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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 37. Compromise Leadership - 1. The Daily Compromise
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CHAPTER 37
COMPROMISE LEADERSHIP
I. The Daily Compromise
In discussing the accommodating Negro leader in Chapter 34, we
assumed for the purposes of abstract analysis that the protest motive was
absent. This assumption, however, has some real truth in it, as we shall
show In the present chapter. The accommodation motive has predominant
importance in the daily life of American Negroes. But it is true that the
protest motive is ever present. In some degree it has reached practically
all American Negroes. To many individuals it is a major interest. And the
Negro protest is bound to rise even higher. But the influence of the protest
motive is limited mainly to the propagation of certain ideas about how
things should be. In any case but few Negro individuals are in a position
to do anything practical about it. Everyone, however, has to get on with
his own life from day to day, now and here. Even when the individual
plans for future employment, for business, or for schooling, he has to
reckon with the world as it is. He has to accommodate.
The Negro protest is thus mainly suppressed and turned inward. But it
has effects upon Negro personality, upon the relations between the classes
in the Negro community, and also upon caste relations. The whites, on
their side, are accustomed to a certain amount of Negro unreliability,
dishonesty, laziness, secretiveness, and even insolence and impudence.
They shut their eyes to its explanation in Negro dissatisfaction and the
other results of the caste system. The average white man, in the South,
actually gets enjoyment out of observing and joking about Negro ineffi-
ciency and slyness. He knows that he gets the services of Negroes for a
cheap price, and so he can afford to joke about this. But, apparently, he
also wants to convince himself that the Negroes are well satisfied.^ Now
and then, however, he reveals to the observer, more or less incidentally,
that he knows about and understands the Negro protest.
The Southerner keeps watching all the time for germs of unrest and
dissatisfaction in the Negro community. He preserves the machinery of
caste controls in a state of perpetual preparedness and applies it occasionally
as an exercise or a demonstration. In this system, the Negroes have to
accommodate individually and as a group. This is the situation in the South.
As we shall observe later, the Northern situation is considerably different.
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