The Idea of self-help or mutual aid as a means to further progress in securing full equality is not, to put it mildly, popular among Negroes. As the recent White House conference on civil rights made clear, Negroes tend to have three basic objections to the idea. First of all, they see the emphasis on self-help as a diversionary tactic, either consciously or unconsciously motivated by a desire on the part of whites to shift attention from the real issue of discrimination in employment, housing, and schools, to the putative deficiencies or weaknesses of the Negro community and the Negro family. A second objection, flowing directly out of the first, is that the emphasis on self-help is only a covert way of implying that the Negro bears an important share in the responsibility for his own plight. And finally, there is the objection pointedly formulated not long ago in these pages by Bayard Rustin:¹

I would advise those who think that self-help is the answer to familiarize themselves with the long history of such efforts in the Negro community, and to consider why so many foundered on the shoals of ghetto life. . . .

Now there is no question that certain white advocates of Negro self-help—I am thinking particularly of John Fischer and Eric Hoffer—have discussed the matter in such a way as to lend substance to these objections. To say, as Mr. Fischer did, for example, that “So long as the Negro blames his plight entirely on circumstances, history and the white man, he's going to stay in that plight,” is to invite a justifiably hostile response. For the truth is that prejudice is never a consequence of the actions or characteristics of the victim; it comes from the bigot himself (who, to be sure, will always rationalize his feelings by pegging them to the victim's “objectionable” traits). In any case, however, if the issue is one of distributing blame, then the white man does indeed deserve it, and “entirely,” to Use Mr. Fischer's word. But the issue, of course, is not the distribution of blame: the issue is jobs, housing, and schools. The $100-billion “freedom budget” proposed by A. Philip Randolph and the massive housing and job-training programs advocated by various civil-rights organizations are the answer to the problem of family instability among Negroes which the much-abused Moynihan Report has focused so much attention upon, just as they are the answer to the “Dull, Devastating Spiral of Failure” which the McCone Report on the Watts riots discusses at such great length. To quote Rustin again: “If Negroes suffer more than others from the problem of family instability today, it is not because they are Negro but because they are so disproportionately unemployed, underemployed, and ill-paid.” So long as we have Negro ghettos, just so long will the main order of business be to break them down, with all that breaking them down implies.

Nevertheless, while crash programs directed at this objective must have priority and are a necessary condition for securing “equality as a fact and not just as a right,” they are not in themselves a sufficient one. In implying that they are, Rustin and others permit themselves to lose sight, at least temporarily, of the important truth that there are things that no one can do for a man except the man himself. Mutual aid—which is to say true self-help—as Rustin rightly points out, is not the same thing as self-improvement. In the last analysis—and particularly in a period when the government is more and more supplanting private philanthropy as the main support of welfare and economic-opportunity programs—mutual aid is more valuable as a means of building a sense of community, of group solidarity and individual pride, than as a technique (which it traditionally was) for dealing with the problems of the poor. One need only look at the civil-rights movement, especially since 1954, to see what a powerful force for the creation of group pride the doing-for-oneself can be. And there is some impressive evidence to show that the relevance of such pride to the goal of integration is more direct than it may at first glance appear. Thus, reporting in his Strangers Next Door on a study of interracial social contact, Professor Robin Williams of Cornell writes:

Respondents who manifest a militant group pride are significantly more likely to have interracial social contact than non-militants and, conversely, those who score high in group self-hatred clearly tend to have less contact than those who are relatively lacking in self-hatred. In other words, it is the individual who identifies positively with his racial group who is likely to have inter-racial contact.

Mutual aid, then, would seem to be inherently desirable from every point of view. Yet many Negroes, even if it is urged upon them not as a diversion but rather as a complementary process to programs of outside assistance, still resist the idea. Why? For an answer to this question, one could do worse than follow Rustin's advice and examine “the long history of such efforts in the Negro community”—but not only “to consider why so many foundered on the shoals of ghetto life.” One must also seek to understand the effect these founderings have had on the internal condition of the Negro community today.

