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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 37. Compromise Leadership - 6. Negro Leadership Techniques - 7. Moral Consequences
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774 An American Dilemma
skills and for their tactful abstention from raising the Negro protest. The
Negro leaders also know their double role.
The Negro community is thus, on the one hand, filled by the Negro
protest and it demands to be appealed to in terms of Negro solidarity. It
also wants to feel that the protest is getting over to the whites. On the
other hand, the Negro community knows the caste situation, is afraid of
radical leaders and trouble-makers, and wants its go-betweens to be able
to make some real deliveries.
7. Moral Consequences
This situation is pregnant with all sorts of double-dealing, cynicism and
low morals in the Negro community. The leaders are under constant
suspicion from the Negro community that they are dishonest, venal and
self-seeking. One observing Negro citizen expressed a common view when
he told us: ^‘You give a few Negroes a break, hand them a job, and all
problems are solved.” The complaints about ‘‘bad leadership”—“incom-
petent,” “selfish,” “treacherous,” “corrupt”—^were raised in every single
Negro community the present author has visited. These complaints may,
indeed, be said to constitute one of the unifying popular theories in the
Negro world, a point upon which everybody can agree. “There are few
Negro leaders,” Ralph Bunche confirms, “who are not suspect immediately
they attain any eminence. The racial situation has created a vicious circle
in Negro reasoning on leadership, and the Negro leader is caught in it.”^^
The Negro community in the South cannot expect—and does not want
—
its leaders to act out the protest the common Negroes actually feel. There
is, indeed, little reason to believe that the leaders are less militant than the
community seriously wants them to be. But the common Negroes do feel
humiliated and frustrated. And they can afford to take it out on their
leaders by defaming them for their “kowtowing,” “pussy-footing,” and
“Uncle Tomming”; by calling them “handkerchief heads” and “hats in
hand” 5
and particularly by suspecting them for being prepared to barter
away their own honor and the interests of the group for a job or a hand-out.
Negro hates the Negro role in American societyy
and the Negro leader
y
who acts out this role in fublic lifey becomes the symbol of what the Negro
hates.
The Southern Negro leader—not being allowed to state and follow a
clear ideological line but doomed to opportunism, having constantly to
compromise with his pride and dignity, and never being allowed to speak
upon the authority of the strength of an organized group behind him but
appearing as an individual person trusted by the adversary group before
him
—
does not have the sanctions ordinarily operating to preserve the
honor and loyalty ot a. Tepresentative leader. The temptation to sell OUt the
group and to look out for his own petty interest is great. He thus easily
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