by Jon Meacham
Thus, the Negro question, as Tocqueville called it, comes full circle, back to where it started late in the seventeenth century when Christian and puritan America, supported by a good deal of spurious scholarship, downgraded the Negro from villenage (a state he shared with the entire servant class of that era) to slavery, by arguing the inferiority of the Negro as a human being—a soul to be saved, most certainly, but a being somewhat lower than the white Christian with respect to the angels. This concept endured during Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War and formed the foundation upon which the complex and sometimes contradictory structure of segregation was built.
Negro leaders spent seventy-five years remodeling that structure, trying to make it more livable by removing such horrible reminders of the past as lynchings, denial of the ballot, restrictive covenants in housing, and inequalities of public facilities. Only after the intractable Deep South emasculated every move toward equalization did the Negro leadership class sue for school integration. Even then it was a segmented, room-by-room assault. But these student demonstrators have—in effect—put dynamite at the cornerstone of segregation and lit the fuse.
This revolt, swelling under ground for the past two decades, means the end of the traditional Negro leadership class. Local organization leaders were caught flat-footed by the demonstrations; the parade had moved off without them. In a series of almost frantic moves this spring, they lunged to the front and shouted loud, but they were scarcely more than a cheering section—leaders no more. The students completed their bold maneuver by jabbing the leadership class in its most vulnerable spot: the Southern schoolteachers. Many of these, as the Norfolk Journal and Guide put it, “were ordered to stop the demonstrations or else!” Most Negro school administrators kept silent on the matter; a few of them, largely heads of private colleges, supported the students; while others—notably Dr. H. C. Trenholm of Alabama State College—were forced by white politicians to take action against the students. As a Negro reporter from New York, I talked with scores of Southern Negro leaders and they admitted without exception that the local leadership class was in dire difficulty.
National leadership organizations fared only slightly better. The NAACP rushed its national youth secretary, Herbert Wright, into the area to conduct “strategy and procedure” conferences for the students.*2 Lester Granger, the executive director of the Urban League, issued a statement saying the demonstrations were “therapeutic for those engaged in them and a solemn warning to the nation at large”—this despite the fact that, in Mr. Granger’s words, “the League does not function in the area of public demonstrations.”
The NAACP does not always move with such swiftness when local groups, some of them laced with NAACP members, set off independent attacks on racial abuse. The Montgomery bus boycott is a classic case in point. But the impact of these new student demonstrations was such that the NAACP was forced to support the students or face a revolt by its Southern rank and file. This does not impeach the NAACP’s motives for entering the demonstrations—its motives and work have the greatest merit—but it does illustrate the reversal of the power flow within the Negro community.
“The demonstrations are not something we planned,” NAACP public-relations director Henry Moon told me. “The students moved on their own. We didn’t know what was going on until it happened. However, it should be kept in mind that many of the students involved are NAACP people.”
The NAACP on Top
The NAACP’s frank admission that it had no part in planning a demonstration against segregation that resulted in upwards of a thousand Negroes being jailed—coupled with its prompt defense of the demonstrators—marks the end of the great era of the Negro leadership class: a half-century of fiercely guarded glory, climaxed by the historic school desegregation decision of 1954, during which the NAACP by dint of sheer militancy, brains, and a strong moral cause became the undisputed commander-in-chief of the Negro’s drive for equality. These demonstrations also ended a two-century-long modus vivendi based on the myth of the Negro leader.
The phrase “Negro leadership class” pops up, Minerva-like, in most histories and essays about the Negro. White writers generally take its validity for granted, but Negro writers, of late, when they speak analytically of the Negro leader, do so with contempt.
The myth of a Black Moses, the notion that Negroes had or needed a leader, began to take shape in the early years of the nation when a troubled America viewed the Negro as an amorphous mass undulating in the wilderness of ignorance rather than as individuals, each to be dealt with purely on merit. When the myth took on flesh, the Negro leader had the provincial outlook of the white community that fashioned him: in the pre–Civil War North, Frederick Douglass, leading his people out of slavery; in the South, the plantation preacher.
Had Emancipation meant that the Negro would become just another of the racial strains to be absorbed into the American melting pot, the myth of the Negro leader would have evaporated. But as Abraham Lincoln so clearly stated, this is precisely what Emancipation did not mean. Consequently, the myth not only continued but took on even greater significance.
There were three chief prerequisites for becoming a Negro leader: (1) approbation of the white community, (2) literacy (real or assumed), and (3) some influence over the Negro masses. Each community spawned an array of “professors,” “doctors” (not medical men), “preachers,” “bishops,” “spokesmen” who sat down at the segregated arbitration table and conducted business in the name of the Negro masses.
These leaders received their credentials and power both from the white community and from the Negro masses, who stood humble before their white-appointed leaders. This status was heady stuff for the early-twentieth-century Negro elite, many of whom could remember the snap of the master’s whip, and they began to function as a social class. As a result, three generations of educated Negroes dreamed of an equal but separate America in which white power spoke only to black power and black power spoke only to God, if even to Him.
