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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 34. Accommodating Leadership - 6. Several Qualifications
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Chapter 34. Accommodating Leadership 731
contempt for the Negro masses below them, and disgust—sometimes
mixed with envy—for the accommodating Negro leaders beside them.
Their ‘^adjustment” is to “mind their own business.”
In practically every Southern Negro community, there is this partial
voluntary retreat of the Negro upper class from active leadership. Thus
the common assumption among whites that upper class Negroes in general
are leaders of their people is not quite true. Upper class Negroes pretend
that it is true in order to gain prestige. It is also an expectation on the
part of white community leaders who happen to know about them, observe
their superiority in education, manners, standards, and wealth, and take
their influence among the common Negroes for granted. It must always
be remembered that the whites’ actual knowledge about the Negroes in
their own community nowadays is usually rudimentary. It is not unusual
to find that a certain Negro has succeeded in impressing the local whites
with an exaggerated belief in his actual influence among his own people.
More important than unwillingness or inability on the part of Negro
upper class persons to play the leadership role is a more or less conscious
repugnance on the part of the Negro lower classes against following them.
“Too much” education often meets suspicion among lower class Negroes.
Many Negro preachers, who usually do not suffer from over-education,
have nourished this prejudice as they saw education draw people from
religious faith and, particularly, from respect for themselves. The usual
class envy between upper and lower class individuals in the Negro com-
munity is an ever present element in the situation, and is strengthened
when, as in the case of the accommodating Negro leaders, the Negro
protest against the whites cannot be invoked as a bond of race loyalty.®
The extreme result of this class conflict is that the Negro masses in
the South—as well as large parts of the white masses in the same region
—often become, not only as inactive as is necessary for accepting readily
the leadership imposed upon them from the outside, but, indeed, so
utterly passive that they simply do not care very much for anything except
their animal demands and their personal security. Their economic, social,
and cultural situation, as we have described it in previous chapters, makes
this understandable. It is difficult indeed to reach the amorphous Negro
masses at all, especially in rural districts.
It is often said that the Negro church and the fraternal and burial
lodges are the only media by which those masses can be reached. The
present observer is inclined to consider this statement as exaggerated in
two directions: first, even the church and the lodges do not have a steady
and strong influence on the lowest Negro classes j
second, the Negro
school, the Negro press, and the Negro professions are becoming vehicles
which have considerable influence with the lower strata.
• Sec Chapters 35 and 37.
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