Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [384]
Since their white friends from the North were thought to be nearer to the sources of power, some blacks thought it in their best interests to cultivate close relationships, even at the risk of compromising their own independence. Still others deferred to them as men of experience and education who were in advantageous positions, whether as Freedmen’s Bureau agents or the representatives of benevolent societies, to render them immediate relief and assistance. But in those places where a black leadership quickly emerged in the aftermath of the war, impatience with white dictation and advice manifested itself from the very outset. Not surprisingly, the New Orleans Tribune voiced the strongest opinions on this question. Without intending any disrespect for “our white friends,” and while appreciating “the disinterestedness, the courage, the sound sense and the fraternal feeling they have displayed during their long crusade in behalf of liberty,” the newspaper insisted that black people make their own policies, decide on priorities, and select leaders from among themselves. “Who can better know our interest than we do? Who is more competent to discern what is good for us than we are?” How blacks answered those questions went to the very heart of their freedom, and the Tribune thought their white friends could best demonstrate their friendship by immediately conceding that fact.
If we are men—as our friends contend we are—we are able to attend to our own business. There is no man in the world so perfectly identified with our own interest as to understand it better than we do ourselves. We listen respectfully to the addresses of our white friends; but we must deliberate and decide for ourselves.… We need friends, it is true; but we do not need tutors. The age of guardianship is past forever. We now think for ourselves, and we shall act for ourselves.15
Although blacks demonstrated a healthy skepticism about how much reliance they should place on their white friends, they were not always agreed on the amount of confidence they could place in themselves and in their own leaders and movements. With the critical problems they faced, and the need to project an image of harmony and responsibility to a skeptical white America, blacks could ill afford the factional struggles, acrimonious debates, and conflicts of personal ambition that pitted the dark-skinned against the light-skinned, the ex-slave against the freeborn, the native against the northern-born. No matter how often black leaders, newspapers, and meetings called for unity, the advent of freedom had a way of exacerbating old differences and introducing new divisions. During the Convention of the Freedmen of North Carolina, for example, one delegate could not restrain himself after a light-skinned Negro had criticized him for daring to oppose the northern-born black they had chosen for chairman. “I didn’t come here,” he shouted, “and no other man of this convention didn’t come here, sir, to have the whip of slavery cracked over us by no slaveholder’s son.” With similar disdain, some blacks who had been free before the war resented being called “freedmen” and tried in every way to dissociate themselves from the former slaves.16
The sources of such divisiveness were familiar enough, reflecting as they did deeply rooted distinctions not only of color but of class, education, income, occupation, and acculturation to white society. Aside from being more literate and affluent than the ex-slaves, the mulattoes and free Negroes who made up the colored elites in cities like New Orleans, Charleston, and Washington, D.C., tended to lead a separate social life, married within their group, attended different churches, and preferred to send their children to private schools rather than to the newly established freedmen’s schools. The Brown Fellowship Society of Charleston, which admitted only well-to-do mulattoes, and the