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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 38. Negro Popular Theories - 4. Courting the “Best People Among the Whites” - 5. The Doctrine of Labor Solidarity
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788 An American Dilemma
The trends of change in American society have made this optimistic,
gradualist philosophy increasingly unrealistic even as a short-range
strategy. For one thing, the outlook for Negro progress along economic
lines can no longer be presented as so bright. The Negroes economic
position is deteriorating, while his legal, political, and social position
is improving. In any case, much success cannot be hoped for along the
directions Washington pursued. The whole middle class ideology of
Washington turns out to be a blind alley. The best prospect for an aver-
age graduate of Tuskegee, or of any of the other schools like it, is to
become a teacher, not a ^^doer,” in business, crafts or agriculture.
The common Negroes, who cannot aspire to exploit the petty monopolies
behind the segregation wall, as teachers, preachers, professionals or busi-
nessmen, have to compete for unskilled jobs and for the opportunity to
advance to semi-skilled and skilled jobs in industry. Unemployment, mean-
while, has taken on proportions in America greater than ever before in
history, which is serious for an unpopular labor group like the Negroes.
The power over employment Is increasingly held not by employers, but by
labor unions. Many cities where Negroes live in tens of thousands or hun-
dreds of thousands are now ^^uriion towns.”
The functions of the philanthropic organizations—to which Booker T.
Washington and his many successors pleaded and from which they so often
got a helping hand—are in the process of being taken over by the states
and the federal government. The federal government, particularly, is
becoming a decisive factor as far as Negro interests as workers or unem-
ployed workers are concerned. Even Negro education is becoming depend-
ent upon the federal government. And the government is becoming less
dependent upon the white upper classes. It depends upon the general elec-
torate and, in labor issues, increasingly upon organized labor.
This new configuration was hardly visible before the First World War
and is to a great extent the result of the Great Depression during the
’thirties and of the New Deal.
5. The Doctrine of Labor Solidarity
The wave of socialistic thought after the First World War, to which we
have referred in Chapter 35, brought to the fore the demand for labor
solidarity across the caste line.® But the American labor movement passed
through a period of infirmity during the ’twenties and it was not until the
New Deal that labor solidarity became a realistic basis for Negro policy.
The younger generation of Negro intellectuals, with few exceptions,
supported by a gradually growing number of Negro trade unionists, have
since 1930 preached labor solidarity as the cure-all of Negro ills. White
labor is explained to be the Negroes’ ‘‘natural” ally; the old alignment
with the white upper class was a “bourgeois illusion.”® Whether or not
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