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II

As with so much else, the natural human impulse for social organization and mutual help was from the earliest days of plantation life stifled among Negroes by punitive legislation. In the Caribbean slave codes (which were incorporated into American colonial law and then into state law), for example, the assembling of more than four or five slaves was forbidden except when a white person was present. Moreover, the Black Codes saw to it that a slave who shared his troubles with fellow slaves would only bring new troubles upon himself. Slavery thus largely succeeded in destroying the sense of community and of shared fate among Negroes. A white visitor in Virginia in 1856 observed that the slave master destroyed “the sympathy that unites . . . the victims of the same oppression. . . . He has but to arm the human passions against each other.”

In 1776, slavery was legal in all the colonies, but by 1830 it had been abolished in the Northern states. The number of slaves grew from a half million before the Revolution to over two million in 1830. Free Negroes increased from 40,000 in 1776 to 320,000 in 1830, 57 per cent of them—surprisingly—living in the slave states. These free Negroes in the South followed a more hazardous existence than in the North, for they could more easily be returned into slavery; nevertheless, they organized themselves from the earliest days of the Republic. The Brown Fellowship Society, founded in Charleston, South Carolina in November 1790, was the first Negro mutual-aid society. But coming into being in a world of caste, it was as caste-conscious as the white slaveholders themselves: thus, membership was restricted to mulattoes and quadroons, and “black men were not eligible.” The following year, however, free black Negroes in Charleston formed a society of their own called the Free Dark Men of Color. Both groups gave help to their members: relief to poor widows, educational assistance to orphans, a cemetery and burial. Both maintained clubhouses for social purposes, and both set high standards for moral conduct and social behavior—in conformity, of course, with the ideals of the white world.

In other Southern cities with substantial groups of free Negroes, similar societies came into existence: New Orleans, Richmond, Washington, Baltimore, and St. Petersburg, Florida. But after the Nat Turner insurrection of 1831, in which sixty whites were killed, a series of laws was enacted which struck the first major blow to the development of communal association among free Negroes. They were denied the right of assembly; they could not hold church services without the presence of a licensed white minister; and they were prohibited from visiting or entertaining slaves and from convening meetings of benevolent societies and other organizations. In Maryland, free Negroes could not have “lyceums, lodges, fire companies, or literary, dramatic, social, moral, or charitable societies.” In many slave states, they were enjoined from engaging in certain occupations and from trading in certain commodities.

De Tocqueville shrewdly observed that “the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.” Nevertheless in the North, free Negroes began early to organize mutual-aid and self-improvement societies. The very first was the Free African Society, founded in Philadelphia in 1787 by Richard Allen, a self-taught Methodist preacher who “worked out” to buy his own liberty. The society undertook to build a fund for mutual aid, to help its members look after their sick, to care for their poor widows and educate their orphans, and to bury their dead. It adopted resolutions to strengthen marriage bonds and familial responsibility, and it provided for the suspension of members guilty of drunkenness or disorderly conduct.

Although mutual-aid and church groups also came into being among free Negroes in other Northern cities (Boston in 1796, and New York in 1808), it was in Philadelphia that an organized free Negro community had its most impressive unfolding. Philadelphia, in the early decades of the 19th century, benefited from the presence of a group of Negroes with exceptional gifts of leadership, some of whose families had enjoyed several generations of freedom—a wealthy industrialist, a bishop, an editor and publisher, an orator. They were a unique elite among free Negroes, and together they stimulated and set in motion a variety of Negro associations and activities ranging from temperance societies and relief work to anti-slavery conventions. Their activities, though on a more modest scale, bring to mind the communal and philanthropic efforts of the acculturated German Jews in America at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries on behalf of the East-European Jewish immigrants then streaming into the United States.

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According to W. E. B. Du Bois's pioneering sociological study, The Philadelphia Negro, (published in 1889), about 7,000 Philadelphia Negroes were members of a hundred mutual-aid societies in 1838; ten years later these societies claimed about 8,000 members. (The figures seem inflated; the 1850 census reported 10,700 free Negroes in Philadelphia, but even so, free Negroes in Philadelphia had an impressive record of communal associations.)

