Groping Toward Democracy by Priscilla A. Dowden-White

Author:Priscilla A. Dowden-White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Chapter Five

In the White Light of Critical Public Opinion

Health Care, Education, and the Manipulation of Public Culture

St. Louis Negroes recognize the futility of fighting race prejudice in any other manner than through education and self improvement. But they rightly object to any legal or implied discrimination.

—Opportunity Magazine(February 1923)

In 1924 Jesse F. Steiner noted that much of what was being spoken of in popular usage as community organization dealt with a very limited phase of the whole problem. The community that seriously undertook to organize all its social forces had taken but one step when it devised the machinery for coordinating its social agencies. “If community organization is the way out,” Steiner cautioned, “it must be sufficiently inclusive to deal with the fundamental forces that are making for [the] disorganization” found in connection with the economic, political, religious, and educational institutions of the community.1 The interrelatedness of community forces was such that a “family case work agency may find its center of attack upon the relief problems of a family, but this leads out at once to the fields of housing, health, sanitation, nutrition, child care, and juvenile delinquency. Similarly when a better housing league undertakes to map out its program of work, it will find its interests drawn into such fields as sanitation, health, city planning, standards of living, immigration, and race segregation.”2

The racial segregation ordinance that voters approved in 1916, though thwarted by the Supreme Court the following year, was a clear signal of the support for racial segregation. The hundreds of race restrictive covenants contracted between real estate interests and private citizens, from 1910 to 1948, provides further proof of the segregationist stranglehold and were a determining factor in the formation of African American neighborhoods. Yet these activities alone served neither to create nor to ensure adequate social welfare institutions and services for the African American community. While separate institutions were sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessey v. Ferguson and the state of Missouri’s regulations mandating segregated institutions, it was not so much the laws but, rather, social action on the part of social welfare community organizers that ensured African Americans’ social welfare delivery and institution building during the Jim Crow era.

Unwilling to “conceive of any standard as being sufficient, which fail[ed] to include the Negro,” black social welfare reformers were aggressive in their struggle for full citizenship rights. Fundamental to those rights, as the SLUL executive secretary John T. Clark would observe during the depths of the Great Depression, was granting “the Negro fuller opportunities to live and earn along with increased responsibilities of citizenship[,] . . . the acid test of any program of race relations.”3 Securing and expanding employment opportunities for black migrants remained of paramount concern to African American community organizers throughout the interwar period. Education and health-care issues were deeply intertwined with labor concerns. Social welfare organizers reasoned that increased employment opportunities for African Americans depended in large measure on the educational preparedness and physical well-being of the group—a

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