On the basis of my reading of Bruce Gordon’s resignation memo, it appears that he came to the NAACP executive post with a keen — and I believe correct — understanding that the NAACP’s historic “civil rights advocacy function” did not preclude it from performing what I call a “social-crisis reformation function.” I use the term “correct” in characterizing Gordon’s understanding of the interconnectedness between an NAACP “advocacy-cum-social reformation function” for a very basic reason. Because it was the progressive leadership strand — not the centrist-minded leadership strand — during the activist development phase of the NAACP in the 1930s who exhibited an understanding of an interconnection between an NAACP “rights advocacy-cum-social reformation” leadership paradigm. That progressive leadership strand in the 1930s NAACP revolved around James Weldon Johnson (who retired in 1932 to teach at Fisk University and died in a car accident in 1938) and W.E.B. DuBois, while the centrist leadership strand in the 1930s revolved around Walter White (who succeeded Johnson as executive secretary) and his assistant Roy Wilkins.
An interesting account of the 1930s NAACP progressive/centrist leadership strands can be found in David Lewis’ second volume on DuBois’ biography — W.E.B. DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century ,1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt Co., 2000). As Professor Lewis informs us, by the middle 1930s when the NAACP’s twenty-odd years of challenging the American White supremacist juggernaut did not have many viable successes to celebrate, W.E.B. DuBois began rethinking the basic ideas that informed the NAACP integration civil rights leadership paradigm.
He settled on what might be called a one-step-backward-two-steps-forward political vision for the leading ethnic-bloc organization among Black Americans. Recognizing that White ethnic groups such as Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Jewish-Americans used their ethnic-bloc patterns to generate what might be called intra-Irish or intra-Jewish ethnic agencies for social advancement of their communities — a kind of “ethnic-communitarian advancement”, let’s call it — DuBois, a keen student of American society in general, suggested a somewhat similar vision-and-strategy for Black people.
In late 1933 and early 1934, W.E.B. DuBois put forth this suggestion in a series of articles in The Crisis — the NAACP’s official journal which he founded and edited. He proposed that Black American civil rights leadership might place less emphasis on its integration or desegregation strategy, on the one hand, while on the other hand mobilizing Black ethnic-bloc resources (churches, civic associations, trade unions like A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, women’s organizations, etc.) along the lines of intra-Black communitarian social advancement.
In an article titled “Segregation” that appeared in The Crisis (January 1934), W.E.B. DuBois expressed a deep pessimism on when viable interracial or integration concord would evolve in what was then a rigidly White-supremacist delineated American civilization. “It is impossible to wait for the millennium of free and normal [integration] intercourse,” DuBois lamented in regard to the tenacity of Negro-phobic White behavior in American life. Accordingly, DuBois suggested that Black Americans’ eventual social advancement would increasingly depend upon “the race-conscious black cooperating together in his own institutions and movements,” the purpose of which would be especially “to organize and conduct enterprises.”
W.E.B. DuBois observed — correctly I think — that such an intra-Black communitarian thrust was nothing new. Why? Because, as DuBois put it, “the vast majority of the Negroes in the United States are born in colored homes, educated in separate colored schools, attend separate colored churches, marry colored mates, and find their amusements in colored YMCA’s and YWCA’s.” (This sentence, by the way, sounds familiar to the post-Civil Rights Movement era African-American ear, save the phrase “find their amusements in colored YMCA’s and YWCA’s”, a situation now replaced — sadly — by Hip Hop entertainment). And it should be remarked that W.E.B. DuBois had a cogent understanding of the tenacity of the Negro-phobic ethos, nay virus, in American civilization. Research on the history of racist segregation in housing, for example, reveals this tenacity of Negro-phobic White American behavior.
