For the coming of the Garveyites shattered the defensive bulwark around the protective community of Negroes. The whites did not understand this at first, nor ever fully. Accustomed as they were to thinking of the Negro as an undifferentiated caste, they could not be expected to. Where there had seemed to be solidarity, there were factions. Where there had been one leadership, now there were more. Where it had been common to associate the force in the local Negro world with individuals, now the mass seemed to rear up faceless; and where no spontaneous drive had seemed to exist, now there was a hum of self-generating energy. The whites did not understand, but some of them found and took an advantage. In our district which, with only a scattered thirty per cent of the population white, was fast becoming a ghetto, Negroes had enjoyed political control. They had had no trouble electing one of their own to the school board and another to the city council. The same men had been returned to office time and again. What they did there (and they did little) seemed not nearly so important as just being there. They had enormous prestige and influence among Negroes, and they had not had to fight to keep it. But in the fall elections of that year they did. Directed by agents from New York, the local Garveyites put up their own candidates, chosen on class lines: the encumbents who, in the common phrase, were “dickties,” found their following split. The campaign smelled of pitch and brimstone and led to street brawls between the sadly outnumbered teen-aged children of the encumbent faction and the Garveyites. Still the whites understood only enough of what was happening to give it burlesque treatment in the press. But the agents from New York were professionals, and their professionalism soon showed itself. They made a deal with the white leaders in the ward. Before the Negroes knew anything, the whites had picked their own candidates, and while Negroes fought one another, whites won the offices.