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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 847
decrease in lynching, and generally, in the greater enforcement of law in the
South during the last two decades. The Commission was able largely to
nullify the influence of the fascistic Black Shirt movement that grew up
during the 1930’s to eliminate Negroes from all jobs while there was any
unemployment of whites. Few other organizations could have made the
effective appeal to Southern whites which the situation called for. The
Commission’s surveys—for instance, of the tenancy problem—have been
of great importance in the national discussion and for national policy. The
work of the Farm Security Administration,® which for a long period was
headed by W. W. Alexander, the Director of the Commission, is much in
line with the efforts of the Commission and has set in effect many plans
propagated and partly prepared by the Commission. The Commission has
had its important part in the development of a friendlier attitude toward
the Negro on the part of the white press in the South. The local interracial
committees have also gotten much for the Negroes:
. . . scores of Negroes have been extended legal aid in cases in which they were
subjected to persecution, intimidation or exploitation; sewers, street paving, water,
lights, library facilities, rest rooms, and other civic advantages, such as parks, play-
grounds, pools and other recreation facilities, have been obtained for Negro com-
munities; community chests have been induced to include Negro welfare agencies in
their budgets; day nurseries and social centers have been conducted, and the appoint-
ment of colored probation officers has been secured.^®"
The fact that in most of these and other respects the Negro is still dis-
criminated against in the South should not be allowed to conceal the fact
that many small changes here and there have occurred, due to the activity
of the interracial movement.
The Commission has not escaped criticism from conservative Southerners.
The President of the Commission, Howard W. Odum, tells us:
It [the Commission] has been investigated by the Ku Klux and by the Talmadge
regime, and many efforts have been made “to get it.” In recent years I have had very
critical letters from some of the “best” people protesting against the radical view-
point which the Commission has taken within the last few ycars.^^®
But, as we have pointed out earlier in this inquiry, one of the most impor-
tant accomplishments of the Commission—which has a far-reaching cumula-
tive effect
—
is to have rendered interracial work socially resfectable in the
conservative South. Liberal white Southerners, on their part, have usually
backed the Commission. Whites in the North, outside the philanthropists,
seldom know or care much about this work.
Negroes, on the other hand, tend to be critical of the Commission—even
the older and more conservative Negro leaders. Few Negroes in the South
have wholeheartedly praised its work. Several of the Negroes who have
®See Chapter 12, Section 12.
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