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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 39. Negro Improvement and Protest Organizations - 3. Business and Professional Organizations
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8i6 An American Dilemma
business and has employed the racial situation as its main stock in trade in bidding for
the support of Negro patronage.^^
In 1918 Du Bois made an effort to create a national organization for
consumers’ cooperation. Upon his call, there met in the Crisis office ^^twelve
colored men from seven different states” and they established The Negro
Co-oferative Guild}^ Some abortive attempts to open cooperative stores in
various cities were made, but nothing came out of it. Du Bois comments in
1940:
The whole movement needed more careful preliminary spade work, with popular
education both of consumers and managers; and for lack of this, it temporarily failed.
It must and will be revived.^®
We have touched upon the spontaneous movement, "don’t buy where
you can’t work.” There is no national organization behind this movement,
but there are, or have been, several organizations with this purpose in many
cities, as, for Instance, The Colored Clerks^ Circle in St. Louis and The
New Negro Alliance in Washington.^® The movement is a logical corollary
of the Negro business philosophy. It is doomed to be rather inconsequential
and even has potentialities damaging to Negro interests.®
Similar to the National Negro Business League are: The National Negro
Bankers^ Association^ The National Negro Insurance Association^ The
National Medical Associationy The National Teachers^ Associationy and The
National Bar Association}^ These organizations exist largely as substitutes
for the ordinary professional organizations which to a large extent—and in
the South regularly—exclude Negroes.’^ Also the Negro fraternities and
sororities belong to this group of professional organizations. All of them
are "race organizations” in the sense that they have as one of their purposes
the improvement not only of their particular group’s status but also that of
the Negro people as a whole. Many of them do a considerable amount of
lobbying and petitioning. In fact, even the churches, the lodges, and the
social clubs are to a degree organizations for race defense. This tendency
became intensified during the war crisis.
Special mention must be given to the National Council of Negro Women
even though we cannot describe or evaluate it. It is under the presidency
of Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune, the outstanding Negro woman "race
leader,” president of Bethune-Cookman College in Florida, Negro advisor
to the National Youth Administration and long head of the "Black Cab-
inet” in Washington.®
It is possible to view all the Negro organizations mentioned in this
section as rather futile and inconsequential. This is the attitude prevailing
* See Chapter 14, Section 2, and Chapter 38, Section 11.
^ See Chapter 29, Section 6.
• The “Black Cabinet” was discussed in Chapter 22, Section 5.
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