Philadelphia, too, was where the Negro Convention Movement started in 1830. Organized first to protest Ohio's renewed rigid enforcement of an old fugitive slave law (as a consequence, about a thousand Negroes migrated from Ohio to Canada), the movement developed on a national scale and in many free states, combining abolitionism with self-improvement and moral uplift. The appeal of the first Negro convention reminded Negro freemen “that knowledge is power, and to that end, we call on you to sustain and support, by all honorable, energetic, and necessary means, those presses which are devoted to our instruction and elevation, to foster and encourage the mechanical arts and sciences among our brethren, to encourage simplicity, neatness, temperance, and economy in our habits.” Two years later, the national convention reported that temperance societies had been organized in several states and that plans for manual-labor schools in New York and in Philadelphia were under way.

But as repressive legislation stifled Negro organization in the South, the rising tide of Irish and German immigration, and the violent encounter between the Negroes and the new immigrants, rudely shattered the brilliant promise of an organized free Negro community in early 19th-century Philadelphia.² Anti-Negro riots began in 1829 and did not subside until after the Civil War. (In New York the Civil War itself was the occasion for the violently anti-Negro draft riots.) In 1836, Philadelphia Negroes even lost the right to vote—a right which they had possessed since 1790. It was “a time of retrogression for the mass of the race,” wrote Du Bois. The Negro leadership was trapped between the prejudice and violence of the whites and the unmanageable, ever-growing mass of fugitive Southern Negroes streaming into the city.

That migration of illiterate and occupationally untrained Negroes before the Civil War, inundating the established communities of Northern Negroes, was a foretaste of the dislocation that was to come after the Civil War. On the eve of the Civil War there were almost 500,000 free Negroes in the United States, and four million Negro slaves. Only a small proportion of slaves had been trained as craftsmen (carpenters, coopers, tailors, shoemakers, bootmakers, cabinet makers, plasterers); others had labored in salt works, mines, on railroad construction and docks; but most had no experience beyond the cotton fields or domestic service. The vast majority were totally without education (according to the 1870 census, 80 per cent of non-whites in America were illiterate). The experience of free Negroes with associations for mutual aid and self-improvement had been fragile in the South, hardier and somewhat more durable in the North, but in North and South alike that experience had largely been confined to Negroes who possessed some education, skills, and means.

The havoc of the Civil War, the emancipation of the slaves, and the consequent disorganization of Southern society had the effect of submerging these comparatively advantaged free Negroes in the vast sea of newly-freed slaves, limiting their opportunities for economic and educational advancement, and reducing their capacity for independent leadership. As for the ex-slaves themselves, without financial or material resources, without skills or literacy, they were thrust into conditions of unparalleled misery.

To be sure, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Land—established in 1865 and probably the first federal agency to assume responsibility for the welfare and protection of large numbers of the population—provided some help. But its main work ceased in 1869, and its only lasting legacy of achievement was the founding of several outstanding Negro educational institutions: Howard University, Hampton Institute, Atlanta University, Fisk University. By contrast, the Freedmen's Bank, set up by the federal government for Negroes, but operated by a private group, left only a legacy of mistrust and despair among Negroes whose scanty savings were dissipated—and never repaid—in mismanagement, speculation, and deceit.

In 1872, the Freedmen's Bureau ceased all operations. Five years later, the last federal troops withdrew from Louisiana and South Carolina. Reconstruction governments which had stood between the Negroes and whites were dissolved or overthrown. Without the military power and the civilian presence of the federal government, Negroes in the South remained without resources, without friends or allies. Thus, instead of a national effort being launched to make self-reliant citizens of the ex-slaves, all Negroes in the South were consigned to a marginal existence. After Reconstruction, destitute thousands began an exodus out of the South looking for a land of freedom in the North and West. In 1879 alone, some 40,000 migrated. The resources of the few private relief agencies were inadequate to cope with this flood, but though Congress investigated and debated the question of aid to the migrant freedman, it never enacted any legislation. As for the millions of Negroes who remained in the South, a new era of disenfranchisement and segregation awaited them: Jim-Crow legislation solidified Southern prejudice in a rigid and unyielding caste system; law and custom contrived for them an existence of poverty and humiliation.

