Although Carter G. Woodson focuses on the education system’s failures in The Mis-Education of the Negro, he points out that other institutions also contribute to Black people’s subordinate status in the early 20th-century U.S. In particular, Woodson blames Black political and church leaders for deceiving Black communities and profiting at their expense, rather than truly representing and serving their political interests. By showing how these influential but selfish leaders have corrupted their positions of power, Woodson suggests that real social change generally stems from those who strive to serve their community, not those who merely claim to lead it.
Woodson argues that Black institutions—especially churches—are too self-interested and don’t use their power to fight for the interests of the race as a whole. Woodson emphasizes that churches are the most powerful organizations in most Black communities because they are generally the only institutions that Black people themselves control. Furthermore, churches are often a hub for community activity: they support the social networks that can make Black schools and businesses successful. However, despite their influence, churches are also hotbeds for self-interested con artists. For instance, Woodson criticizes the way these churches endlessly divide into smaller and smaller denominations. Rather than a few churches that can meaningfully represent the community, Black communities end up with dozens of different churches, which all fight for power and influence. Selfish, dishonest men become ministers because they know they can easily gain people’s trust and profit off of their parishioners. Worse still, many churches refuse to cooperate because of irrelevant theological differences. For instance, Woodson notes how one town is evenly split between Methodists and Baptists. Since the two groups refuse to work together, the community can’t organize to demand political change. This illustrates why Woodson believes that religious and leadership divisions are holding the race back. Woodson goes on to argue that churches could easily overlook their differences, consolidate, and dedicate their resources to guiding the community and training new leaders. However, preachers aren’t interested, since they are primarily interested in using their platform to make money, rather than to defend their communities’ interests.
Woodson thinks that Black professionals and political leaders follow the same dangerous pattern as churches: they know that division is more profitable than progress, so they hold people back instead of moving them forward. Like churches, Woodson argues, politicians and spokespeople are often “racial racketeer[s]” rather than true leaders. For instance, many spy on their communities, reporting subversive political activity to the white establishment in exchange for payment. Some Black politicians know they will get most Black people’s votes because they are the only Black candidate, so they sell those votes to national parties in exchange for federal contracts. Thus, rather than doing their jobs and fighting for political rights on behalf of their communities, these politicians view their constituents as pawns to buy and sell. Woodson contrasts this with the way Black people organized to stop slavery and fight the Back-to-Africa Movement—these examples show how Black people can actually mobilize to change the national policies that affect them. But Woodson contends that, in the decades between Reconstruction and the Great Depression, Black leaders grew complacent, and the working-class Black masses gave up on reining them in. Similarly, Woodson accuses Black professionals (like doctors, lawyers, and engineers) of extorting money from their communities instead of helping them. For instance, he notes that many educated Black elites become doctors in the hopes of striking it rich, then give their patients meaningless treatments in order to turn a profit. While such professionals get wealthier, the vast majority of Black people don’t benefit. As evidence that Black leaders have failed, Woodson cites the astonishing fact that the Black working class in Washington D.C. is just as poor in the 1920s and 1930s as it was in the 1880s.
Woodson concludes that Black institutions are not only failing to fulfill their duties to the community: rather, they are actively flouting these duties in order to make a profit. In order to further the struggle for political, social, and economic equality, he argues that people must seek to serve the Black community from within, not lead it from above. In other words, like the educators who seek to correct for the influence of a racist school system, the real agents of social change have to be part of the community they are improving, and they have to act for the sake of the community as a whole.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Failures of Black Leadership ThemeTracker
Failures of Black Leadership Quotes in The Mis-Education of the Negro
When a Negro has finished his education in our schools, then, he has been equipped to begin the life of an Americanized or Europeanized white man, but before he steps from the threshold of his alma mater he is told by his teachers that he must go back to his own people from whom he has been estranged by a vision of ideals which in his disillusionment he will realize that he cannot attain. He goes forth to play his part in life, but he must be both social and bisocial at the same time. While he is a part of the body politic, he is in addition to this a member of a particular race to which he must restrict himself in all matters social. While serving his country he must serve within a special group. While being a good American, he must above all things be a “good Negro”; and to perform this definite function he must learn to stay in a “Negro’s place.”
With “mis-educated Negroes” in control themselves, however, it is doubtful that the system would be very much different from what it is or that it would rapidly undergo change. The Negroes thus placed in charge would be the products of the same system and would show no more conception of the task at hand than do the whites who have educated them and shaped their minds as they would have them function. Negro educators of today may have more sympathy and interest in the race than the whites now exploiting Negro institutions as educators, but the former have no more vision than their competitors. Taught from books of the same bias, trained by Caucasians of the same prejudices or by Negroes of enslaved minds, one generation of Negro teachers after another have served for no higher purpose than to do what they are told to do. In other words, a Negro teacher instructing Negro children is in many respects a white teacher thus engaged, for the program in each case is about the same.
