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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 37. Compromise Leadership - 4. The Protest Motive - 5. The Double Role
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772 An American Dilemma
classes, he is a race hero and will be protected by them by means of
pretended ignorance as to his doings and whereabouts.
Whenever a Negro leader can afford—without endangering his own
status or the peace of the Negro community—to speak up against, or
behave slightingly toward, members of the superior caste, this will increase
his prestige.*
5. The Double Role
More generally, the presence of the protest motive in the Negro com-
munity tends to induce the Negro leader to take on two different appear-
ances: one toward the whites and another toward the Negro followership.
Toward the Negroes he will pretend that he has dared to say things and
to take positions much in exaggeration of what actually has happened. The
present author, when comparing notes from interviews in the Negro com-
munity with what the white community leaders have told him about their
‘‘good Negroes,” has frequently observed this discrepancy.*"^
A dual standard of behavior is not unnatural for a Southern Negro. It
is rather to be expected of anybody in the lower layer of the Southern caste
system. But the Negro leaders especially are pressed into such a pattern as
they are more regularly, and in a sense professionally, in contact with
whites and have a more considerable stake in the game.
They play two roles and must wear two fronts. , . . The adjustments and adapta-
tions of the Negro leader are apt to be more pronounced and in bolder relief than
those of the common Negro for the reason that the Negro leader clearly has much
more to lose. He has two worlds to please and to seek his status in.®
There is a limit, though, to what an accommodating Negro leader can
pretend in the Negro community of what he has been bold enough to say
or do. What he says to the Negroes, if it is really startling, will most of the
time be reported by servants and other stool pigeons to the whites, and
might make them suspicious of him.
The Negro community gets a revenge against the whites not only out of
the Negro leaders’ cautious aggressions but also out of the whites^ being
* A Negro school principal in one of the larger cities in the Deep South once took
me around and showed me various aspects of Negro life fn the community. All the time
and even when we were alone he displayed towards me the usual cumbersome caste etiquette
of the region. In the evening he had called together a meeting of some twenty leading
Negro citizens for a conference with me, for which he acted as chairman. He now developed
an entirely new personal relation to me and became bossy, careless, and even impudent,
but under a general cover of exaggerated friendliness and great familiarity. The next
day when we continued our explorations of the condition in the city he had again
returned to his ordinary caste role of unobtrusive and overpolite Southern Negro. I even
sensed a sort of excuse for the previous evening. My tentative explanation was that he
had put on the show of superiority at the meeting to impress his Negro friends, after he
bad carefully surveyed me and, rightly, found that there was no risk involved.
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