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In 1898, Du Bois published one of his first sociological studies under the auspices of Atlanta University, Some Efforts of Negroes for Their Own Social Betterment. Using materials collected by his students, Du Bois extolled the scope and variety of organized activity among Negroes:

. . . there are among them 23,000 churches, with unusually wide activities, and spending annually at least $10,000,000. There are thousands of secret societies with their insurance and social features, large numbers of beneficial societies with their economic and benevolent cooperation. . . .Finally there are the slowly evolving organs by which the group seeks to stop and minimize the anti-social deeds and accidents of its members. This is a picture of all human striving—unusually simple, with local and social peculiarities, but strikingly human and worth further study and attention.³

Du Bois appears to have exaggerated the extent and stability of Negro association. He used his sources uncritically, because he was exploiting scientific study for defensive purposes, painting the reality larger than life. Though the Negro churches expanded with enormous rapidity and commanded the deep loyalty of Negro masses, they were often too poor in organizational and intellectual resources to develop stable self-help activities, and too much directed to the next world to build self-reliance in this one. As for the mushrooming fraternal orders, mutual-benefit and insurance societies, most were small, circumscribed, and short-lived. Undoubtedly, the regalia and ceremonials provided their members with an opportunity to escape the humiliations and hardships of the real world and to enjoy companionship and congeniality. But “loosely organized and poorly managed, with few or no regulations placed upon the officials, no controls, no actuarial studies,” many organizations failed, unable to meet their obligations.⁴ These failures, in the wake of the more spectacular failure of the Freed-men's Bank, discouraged the growth of associations for mutual aid among Negroes. They appeared to be—as they indeed were—incompetent, unreliable, and abusive of their financial trust, and they have left a heritage of suspicion among Negroes toward organizations for mutual aid.

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III

Not the least important of the failures of these societies and churches is the fact that none of them produced a Negro leader of national or even regional stature. This, combined with the abdication of the federal government, meant that the first generation out of slavery—untrained for the newer industrial occupations and economically crushed in the competition for livelihood between the emergent poor whites in the South and the European immigrants in the North—not only had to combat prejudice and discrimination on their own, but also had to try, unaided, to surmount their educational, social, and cultural disabilities, the product of generations of slavery.

A small number of this first generation out of slavery succeeded in true Horatio-Alger fashion. Such a one was Booker T. Washington, the first authentic Negro leader of national stature to emerge in the post-Reconstruction era, and about whom Du Bois said in 1903: “Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington.”⁵

The peak of Washington's national renown and acceptance by whites as a Negro leader came in his celebrated address in 1895 at the opening of the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta. That five-minute speech in which Washington expressed his philosophy of race relations at that juncture in American history served also to solidify rising militant Negro opposition to him. He began with a simple literary device:

A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal, “Water, water; we die of thirst!” The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” A second time the signal, “Water, water; send us water!” ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” And a third and fourth signal for water was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River.⁶

“Cast down your bucket where you are” constituted an admonition to Negroes to abandon ideas of emigration and to cultivate friendly relations with white Southerners: Negroes, Washington urged, should turn to basic occupations “in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions,” for “it is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.” But “Cast down your bucket where you are” also constituted an admonition to white Southerners to use Negro manpower in agriculture and industry instead of “those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits.” The Negro, said Washington, felt a devotion to the white South “that no foreigner can approach,” and he emphasized the historically close relations between the races and their common purposes. Yet lest he be misunderstood—this was Atlanta in 1895 when segregation had already become solidified in Jim-Crow legislation—he added: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” And on another occasion, decrying the agitation for social equality as “the extremist folly,” he declared: “It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.”