But the Negro leadership class has produced some practical and positive results: the concept provided America with an easy way of doing business with a people it had wronged and did not understand; it provided a platform for talented Negroes—many of whom were dedicated to the interests of the masses. During the last three decades, however, Negro leadership organizations, based in the North and with a national approach to the Negro’s problem, eclipsed the local leaders. The heads of these organizations assumed the general title of “Leader of Leaders.”
The NAACP rose in power during the decade of the ’forties by winning a series of court victories which broke down restrictive covenants and ordered Southern states to equalize the salaries of Negro and white schoolteachers and the facilities of Negro and white public schools. Its position was further strengthened when the Urban League fell into disfavor, as far as Negroes were concerned, because of its reluctance to give aid to Negro labor unionists. Then, in 1949, two of the Negro members of the League’s board of directors resigned, claiming that white real-estate operators controlled the League.
The NAACP, on the other hand, saw the sign in the sky and was more definite in its support of the Negro labor unionists. As a result, the NAACP also eclipsed A. Philip Randolph and his Pullman porters’ union—the third of the “Big Three” Negro leadership organizations—and at mid-century it stood atop the heap.
But the NAACP’s main ally was the upsurge of freedom that swept the world in the wake of Nazism and in the face of Communism. Far-reaching social change was in the air. It could happen here. Who would bring it? How? The NAACP had the center of the stage; its position was based on solid performance; Negroes—smarting under the charge that they forever fight among themselves—closed ranks around “Twenty West Fortieth Street,” the New York headquarters of the NAACP.
And so a curtain was lowered between the opponents and the advocates of a broader desegregation. It was a sham curtain, to be sure, for there was no unity on either side.
But for the Negro, as has been true so often in the past, the well-reasoned lie worked. Negro writers, clergymen, schoolteachers, lawyers, social workers—all who commanded a public platform—agreed without conspiring that we would not disagree in public with the NAACP. Many of us felt that the NAACP was too committed to legalism; not committed enough to direct action by local people. There was an endless parade in and out of the NAACP’s national office of Negroes who felt that the desegregation fight should take on a broader base. But until the spring of 1958, four years after the school desegregation decision, not a single desegregation-minded Negro engaged in serious open debate with the NAACP. Even then, unfortunately, the debate came in terms of personalities rather than policy.
The decade of the ’fifties was an incredible era for the Negro leadership class, particularly for the NAACP. That the NAACP hung together at all is a monument to its vitality as well as to the effectiveness of its muffling curtain.
First off, by suing for school integration the NAACP immobilized the majority of the Negro leadership class. The entire structure of the Negro community was designed to function in a separate but equal America. Negro newspapers, in addition to being protest organs, were the social Bibles of Negro society. They had their “400” and a list of the year’s best-dressed women. The Negro church was ofttimes more Negro than church. Negro businesses depended upon the concept of a Negro community for survival (as late as 1958 Negro businessmen in Detroit criticized the NAACP for holding its annual convention at a “white” downtown hotel, which meant that local Negro merchants failed to benefit from the gathering). The dilemma of the Negro teacher was even more agonizing. If Negroes really meant business about integration, then it was obvious that the Negro leadership class could remain leaders only by working to put themselves out of business.
The Bitterness Under the Glamor
To this one must add the internal problems of the NAACP itself. In 1948–49, Walter White, then the executive secretary of the NAACP, divorced his Negro wife and married Poppy Cannon, a white woman. This brought on an organizational crisis that might have resulted in ruin if the board of directors had not given Mr. White a year’s leave of absence. Nobody expected Mr. White to return to his post and Roy Wilkins, who had been Mr. White’s loyal assistant for almost twenty years, turned in an excellent performance as acting executive secretary. But the following spring Mr. White did return. Another organizational crisis was averted by making him secretary of external affairs and Mr. Wilkins secretary of internal affairs. Things remained that way until 1955, when Mr. White died. Nor was that the only separatist movement going on within the NAACP. Since 1939 the entity known to the public as the NAACP has actually been two organizations: the NAACP, headed by the late Walter White and now by Roy Wilkins, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, headed by Thurgood Marshall.
The initial reason for the separation was to provide tax relief for contributors to the Legal Defense and Education Fund, which functions solely as a legal redress organization. The NAACP, on the other hand, maintains a lobby in Washington and so its contributors are not entitled to tax exemptions. For fifteen years, however, the two organizations maintained quarters in the same building and shared an interlocking directorate. In 1952 the Legal Defense and Education Fund moved to separate quarters and in 1955 the interlocking directorate was ended. The tax matter aside, the cleavage came about as a result of deep internal troubling, the details of which are still in the domain of “no comment.” In the midst of all this, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt left the NAACP board for reasons that have never been fully disclosed.
The lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi produced yet another crisis for the Negro leadership class. Mrs. Mamie Bradley, Till’s mother, became a cause célèbre and Negro leadership organizations became locked in a bitter struggle over just where Mrs. Bradley would speak and under whose auspices. But even before Mrs. Bradley started her speaking tour there was the famous Chicago wash-pot incident. Till’s body lay in state in a Chicago funeral home: somehow—nobody, including the funeral director, knows just how—a wash pot covered with fine chicken wire was placed at the head of the bier. Thousands of Negroes filed by to see the grim remains, and as they passed they dropped money in the wash pot. How many times the pot was filled and emptied, nobody knows; nobody knows where the money went. I was among the newsmen who went to check the wash-pot story but when we got there the pot, complete with chicken wire and money, had vanished.
After the funeral, Mrs. Bradley embarked on an NAACP-sponsored speaking tour, traveling by air, with secretary. Bitter disputes about money raised during her appearances came from all sections and her tour finally petered out.
Nevertheless, these were glamorous years for successful Negroes; almost all got the title of Negro leader. Their names and faces appeared on ads endorsing soap, cigarettes, whiskeys, and ladies’ personal items. Adam Clayton Powell endured in Congress, always reminding his flock that, some ten years earlier, he was the first Negro to call the late Senator Theodore Bilbo, of Mississippi, a “cesspool”; Paul Robeson called a press conference and announced that Negroes would not fight with America against Russia; Jackie Robinson took a day off from the Brooklyn Dodgers to assure the House Un-American Activities Committee that Mr. Robeson was wrong. Indeed we would fight. Joe Louis, who had dispelled doubts during the dark days of Dunkirk by proclaiming, “America will win ’cause God is on our side,” made an all-expense-paid visit to a Washington, D.C., courtroom and embraced the defendant, James Hoffa, in full view of the jury, peppered with Negroes. Father Divine announced that he brought about integration, and he had a white wife to prove it!
Enter the Students
These incidents—some humorous, some tragic, but all of them significant—had a grave impact on the Negro leadership class; a less stout-hearted group would have exploded from so much internal combustion. But it was the tense drama of school integration that provided the bailing wire for a show of unity.
I was there and it was a moving and unforgettable experience to see Negro students at Clinton, Sturgis, Clay, and Little Rock dodge bricks as they raced to and from school under armed guard. It was a magnificent hour for these fortuitously elite youngsters, many of whom became international heroes. But few of us lost sight of the Negro masses in these cities. They were still called “Jim,” “Mary,” “Aunt Harriet,” and “Uncle Job”; they had to buy clothes they were not allowed to try on; their homes were searched by police without warrants; their heads were bloodied, their jobs threatened if they dared protest. They darted in and out of drug and department stores where they dared not sit down. They were denied free access to the polls, and if they received a just day in court it was usually when all parties concerned were Negroes.
Despite the march of well-scrubbed, carefully selected Negro students into previously all-white schools, it was crystal clear that the fundamental question of the Negro’s dignity as an individual had not been resolved. The glory was the NAACP’s and nobody begrudged it. Yet, there was a widespread doubt that a nationally directed battle of attrition that took so long and cost so much to bring so little to so few would ever get to the heart of the issue.
There were many local heroes during the decade of the ’fifties: they all had a brief hour, were clasped to the breasts of national leadership organizations, but when their public-relations and fund-raising value slipped they fell into disuse.
Mrs. Daisy Bates, president of the Arkansas State NAACP and the undisputed moving spirit behind the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School, affords an example of life behind the monolithic curtain.
The Spingarn Medal of 1958, voted annually by the NAACP to the person or persons who have contributed most to racial advancement during the previous year, was awarded to the Little Rock Nine. When the students received notice of the award and realized that it did not include Mrs. Bates—whose home had been bombed, her business destroyed—they rejected the citation. The powers-that-be at Twenty West Fortieth Street
reversed themselves and Mrs. Bates was included in the award, which she and the students accepted with full smiles, amid thunderous ovations. The Negro press reported the Bates case in great detail and interpreted the incident as overt evidence of the covert pressure the NAACP had been exerting on local Negro leaders for some time.
Dr. King and Mr. Wilkins
The curtain had begun to lift; it had achieved a great good, for it had produced a façade of unity; yet it had cloaked some terrible wrongs, including the smothering of homegrown, local Negro leaders who, even then, sensed the restlessness of the masses. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the lone successful exception, and even he came into international prominence mainly because the NAACP refused to help the Montgomery bus boycotters when they at first demanded something less than full integration.
Acting on pleas from Negroes in other Southern communities, Dr. King organized the Southern Christian Leadership Council (the organization has undergone several name changes but this is the current one) to instigate non-violent protests in Southern cities. The NAACP has a most active program all through the South and a clash between the two organizations—that is to say, Dr. King and Mr. Wilkins—seemed inevitable. To end rumors of a power struggle between them, Dr. King flew to New York and made a public show of purchasing life memberships in the NAACP for himself and his Montgomery Improvement Association. Dr. King and Mr. Wilkins then embarked on a series of infrequent private talks that may go down in history as the Negro leadership class’s great and final hour.
The King-Wilkins talks of 1957–58 undoubtedly covered the issue of just who would do what and where, but central in the discussion was the common knowledge that many NAACP members were disenchanted with Wilkins’ leadership. The two men came out from the talks as one, each co-sponsoring the activities of the other’s organization.
