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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 39. Negro Improvement and Protest Organizations - 6. The N.A.A.C.P. Branches
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824 An American Dilemma
task is to supply the material and the money; the folks up North have got to
stick their necks out for us.”^®
(2) Now and then, ordinarily not for a period of many years, the local association
flares up to importance in the community on account of a particularly self-
sacrificing and energetic leader or group of leaders. Some actions are taken: In
the North, these may be anything within the scope of the organization’s aims.
In the South they are usually restricted to the following things: a drive to get
Negroes to register and vote; the organization of Negro voters to defeat a bond
issue when Negro interests are flagrantly neglected; a representation to the
authorities for more adequate schools or hospital facilities, for improved housing
conditions, parks, and playgrounds, for the hiring of Negro policemen or fire-
men to serve in Negro districts, for the equalization of salaries of Negro
teachers, against occasional police brutality; the instigation of a law suit to save
a victim from the injustice of the region. No Southern branch could ever have
the resources—or the boldness—to raise more than one or two such issues at a
time. By its activity it receives publicity, and a membership drive will tempo-
rarily raise the enrollment considerably.
(3) After some time the activity falls again, cither because the leaders move away
or get disillusioned, or because of developing factionalism and internal strife and
jealousy. Sometimes the cause is that influential white people in the community
scare the leaders, or at least some of them, by telling them that they have to
slow down. In either case the branch returns to its normal condition of relative
ineffectiveness with maintenance and watchfulness. In extreme cases the branch
can be totally destroyed.
In many Southern communities conservative or dependent upper and
middle class Negroes shared the common white opinion in the region that
the N.A.A.C.P. is a ‘‘foreign” or “radical” organization, that its policy is
“tactless” and “tends to stir up undue hostility between the races.” They
stayed away from it entirely or made a compromise by paying dues but
never attending meetings and by generally advising the organization to
abstain from taking any action. I often heard the complaint that teachers
are timid about identifying themselves with the Association for fear of
jeopardizing their jobs, and that preachers are reluctant to join since their
churches are often mortgaged by white people. In other communities,
teachers and preachers were important in the local associations, but they
did not usually urge action. Most other upper class Negroes also are
dependent on the whites and have to proceed carefully. One prominent
Negro leader in a city in the Deep South, which has a bad history of
intimidation of Negroes, commented to us upon a recent unsuccessful effort
to get a branch started again:
They went about it wrong. The best way to get an organization like that started
here is to go talk to the white man first."*®
This attitude should not be criticized in levity but must be understood
against the background of the Southern caste situation.
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