Booker T. Washington, the spokesman for Southern rural Negroes barely a generation out of slavery, knew the disabilities of the people from whom he had emerged. He evolved a social and educational policy for the Negro masses which was intended to turn them into productive agricultural and industrial plebs. That policy began with what the principal at Hampton Institute had called “the gospel of the toothbrush,” and included the use of bed sheets, the repair of torn and broken articles, the practice of cleanliness, thrift, and sobriety. (One is reminded of Abraham Cahan, editor of the Socialist Jewish Daily Forward, who made the use of the handkerchief a central article in his program for the Russian Jewish immigrants.) Washington believed it was to the advantage of the Negro masses to concentrate primarily on self-improvement and vocational training. He had hopes, or visions, that Negroes, once having shed the educational and psychological disabilities of slavehood, and disciplined and hardened by the practice of Protestant virtues, would eventually be accepted as civic, if not social, equals.

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The often-repeated charge that Washington represented “the old attitude of adjustment and submission” to the racist South originated among Northern college-educated Negro intellectuals—the radicals of the Niagara Movement, whose social, educational, and professional aspirations extended far beyond Washington's modest goals for the rural masses. Their view was given wide currency in Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma, which termed Washington's philosophy “accommodation” and Du Bois's “protest.” More recently, Howard Brotz, taking a fresh look at this controversy in The Black Jews of Harlem, described it as “a tension between the quest for autonomy—moral, cultural, political—of the American Negro as a people or a community [Washington], and the quest for the right to be integrated as individuals into a multiracial, universalistic society [Du Bois].”

This tension was a by-product of the stratification in socio-economic status among Negroes that was developing between 1890 and 1914. Negroes whose families had been free for several generations, or who had lived in the North for several generations, formed the core of a slowly expanding elite of college-educated professionals and businessmen, now numerous enough to constitute a full-fledged segment of Negro society—a social and economic group, rather than a mere handful of individuals. Out of this group came the Radicals. For themselves and aspirants to their class, the Radicals demanded a different educational policy from that which Washington advocated for the masses. Washington put his greatest emphasis on elementary and industrial education; they insisted on higher education. Du Bois himself, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and educated at Harvard (one undergraduate year at Fisk was his first exposure to Southern Negro life), advocated an elitist philosophy—education for the “Talented Tenth,” to develop “the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst.”

Washington had wanted to build an economically self-reliant community that could survive in autonomous self-sufficiency. (His main error, perhaps, was that his ideas were better suited to a pre-industrial than an industrial economy, and to the pre-Jim Crow Society in which they originally took shape.) The Radicals wanted total assimilation and total integration, including social acceptance in white society. (The rebuffs with which they met led them to occasional flirtations with pan-African nationalism, but at heart they adhered to their assimilatory purposes.) Out of this latter program two organizations, both interracial, came into being in the first decade of the 20th century: the NAACP and the National Urban League, the former politically radical, the latter more staid. The NAACP made its goal the achievement of equality before the law; the Urban League began as a social-welfare agency to help the Negro migrant adjust to the conditions of the Northern urban industrial and commercial centers. The Negroes in both organizations were nearly all Northern, college-educated, and more closely identified with white professionals and communal leaders than with other Negroes. Indeed, they had more acceptance from that white world than from the Negro masses, who did not—and to a surprising extent still do not—know them. Washington's leadership, in contrast, had rested on two bases—support from the mass of Southern rural Negroes and recognition by white political leaders. (With his death, Southern rural Negroes remained leaderless until the emergence in 1955 of Martin Luther King as a national figure.)

During World War I, Negro migration from the South to Northern industrial cities accelerated. Poor, ill-educated, untrained for industrial occupations, friendless and disoriented, the new migrants had no interest in, or benefit from, the NAACP's program, and the National Urban League was not yet in a position to help them. These urban Negro masses found their leader in Marcus Garvey, the Black Moses. A Jamaican who came to the United States in 1916 as head of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, he preached with spectacular success a doctrine of black nationalism and racial pride in African origins. At the movement's peak in 1920—21, Garvey was reputed to have had at least a half million members (some think even a million), and he raised more money than any Negro organization had ever dreamed of. The key to Garvey's appeal was that he exalted everything that was black. Black stood for strength and beauty; Christ, he said, was black and Moses was black. Garvey preached that Negroes must renounce all hope of assistance from whites. The Negroes' only hope was to leave this country of oppression and return to Africa. The Negro intellectuals hated Garvey, dismayed by the anti-white sentiments he articulated, for their expectations were based on cooperation with whites. But Garvey's followers came from the lower classes. He “put steel in the spine of many Negroes,” developed race pride and compensation for feelings of inferiority.

