More dangerously, this presidential contempt engulfs students, who grow into maturity with personalities habituated to submission and who are likely to believe in the infallibility of the dictatorship principle. In general, Negro-educated Negroes have never learned to live with Freedom and this is why they are almost totally missing from the ranks of those who apply the privileges and the tools of democracy to the construction of Freedom’s spacious house. Where they have taken over as leaders of Negro communities there rises a nauseating reek of devious and oily obsequiousness. It is a kind of fascism in reverse. A group of Negro parents in a Virginia city wished to equalize the facilities of the Negro school with those of white schools. One of the things that the colored school lacked was a cafeteria. This was particularly noticeable because the city school board had just added such a convenience (at a cost of $20,000) to the only white school without it. The Negro parents went to the principal of their own school. As an ambitious and hard-working educator, less complacent and timeserving than most of his type, he had ideas, and the chief one was that the parents’ group solicit funds (he thought $2,500 would do it!) in Negro homes, churches, and other racial institutions. By a show of initiative and energy, he thought, it might be brought home to the white people that Negro citizens were worthy of consideration. Naturally among those to whom the project was first presented was the Negro acknowledged as the colored community’s leader—a lawyer, graduate of a Negro college and a white law school. The esteem he commanded among his own people and the attention he could get from the whites were very real. A friend of mine happened to be in the lawyer’s office when the committee of parents went there. Whether out of boorishness, as my friend thinks, or because of the very human desire to prove his influence, or because he clearly saw his duty as a leader, the lawyer took over completely. “We’ll get in touch with some real money,” he said. “No point in piddling around with the colored folks’ two cents’ worth.” Then, picking up the telephone, he called several of his white “friends”—a peanut-produce manufacturer (he carefully identified them between calls), a banker and an insurance broker, among others—and explained to them the Negro parents’ project for the school. In ten minutes of “the most consummate fawning,” my friend said afterward, the lawyer had solicited pledges of more than a thousand dollars. He typed out an identifying statement for the parents and sent them off to collect from his white friends.