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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 39. Negro Improvement and Protest Organizations - 11. The Commission on Interracial Cooperation
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Chapter 39. Improvement and Protest Organizations 843
come of white people^s activity. The Commission can employ Negro field
workers, but it cannot, without endangering its good-will, have a single
Negro employee working in its office.®® The N.A.A.C.P. tries, at least, to
get mass support and the Urban League works, of course, mostly with poor
Negroes. The Interracial Commission, on the contrary, has had to direct
its main effort on “the best elements of the two races.” The two other
organizations are, in a measure, opportunistic, as must be all minority
organizations for concerted action. The Interracial Commission has to go
much further in compromise in its practical work. These differences are all
explained by differences in the tasks approached and the political conditions
under which the organizations are working. No one who has read earlier
parts of this inquiry will lightheartedly turn them into criticism against the
Southern interracial movement.
Like Southern liberalism itself,® of which the interaclal movement is an
operative part, the attempt to bring representatives of the two groups
together in constructive efforts to Improve race relations in the South has a
long history. Thomas Nelson Page wrote in 1904:
A possible step in reaching the solution of the question might be for a reasonably
limited number of representative Southern men to meet in conference a reasonable
number of those colored men of the South who are more familiar with actual condi-
tions there, and thus arc representative of the most enlightened and experienced
portion of that race. These, in a spirit of kindness and of justice, might confer
together and try to find some common ground on which both shall stand, and formu-
late some common measures as to which both sides shall agree and which both shall
advocate.®®
Booker T. Washington and his white supporters In the South had the same
vision. It is related that after the Atlanta riot in 1906, Washington boarded
the first train for the city and interested the leading white people in con-
ferring with a limited number of prominent Negroes in the local com-
munity.®^ Ray Stannard Baker said that “this was the first important occa-
sion in the South upon which an attempt was made to get the two races
together for any serious consideration of their differences.”®® There had,
however, previously been some confei^ences on Southern education spon-
sored by Northern philanthropists. Too, many churches and other religious
institutions had earlier sponsored interracial work, and they are still active
in it.
Nevertheless, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation represented a
new and courageous start. It was organized in 1919 as an effort to meet the
great uncertainty and strain in the relations between whites and Negroes
after the First World War.®® The leading spirit of the movement and, later,
the director of the work was W. W. Alexander. The purpose of the new
organization was:
* See Chapter ax, Section 5.
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