Still, Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association expired in shame. Garvey was convicted of using the mails to defraud through raising money for his Black Star steamship line, though it is more likely that he himself was victim rather than victimizer. Sentenced to Atlanta Penitentiary, he was later deported as an undesirable alien to the West Indies, where he died. He left a dual legacy: an experience that reinforced lower-class Negro distrust of organizations that dissipated their funds, but also an exhilarating discovery of race pride through black nationalism. Today's Black Muslims are the natural heirs of the Garvey movement. (Elijah Muhammad, indeed, once paid tribute to Garvey as a “very fine Muslim.”)

Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey were the outstanding exponents of the three major goals in Negro life: communal self-improvement, the struggle for legal equality, and race pride. Nowadays no Negro organization is dedicated exclusively to one or another of these purposes; all three strands are intertwined. The struggle for civil rights has out of its own inner dynamics bred a wider sense of community among Negroes, and helped to develop a more inclusive social policy. Negroes are now a community in the making, but a community which has not yet overcome its heritage of imposed divisiveness, and its history of frail and discouraging associational experiences. This community needs a stable political, social, and educational policy that will serve the needs of all, not just of a Talented Tenth. Can the existing organizations develop such a policy out of their own heritage of group associations?

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IV

The “egocentric predicament,” Ralph Barton Perry's phrase for men's inability to see the world except through their own eyes, explains some of the difficulties in communication among America's ethnic, racial, and religious groups. Each group regards the other from the perspective of its own experience and its own culture, and for this reason Jews have understandably been the group with the highest, and perhaps most unrealistic, expectations of Negroes in terms of self-help and communal organization. From Talmudic times on, Jews evolved a communal structure designed to maintain themselves as a distinct group and to transmit their religious culture from generation to generation; and this tradition was carried over to America. Thus the medieval hekdesh to care for the sick was translated in America into a great network of Jewish hospitals; the UJA fulfills the mitzvot of caring for the needy and redeeming the captives; the ORT continues to enable the poor to become vocationally self-reliant (in Maimonides's view, the highest degree of charity). So pervasive has the habit of philanthropy among Jews become that even country clubs require prospective members to make substantial contributions to UJA as a concrete expression of their identity with the congregation of Israel.

All communal organization is based on a “we feeling,” an expanded family solidarity, and attachment to a shared culture. The crucial factor in successful organization of formal institutions is past experience in self-government, whereas simple and informal communal institutions may require little more than the “we feeling,” the desire to maintain group cohesion. The Italian immigrants to America, for example, had little sense of a shared national Italian culture or of belonging to a national Italian polity, but the extended family sufficed to protect them against the stresses of the outer society. Loyalty to the family has remained the cornerstone of Italian group solidarity in the absence of formal communal institutions. Their economic attainments and their dominance in certain occupations—construction and sanitation are two such—have largely been the consequence of group cohesion and familial connections.

Among the Irish, group cohesion was nurtured by their history of English-Anglican oppression, by an assured and aggressive Church with its parochial-school system, by a prodigious sense of self-esteem, and a host of informal communal institutions. Among Greeks, fraternal societies served to preserve and develop a sense of communal belonging: those societies gave financial help to relatives and friends who remained behind in Greece, and they served to organize the American Greek community in support of the home country's political causes. The Chinese, too, maintained an extensive and interlocking network of benevolent, mutual-aid, and communal institutions, ranging from temples and churches to language schools and hospitals. Excluded from many occupations by state laws and labor unions, the Chinese went into businesses that might give them economic independence and they attained signal success in two fields closely related to domestic service, above which they desired to rise: laundries and restaurants.