Some one recently inquired as to why the religious schools do not teach the people how to tolerate differences of opinion and to cooperate for the common good. This, however, is the thing which these institutions have refused to do. Religious schools have been established, but they are considered necessary to supply workers for denominational outposts and to keep alive the sectarian bias by which the Baptists hope to outstrip the Methodists or the latter the former. No teacher in one of these schools has advanced a single thought which has become a working principle in Christendom, and not one of these centres is worthy of the name of a school of theology.
This minister had given no attention to the religious background of the Negroes to whom he was trying to preach. He knew nothing of their spiritual endowment and their religious experience as influenced by their traditions and environment in which the religion of the Negro has developed and expressed itself. He did not seem to know anything about their present situation. These honest people, therefore, knew nothing additional when he had finished his discourse. As one communicant pointed out, their wants had not been supplied, and they wondered where they might go to hear a word which had some bearing upon the life which they had to live.
The elimination of the Negro from politics, then, has been most unfortunate. The whites may have profited thereby temporarily, but they showed very little foresight. How the whites can expect to make of the Negroes better citizens by leading them to think that they should have no part in the government of this country is a mystery. To keep a man above vagabondage and crime he needs among other things the stimulus of patriotism, but how can a man be patriotic when the effect of his education is to the contrary?
The ambitious of this class do more to keep the race in a state of turmoil and to prevent it from serious community effort than all the other elements combined. The one has a job that the other wants; or the one is a leader of a successful faction, and the other is struggling to supplant him. Everything in the community, then, must yield ground to this puerile contest.
The Negroes, however, will not advance far if they continue to waste their energy abusing those who misdirect and exploit them. The exploiters of the race are not so much at fault as the race itself. If Negroes persist in permitting themselves to be handled in this fashion they will always find some one at hand to impose upon them. The matter is one which rests largely with the Negroes themselves. The race will free itself from exploiters just as soon as it decides to do so. No one else can accomplish this task for the race. It must plan and do for itself.
The race needs workers, not leaders. Such workers will solve the problems which race leaders talk about and raise money to enable them to talk more and more about. […] If we can finally succeed in translating the idea of leadership into that of service, we may soon find it possible to lift the Negro to a higher level.
Why should the Negro writer seek a theme abroad when he has the greatest of all at home?
The bondage of the Negro brought captive from Africa is one of the greatest dramas in history, and the writer who merely sees in that ordeal something to approve or condemn fails to understand the evolution of the human race.
Can you expect teachers to revolutionize the social order for the good of the community? Indeed we must expect this very thing. The educational system of a country is worthless unless it accomplishes this task. Men of scholarship and consequently of prophetic insight must show us the right way and lead us into the light which shines brighter and brighter.
We should not close any accredited Negro colleges or universities, but we should reconstruct the whole system. We should not eliminate many of the courses now being offered, but we should secure men of vision to give them from the point of view of the people to be served. We should not spend less money for the higher education of the Negro, but should redefine higher education as preparation to think and work out a program to serve the lowly rather than to live as an aristocrat.
To educate the Negro we must find out exactly what his background is, what he is today, what his possibilities are, and how to begin with him as he is and make him a better individual of the kind that he is. Instead of cramming the Negro’s mind with what others have shown that they can do, we should develop his latent powers that he may perform in society a part of which others are not capable.
Right in the heart of the highly educated Negro section of Washington, too, is a restaurant catering through the front door exclusively to the white business men, who must live in the Negroes’ section to supply them with the necessities of life, and catering at the same time through the back door to numbers of Negroes who pile into that dingy room to purchase whatever may be thrown at them. Yet less than two blocks away are several Negroes running cafés where they can be served for the same amount and under desirable circumstances. Negroes who do this, we say, do not have the proper attitude toward life and its problems, and for that reason we do not take up time with them. They do not belong to our community. The traducers of the race, however, are guiding these people the wrong way. Why do not the “educated” Negroes change their course by identifying themselves with the masses?
The race cannot hope to solve any serious problem by the changing fortunes of politics. Real politics, the science of government, is deeply rooted in the economic foundation of the social order. To figure greatly in politics the Negro must be a great figure in politics. A class of people slightly lifted above poverty, therefore, can never have much influence in political circles. The Negro must develop character and worth to make him a desirable everywhere so that he will not have to knock at the doors of political parties but will have them thrown open to him.
In the failure to see this and the advocacy of the destruction of the whole economic order to right social wrong we see again the tendency of the Negro to look to some force from without to do for him what he must learn to do for himself. The Negro needs to become radical, and the race will never amount to anything until it does become so, but this radicalism should come from within. The Negro will be very foolish to resort to extreme measures in behalf of foreign movements before he learns to suffer and die to right his own wrongs. There is no movement in the world working especially for the Negro. He must learn to do this for himself or be exterminated just as the American Indian has faced his doom in the setting sun.
The Negro can be made proud of his past only by approaching it scientifically himself and giving his own story to the world. What others have written about the Negro during the last three centuries has been mainly for the purpose of bringing him where he is today and holding him there.
