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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - X. The Negro Community - 43. Institutions - 5. Voluntary Associations
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Chapter 43. Institutions 955
The distinctive thing about Negro associations has been the death benefit
and sickness insurance features of some Negro lodges and benevolent
societies. Even this was not a unique trait of Negro organizations, since
white lodges frequently have them too. But it was much more developed
among Negroes,®** and it made the lodges of almost equal Importance with
the churches In the period around 1890.®® The insurance features of many
lodges elicited the only serious praise that has been bestowed upon Negro
sociable organizations. A survey edited by Du Bois in 1898 said that the
lodges represented the ^^saving, banking spirit among the Negroes and arc
the germ of commercial enterprise of a purer type,” but at the same time
he castigated their ‘^extravagance and waste in expenditure, an outlay for
regalia and tinsel.”®® Booker T. Washington saw the secret society as the
Negro’s means of creating capital, learning business techniques, and teach-
ing the “masses of people habits of saving and of system which they would
not otherwise have been able or disposed to learn.”®^ But owing to the
frequent failure of the lodges and benevolent societies to pay Insurance
premiums,*^ which has been noticeable since the beginning of the depression
in 1929,®® the lodges have been declining in popularity.*’ Especially the
lower classes have left 5
the middle classes remain for the prestige, power
and recreation that the lodges provide. But even the middle classes, and
especially the upper classes, are being attracted away from the lodges and
toward the business and professional associations, the college and high
school fraternities and sororities. Typical of the highest sort of evaluation
of the lodges heard today is the one expressed by the secretary of a local
Urban League in a Northern city:
Not much practical value to the community at large but vastly important to the
individual who is thereby associated with a definite group. There are a few vision-
ary optimists in each order who think their group can become “a great force for the
political and social betterment of the Negro people,” but the rest are there because
they like to have a good time with the boys, or the girls, and who like the pomp and
ceremony and mumbo-jumbo of the meetings—^which is as good a reason for join-
ing as any.®®
Thus, aside from the fact that all Negro groups are Inevitably forced to
be “race conscious” and that most of them at least pretend to improve the
position of the “race,” “there is a pronounced tendency ... for mutual aid
associations and civic groups to become recreational associations.”®® It is,
therefore, only as a means of recreation that Negro voluntary associations
can be given a high evaluation. To determine whether or not such a high
evaluation is justified, we shall have to consider, briefly, the general charac-
ter of recreation and amusement in the Negro community. This we shall
do in the following chapter.
“See Chapter 14, Section 3.
’’See footnote 52 to this chapter.
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