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The communal structures of these different ethnic and racial groups developed out of cultures which set a high value on the group's preservation and whose traditions of “self-government” the immigrants could adapt to their respective situations in America. Negroes have been largely deprived of any such experience of self-government by the particular forms of oppression to which they have been subjected. What they have is a history of fragile communal organization battered by repressive legislation and group divisiveness; and they have further been weakened as a community by the failure of middle-class Negroes “to play the role of a responsible elite,” as the late E. Franklin Frazier put it in his classic work, Black Bourgeoisie. The Negro middle class, although relatively small (an estimated 26 per cent of the Negro population as compared with 64 per cent of the whites), nevertheless includes an expanding number of persons.⁷ Yet only a handful of those at its topmost echelon (the one hundred wealthiest, listed in the May 1962 issue of Ebony) are on the boards of the National Urban League or the NAACP; nor, it would seem, have those below this economic level been notable for their philanthropic concern with fellow Negroes.

This traditional weakness in communal structure is perhaps an even more serious handicap today—when the economic gap is widening not only between Negroes and whites, but also between the Negro middle class and the Negro masses—than it ever was. But tradition is not a static phenomenon; and while it cannot be imposed from without, new cultural patterns can be forged from within when the will to establish them exists, as now seems to be the case to a greater extent than previously among the Negro middle class. Thus, all the major Negro organizations are nowadays engaged in some self-help projects (while carefully avoiding that designation). As one might expect from its history, the Urban League is foremost among them—concerning itself with family problems, home and neighborhood improvement, vocational guidance and back-to-school programs for the young—but the NAACP recently also began to move into this field, organizing “Citizenship Clinics” in the North. Then, too, there is the recent growth of savings-and-loan associations owned and operated by Negroes (Elmer M. Lancaster of the Department of Commerce calls this one of the most significant factors in the American economy). And finally, on the national scale, there are agencies like the National Council of Negro Women and the National Business League.

Apart from the major organizations, we also find hundreds of small, local efforts of a more or less informal character. There are “The Leaguers” in Newark, New Jersey, an organization for Negro teenagers founded sixteen years ago by Mrs. Mary Burch, an educator and social worker, to stimulate and encourage Negro teenagers to continue their education through college and also to teach youngsters self-reliance through community service. The United Credit Union, established in Watts about a year before the riots, is now the center of self-help activity in the area, many residents having lost their jobs in the wake of the riots, and small-loan companies having tightened up credit to Watts residents. Finally, there are such projects as “Operation Upgrade” (in Bedford-Stuyvesant), and the Morningside Parents Association and the New Era Neighborhood Association (both in Harlem).

What is most interesting and paradoxical about mutual aid among Negroes today, however, is that some of the most effective programs are being carried out by the least likely leaderships—the Black Muslims at one extreme, and at the other, those militant civil-rights groups which react with the deepest outrage to the idea of Negro “self-improvement.”

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Until very recently, the Black Muslims were the only important Negro organization dedicated to self-improvement on a large scale. The Muslim movement has striven for a total transformation of Negro values and traditions. The movement is anti-white, but its moral values are rigidly puritanical and “bourgeois.” While the Muslims have succeeded in fashioning a community with high self-regard, they have only been able to do so at the expense of promoting race hatred. Moreover, the Muslim movement is self-defeating, for as Rustin puts it: . . . “every prostitute the Muslims convert to a model of Calvinist virtue is replaced by the ghetto with two more. Dedicated as they are to maintenance of the ghetto, the Muslims are powerless to effect substantial moral reform.”

The paradox underlying self-help among Negroes is most apparent in the militant civil-rights groups where but to mention “self-help” is to invite attack. Yet mutual aid is precisely what the militancy of these groups has more and more led them to emphasize in their struggle to win equality. Thus, in Selma, Ala., McComb, Miss., and elsewhere in the heart of Klan territory, Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other civil-rights organizations have been setting up Negro cooperatives to compensate for economic reprisals against Negroes who have registered to vote—the Poor People's Corporation, cooperative groceries, sewing cooperatives, and other types of business. Thus also, the volunteers in the 1964 Mississippi Summer program (whose political objective was the Freedom Democratic Party) found themselves involved—almost inevitably—in literacy and tutorial projects, in community centers and vocational training. The militant selective boycott program of Philadelphia Negroes to win jobs from big industrial firms made possible the uniquely successful vocational training program (the Opportunites Industrialization Center) conducted by Negro minister Leon Howard Sullivan. Here the élan of civil-rights activity has carried over into job training: “It's attitude we stress,” Sullivan says. “We teach probably 25 per cent skill and 75 per cent attitude. The Negro has got to get his head up and believe in himself.”