For instance, in the study American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), Professors Douglas Massey and N.A. Denton uncovered that whereas what they termed the “segregation index” for housing patterns stood at 46% in the city of Philadelphia between 1860 and 1910 (a city in which the young DuBois undertook his first sociological research between 1896 and 1899 resulting in the classic study The Philadelphia Negro (1899) ), by 1940 the “segregation index” increased massively to 88.8%, and forty-odd years later in the 1980s the “segregation index” fluctuated between 77% and 79%. (Massey’s and Denton’s “segregation index” of 0% is equivalent to no segregation, while 100% represents total segregation).
Not surprisingly, a rather taut ideological fissure surfaced in the NAACP’s leadership circle following DuBois’ public proposal in 1934 to supplement the organization’s official integration policy with what might be called a two-tier or dualistic Black social advancement program. A program combining the historic “civil rights advocacy” function with a “intra-Black communitarian uplift” function. Not only did W.E.B. DuBois’ critics among the NAACP leadership circle — especially Walter White and Roy Wilkins — vigorously oppose a two-tier policy strategy for the NAACP (what today I characterize as a “civil rights advocacy-cum-social reformation” strategy). They went from policy opposition to maneuvering to have W.E.B. DuBois dismissed from his longstanding editorship of The Crisis (since 1910), an outcome that was officially effectuated as the year 1934 closed down.
In W.E.B. DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (1993), Professor David Lewis’ treatment of the policy fissure between DuBois and the NAACP centrist-minded leaders like Walter White and Roy Wilkins in 1934 is, from my perspective, rather problematic. Lewis relates in a favorable tone the Byzantine maneuverings by Walter White and Roy Wilkins that closed the door on W.E.B. DuBois’ intellectually and politically outstanding role in the official ranks of the NAACP as founder-editor of its great journal The Crisis. For David Lewis, DuBois’ embrace of an intra-Black communitarian policy perspective for the NAACP marked the nadir of DuBois’ leadership career.
Lewis, for instance, refers favorably to an insulting commentary on DuBois’ intra-Black communitarian proposal by the conservative Black columnist for The Pittsburgh Courier, George Schuyler, who remarked: “Imagine the Top Sergeant of the Talented Tenth [W.E.B. DuBois] fouling like a punch drunk pugilist despairing of victory.” For David Lewis, George Schuyler’s infantile, tacky, and profane commentary on DuBois’ Black communitarian ideas “was [an] apt judgment.” (p.104)
In proposing a two-tier NAACP leadership perspective, W.E.B. DuBois was not indulging in typical one-dimensional separatist “black nationalism nostrums”, as Professor David Lewis claims. Nor was he throwing-in-the-towel on the historic “civil rights advocacy” NAACP role against American racism. Quite the contrary. Rather, DuBois’ Black communitarian ideas were premised on an insightful understanding by DuBois about Black American’s generic socio-cultural attributes in American life.
Namely, that Black Americans are both a “racial group” and an “ethic group”. As a “racial group” Black Americans can be thought of as a defensive ethnic group, which is to say as a group shaped in part by oppressive White supremacist dynamics in American civilization. As an “ethnic group” Black Americans can be thought of as an offensive ethnic group, which is to say as a group like Irish-Americans and other White ethnic groups who are fashioned by organic historical-cultural patterns, such as religion, folk beliefs and heritage, cultural-expressive practices, familial authority practices, and linguistic patterns.
Accordingly, when W.E.B. DuBois promulgated his two-tier policy perspective (civil rights advocacy-cum-Black communitarianism) in his famous essay titled “Segregation” in The Crisis (January 1934), he introduced what might be dubbed a “new civil rights rhetoric”. This new civil rights rhetoric sought to place the plight of the dark-skinned working-class majority of African-Americans in the pre-World War II era at the center of the mainline civil rights organization’s policy agenda — the NAACP’s agenda. After all, by the 1930s — despite a quarter-century emphasis on integration policies by the NAACP and its allies among liberal White Americans — the plight of the dark-skinned working-class Black masses in cities and in agrarian areas remained one of precarious jobs when they had jobs, poor education opportunities, and poverty-level living conditions. U.S. Census Bureau data for 1940, as World War II commenced for the United States, reported some 90% of African-Americans classified as living at poverty-level.
