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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 34. Accommodating Leadership - 3. In the North and on the National Scene
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Chapter 34. Accommodating Leadership 723
Isolation breeds suspicion among Negroes against the majority group.
And suspicion is, in fact, justified. For isolation bars the growth of feelings
of mutual identification and of solidarity of interests and ideals in both
groups. A white man’s purposes when stepping down to lead Negroes must
be scrutinized carefully before he can be trusted. This is a pragmatic truth
obvious even to the most unsophisticated Negroes, and it has a basis in the
Negro people’s history through centuries. Northern Negroes will thus be
reluctant to listen to white people with a thorough trustfulness and an
entirely open mind. Indeed, they are able to give freer play to their suspi-
cion than Southern Negroes as they are less controlled and dependent. Too,
the growing race pride exerts its influence in this direction. Northern
Negroes, therefore, also seek the intermediation of leaders from their own
g^oup.
On the white side, those politicians, public officials, philanthropists,
educators, union leaders, and all other white persons in the North who have
to maintain contact with and exert influence upon the Negro group must
sense this suspicion. They usually also find the Negroes strange in many
ways. Negroes seldom constitute the main interest in their various pursuits.
They welcome the Negro leader as a great convenience, therefore, as a
means of dealing with the Negroes indirectly.^
The Northern situation, however, is different from the Southern situation
in two closely coordinated respects: (i) that the white majority is not
motivated by an interest solidarity against Negroes, reaching practically
every white individual,® and (2) that the Negro minority is not cramped
by anything like the formidable, all pervasive. Southern system of political,
judicial and social caste controls. One effect of this difference is that the
Northern situation gives greater opportunity for the protest motive to come
out in the open and not only, as in the South, to contribute its queer,
subdued undertones to the pretended harmony of accommodation.*^
A number of circumstances make the Negro look to the North in his
national political interest. National power is centered in the North. In
national politics the South is quite like a minority group itself—^a ^‘prob-
lem” to the nation and to itself—^politically, economically and culturally.
Negroes have the vote in the North. For these reasons the relations between
whites and Negroes in national affairs tend to conform more to Northern
than to Southern local patterns. But Negro leaders are needed. The Negro
people are set apart j
they have distinctive problems 5
and they are hardly
represented at all in the policy-forming and policy-deciding private or
public organs. The federal government and its various agencies, the
political parties, and the philanthropic organizations have difficulty in
reaching Negroes through their normal means of public contact. They must
* See Chapter 2, Section 8.
**
See Chapters 35 and 37.
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