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hey can you write a one paragraph analysis or your opinion on the information provided below: Grass-roots black community organization such as mutual benefit societies,church groups, and gospel quartets were crucial to black people's survival. Through them, African Americans created and sustained bonds of community, mutual support networks, and a collectivist ethos that shaped black working-class political struggle. As Elsa Barkley Brown points out in her work on Richmond, Virginia, mutual benefit societies, like many other black organizations, "institutionalized a vision of community based on notions of collectivity and mutuality even as [they] struggled with the practical problems of implementing and sustaining such a vision." Although the balance of power in these organizations was not always equal,
with males and the middle class sometimes dominant, Brown demonstrates that within benevolent societies all members played some role in constructing a vision of the community.
Yet we need to acknowledge intraracial class tensions. Mutual disdain, disappointment, and even fear occasionally found their way into the public transcript. Some middle-class blacks, for example, regarded the black poor as lazy, self destructive, and prone to criminal behavior. Geraldine Moore, a black middle-class resident of Birmingham, Alabama, wrote that many poor blacks in her city knew "nothing but waiting for a handout of some kind, drinking, cursing, fighting and prostitution." On the other hand, in his study of a small Mississippi town, the sociologist Allison Davis found that "lower class" blacks often "accused upper-class
persons (the 'big shots,' the 'Big Negroes') of snobbishness, color preference, extreme selfishness, disloyalty in caste leadership, ('sellin' out to white folks'), and economic
exploitation of their patients and customers."'
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answered4 years ago