OIC is now giving special pre-job training to some 1,000 Negroes at a time, helping them to brush up on their reading, writing, and arithmetic, and to improve their speech and even their personal grooming. “Many trainees,” Sullivan points out, “walk 15 to 20 blocks morning and night to seize the opportunity offered by OIC.” Not surprisingly, this enterprise has won the backing of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce and the so-called “white power structure.” The Office of Manpower, Automation and Training of the U.S. Department of Labor stepped in with a $458,000 grant and the federal anti-poverty program has contributed $1,756,000. But perhaps the most hopeful thing about this project is the fact that Negroes themselves have twice managed to raise $100,000 in city-wide drives to support it.

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V

In 1915, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History was formed as a vehicle through which educated Negroes might rediscover their obscure or forgotten historic traditions. The emphasis was on Negro “contributions”: it was a defensive and apologetic emphasis, for educated Negroes (like many Jews) used to be ashamed of their past and wished only to obliterate the memory of submission and accommodation. But as each new generation everywhere revises its view of the past, so, too, are today's younger Negro writers and historians doing: they are coming to see their past—including slavery—not as a sheer humiliation but as a reservoir of dignity and courage in the face of appalling oppression. Ralph Ellison expresses it this way in Shadow and Act: “Our Negro situation is changing rapidly, but so much we've gleaned through the harsh discipline of Negro American life is simply too precious to be lost. I speak of the faith, the patience, the humor, the sense of timing, rugged sense of life and the manner of expressing it, which all go to define the American Negro.”

A true Negro community is now beginning to emerge out of the civil-rights movement. Northern, college-educated young Negroes, in their unique version of populism, in their American-style “going to the people,” are expressing solidarity with illiterate Southern Negro sharecroppers, not by rhetoric, but demonstrably by their presence in Alabama and Mississippi. Others are dedicating themselves to serving the Negro poor and outcast in the Northern slums. They are creating new traditions out of which authentic communal associations are developing—traditions as indigenous to the Negro and as relevant to the special complexities of his particular condition as immigrant-aid societies and hospitals were to the Jews.

It seems obvious that this is both a necessary and a helpful trend and that everything should be done to further it. No service is performed by those Negro leaders who attack the idea of mutual aid—however understandable the motives behind the attack. When Negro leaders call self-help an Uncle Tom concept, claiming that it implies that Negroes are themselves responsible for their plight and asserting that the responsibility belongs wholly to white society, they may be adopting the right tactic for replying to white people; but what of the impact on the Negroes who overhear? Is it not likely that part of the effect is to dampen Negro initiative, and to help delay the time when the Negro upper and middle class will at last become the “responsible elite” Frazier wanted it to become—earning leadership through a sacrificial involvement in the plight of the Negro mass, deserving it by generous financial contributions to meet communal needs? Would it, then, not be better if, while the primary objective of securing crash programs is being pursued, the newly reawakened impulse toward mutual aid among Negroes were at the same time encouraged and reinforced, instead of derided and decried?

¹ “From Protest to Politics,” COMMENTARY, February 1965.

² See Eugene P. Foley's study of the failure of Negro business in Daedalus, Winter 1966.

³ Quoted from John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes.

⁴ Robert H. Kinzer and Edward Sagarin, The Negro in American Business: The Conflict Between Separatism and Integration.

⁵ “On Mr. Booker T. Washington and others,” The Souls of Black Folk, in John Hope Franklin, ed., Three Negro Classics.

⁶ Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography.

⁷ Between 1950 and 1960, for example, there was a threefold increase in the number of Negro engineers; the number of architects increased 72 per cent, natural scientists, 77 per cent, lawyers, 43 per cent, dentists, 31 per cent, and physicians, 14 per cent. Overall, some 300,000 Negroes have been added to this class since 1940.