Black Professionals and Race Consciousness: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 1890–1950

Darlene Clark Hine

Preface: The Meta-Argument
Without the parallel institutions that the black professional class created, successful challenges to white supremacy would not have been possible. The formation of parallel organizations (such as the National Medical Association in 1895, the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in 1908, and the National Bar Association in 1925) proved to be far more radical, far more capable of nurturing resistance, than anyone could have anticipated in the closing decade of the nineteenth century and opening decades of the twentieth.1 The development of the black professional class and of the educational and practice facilities in which its members were trained and worked seemed to imply acquiescence in segregation. But such institutions never silenced internal dissent. Ideological tensions between parallelism and integrationism haunted black discourse throughout the twentieth century.	1
Black professionals identified the Achilles' heel of white supremacy: Segregation provided blacks the chance, indeed, the imperative, to develop a range of distinct institutions that they controlled. Maneuvering through their organizations and institutions, they exploited that fundamental weakness in the "separate but equal" system permitted by the U.S. Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.2 For all their violence, lynchings, prejudice, and hatred, white supremacists could not exterminate black people. The white supremacists' major goal, after all, was to maintain a pliable, exploitable labor force that would remain permanently in a subordinate place.	2
Several questions help us frame the evolution of black professional race and class consciousness between 1890 and 1950. How did circumstances, national and global events, and the legal actions and assaults of white supremacists determine black resistance tactics? Did separate development amount to accommodation to hierarchies of economic, political, professional, and social power? Did parallelism impede the long struggle for equality of opportunity? The complementary factors of racism and sexism, of exclusion and segregation, imposed on them by white society and operating in their professions compelled black physicians, nurses, and lawyers to create parallel institutions in order to maintain themselves and to ensure the survival of the greater black community. I argue that parallel institutions offered black Americans not only private space to buttress battered dignity, nurture positive self-images, sharpen skills, and demonstrate expertise. These safe havens sustained relationships and wove networks across communities served. Thus, within their professional preserves, black physicians, nurses, and lawyers debated and improvised innovative resistance strategies.	3
Admittedly, this was forced agency, the best hand they had in an all-around bad deal. Granted, most black professionals were perhaps motivated primarily by self-interest, but at critical junctures their individual self-interest and that of their class merged with the interests, desires, and aspirations of their oppressed race. Uniquely positioned by virtue of their education, respectability, and expertise and the authority that they enjoyed in the black community, only the professionals could open the crack in the edifice of white supremacy that the black community later poured through during the 1950s and 1960s.	. . .