Race Harmony and Black Progress by Mark Ellis

Author:Mark Ellis [Ellis, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies
ISBN: 9780253010667
Google: EViSAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2013-10-16T22:24:44+00:00

7 Northern Money and Race Studies

In march 1925, at the first National Interracial Conference in Cincinnati, Jack Woofter and Will Alexander discovered how ambivalently African Americans regarded the interracial cooperation movement. The conference was held under the auspices of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) and the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and organized by black economist and social gospeler George E. Haynes, who ran the FCC’s Department of Race Relations. His co-chairmen were George C. Clement, an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church bishop who led the FCC’s Commission on the Church and Race Relations (CCRR), and two white clergymen, CIC chairman M. Ashby Jones and the English-born president and cofounder of the FCC, S. Parkes Cadman. Other organizations represented at Cincinnati included the YMCA and the YWCA, along with sundry churches, public health associations, fraternal organizations, and student bodies. The Russell Sage Foundation also sent several delegates, including Mary van Kleeck, the New York social reformer who directed the foundation’s Department of Industrial Studies.1

Many of the 216 participants (114 blacks and 102 whites) at the Cincinnati conference knew each other through war work, religious committees, or social work networks. Woofter, Alexander, and Ashby Jones were accompanied by the CIC’s director of publicity, Robert B. Eleazer, and David D. Jones, a young black administrator recently appointed to be CIC general field secretary. Several CIC state interracial committees were represented, as were unconnected interracial groups outside the South. No one attended from the leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) or the National Urban League (NUL), but the latter’s southern field secretary, Jesse O. Thomas, from Atlanta, and its Philadelphia secretary, Forrester B. Washington, participated throughout the conference. The small number of academic participants included E. Franklin Frazier and John Hope from Morehouse College and the white Chicago-trained sociologist Earle E. Eubank of the University of Cincinnati. Apart from Haynes, the best-known black leader present was the Reverend W. H. Jernagin of the National Race Congress, a second-division organization based in the District of Columbia and dominated by church ministers. The black press was represented by Nettie George Speedy of the Chicago Defender, Chandler Owen of the socialist Messenger magazine, and Nahum Brascher of the Associated Negro Press.2

Haynes opened proceedings with a gibe at new theorists of race in the social sciences, such as Franz Boas and Melville J. Herskovits, and organizations like the NAACP (and, implicitly, the Socialist Party and the Universal Negro Improvement Association). His point was that a national profile did not bestow local relevance: “The danger now arises that communities, organizations and individuals may lose sight of the fact that the problems consist of concrete relations of the two races in industry, in education, in church, in state, in neighborhoods and in other relations of life. The danger is that such a movement may become more or less theoretical and generalized rather than practical and localized.”3

This attitude marked one of the differences between the 1925 National Interracial Conference and the better-known 1928 National Interracial Conference held in Washington, D.

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