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CHAPTER 43
INSTITUTIONS
I. The Negro Community as a Pathological Form of an
American Community
Until now the Negro community has not been the primary object of our
study. But we have not been able to avoid dealing with the community and
with various, alleged or real, cultural and personality traits of the American
Negro. There are a number of problems, however, such as those of the
Negro family, crime, insanity, and cultural accomplishments, which have
been touched upon only incidentally. We shall now take up these
nonpolitical aspects of the Negro community. The treatment will be
incomplete and condensed, for three reasons. First, these problems are not
focal in our inquiry. Second, many sides of them have already been dealt
with in other parts of the book. Third, several of those problems have
recently been treated extensively in the scientific literature. It would
obviously be impossible to describe and analyze the hundreds of specific
communities in which Negroes live. We must content ourselves instead
with a general account of the basic community institutions and activities,
noting the major contrasts between the white and the Negro pattern of
community organization, depicting the salient historical trends, and indicat-
ing the most striking divergences between the Northern and Southern and
the urban and rural ways of life.
The value premise for this Part is derived from the American Creed.
America was settled largely by persons who, for one reason or another, were
dissatisfied with conditions in their homelands and sought new opportuni-
ties. Until 1921 the nation welcomed immigrants almost unreservedly.
They came from everywhere and brought with them a diversity of institu-
tions and cultural patterns. It was natural that the ^^melting pot,” ^^Ameri-
canization”—or, to use a more technical term, ^^assimilation”—became a
central element in the American Creed. To make a homogeneous nation out
of diverse ethnic groups, the immigrants were to abandon their cultural
^^peculiarities”—or to contribute them to American culture as a whole, as
some would have it—^and to take on the cultural forms of America. There
could be diversity, to be sure, but this diversity was not to have a strictly
ethnic basis j
individuals should be free to be part of any community they
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