumnus who is now a prominent attorney in St. Louis, Riddle was among the 50 people who attended.

Thomas was a Civil War veteran and preacher who early in the 20th century wrote "The American Negro," a book that vilified blacks in general and black women in particular as "advanced agents of intemperance and vice," Smith said.

His attempt to do something about "the Negro problem," the book was well-reviewed in many newspapers and especially well-received in the Jim-Crow South.

Black intellectuals tried to ignore the book, not wanting to give Thomas more notoriety.

Thomas himself was a mulatto, a status he attempted to distinguish. "It was a strategy of raising the status of mulattos by lowering the status of Negroes," Smith said.

Smith pursued many psychological and physical explanations for Thomas's beliefs, including pain from the battlefield amputation of his right arm during the Civil War.

But, Smith said, "There is every reason to believe he wrote the book from his heart."

Thomas had internalized the dominant culture's racial definitions, Smith said. "He was a man at war with himself."

In the end, Smith concluded that Thomas used his attitudes toward blacks to rationalize his own character flaws. He was caught stealing from work a number of times.

"It was his defense against characteristics he was afraid to recognize in himself,"he said.

"... It was his character, not his color, that led to Will Thomas' demise."

As Dr. Frank Nickell, director of the Center for Regional History, pointed out in his introduction, Smith has been busy since he left the university. He has written 15 books and has published 50 scholarly articles.

He is the Graduate Alumni Distinguished Professor of History at North Carolina State University.