Barack Obama and the Legacy of the Model Negro

by Dax-Devlon Ross

 Before there were “good blacks” there were “model negroes.” And before there were “model negroes” there were Head Negroes In Charge. Though distinguishable, they are each part of a continuum, a tradition, that traces itself back to Frederick Douglass and is fully crystallized in Booker T. Washington. All three strains of the “acceptable” black are in conversation with one another. They borrow each other’s symbolic elements even as they put them to use – and are put to use – in their specific epoch to allay white America’s anxieties. Their emergences and particular characteristics are in large part dependent upon the contours of their counterpart— the “bad black,” the “black separatist” and “uppity nigger.” For example, Bayard Rustin once noted how, following Paul Robeson’s 1949 statement that blacks would not go to war against the Soviet Union because of it racial egalitarianism, the mainstream black leaders of the day – Mary McLeod Bethune, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Roy Wilkins and Walter White – successfully used Robeson to gain ground on the integration front. Even as they isolated and denounced him, Rustin noted,

[H]is “wild” statement helped to make their demands, by comparison, appear reasonable and even modest; his implied threat of future disorder made the passage of their “responsible, middle-of-the-road” program seem more urgently necessary. (Duberman, 345)