Eugene Kinckle Jones by Felix L. Armfield

Author:Felix L. Armfield [Armfield, Felix L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Social Work, History, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9780252093623
Google: uZRDl9xtcPMC
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2011-02-14T03:58:09+00:00

5. Changing of the Guard

His character was as nearly perfect as a man’s can be. He was gentle, patient, and wise. His integrity was unshakable and was equaled only by his courage. He understood the true nature of American democracy, its weaknesses and its strength, its internal group conflicts, and what needed to be done to fulfill its promises.

—Board of Trustees of the National Urban League on Eugene Kinckle Jones, 1954

As Jones returned to New York to resume his full-time position as executive secretary of the NUL, a changing climate was emerging within the social-work profession. Jones arrived in 1937 and began to engage directly in providing social-work services for black people. Major changes within the social-work profession, the NUL, and Jones’s personal life loomed on the horizon.

Many social workers were convinced by Roosevelt’s second-term election that New Deal policies would effectively address major social woes. Particularly following the adoption of the Social Security Act in 1935, many social reformers, black and white, began looking to government-rather than community-initiated relief.1 By the 1930s, there was a gradual move away from the community settlement-house concept toward the establishment of government welfare agencies. The 1920s model of casework as the paradigm of social work lost center stage during the Depression. The social-work scholar John H. Ehrenreich concludes that “with the advent of the Depression and its massive poverty, its newly energized social programs, its new social work institutions, and its transformed relationship between social workers and government, the twenties’ model of professionalism became an anachronism.”2 Ehrenreich further claims that “the rapid expansion of relief programs following Roosevelt’s inauguration as president had transformed the relationship between relief and casework.”3 In short, social-work elites could no longer claim that social work solely operated with respect to clients and patrons. Furthermore, the profession was deeply split between the old guard and the rank-and-filers by the 1930s.

The best-known of the elite settlement-house social reformers, Jane Addams, died in 1935. According to the historian Judith Trolander, “[N]o one came along in the settlement movement to replace her in the public mind.”4 Even those settlement homes that remained by the mid-1930s began to realize that certain fundamental changes were necessary to keep up with the changing trends in social work. Perhaps the greatest failure of the settlement-house movement was that it did not embrace an overall integrated agenda during this time of Jim Crow segregation. The historian Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn concludes that race was the main cause of the movement’s decline: “Not only did the settlements’ failure to welcome black neighbors universally into their programs contribute to their long-term decline, but their restrictionism left the great promise of the movement unfulfilled.”5

A group of social workers attempted to address racial injustice within the profession during the 1930s; this was often described as the “rank-and-file” movement among organized social work. Though the organization’s greatest concern was the establishment of social-work unions, it played a major role in radical agitation during the 1930s. Most social workers identified the rank-and-file movement as the political left wing of social work.

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