SLATE Summer Conference

Through the Racial Looking Glass

By Nat Hentoff

A Perceptive Report on the American Negro and His New Militancy for Uncompromising Equality

During a British concert last fall, Dizzy Gillespie dedicated a number to "Mother Africa". Looking at the audience with a characteristically mocking smile, he added, "We're going to take over the world, so you had better get used to it."

The listeners chuckled, secure in their own freedom from predjudice and convinced that Dizzy was just clowning again. A few nights later, a group of British jazzmen held a private party in honor of Gillespie. Toward dawn, Dizzy burst into an impromptu lecture:

"You people had better just lie down and die. You've lost Africa and Asia, and now they are cutting out from white power everywhere. You'd better give up or learn how it fells being a minority."

Dizzy was still laughing, but he wasn't clowning. Gillespie is no racist in the sense of the bitter, separatist sects such as Elijah Muhammad's Temples of Islam. He has led several integrated bands and has many nontoken white friends; but Dizzy's irrressible race pride does symbolize partly the accelerating change in American Negroes' attitudes towards whites-including white liberals-and toward themselves.

They are generating those "winds of social revolution" which labor leader A. Philip Randolph has warned the A.F.L. C.I.O., "are blowing on every institution on the country." Some of the winds are reverse and destructive and represent ugly reverse racism-Crow Jim. Others are inchoate and so far are powered more by smoldering emotions than by specific programs. The strongest are those forces for immediate and final integration which are directed by varying techniques by such groups as the N.A.A.C.P., and the Congress of Racial Equality, and Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The one organic change which now applies to nearly all Negro adults—including the vast majority of the unorganized—has been underlined by James Baldwin: "The American Negro can no longer be, and will never be again, controlled by white America's image of him." The intensity and extent of the self-emancipation are revealed in comedian Dick Gregory's explosion during a candid interview with Paul Krassner in The Realist:

"I'm so goddamn sick and tired of a white man telling us about us-he can't. He tells us, `Wait, take your time.' You can't tell me to wait. You're not black 24 hours a day... This is the right that the white man has been assuming for years-that he can assume to know more about us than we know about ourselves. And this is wrong. Because he don't. He knows about us what we want him to know. He never follows us home... We are better qualified to write about the white man in this country than he's damn-near qualified to write about us. Because he do things around us because he don't count us that his best friends know anything about."

The Negro maid has certainly observed more about her employers than they have realized. The employer, playwright Lorraine Hansberry adds, "doesn't go to the maid's house. You see, people get this all confused. They think the alienation is equal on both sides. It isn't. We have been washing everybody's underwear for 300 years. We know when yours is not clean."

Beyond this sense of having a superior knowlege of the battleground, there is also the overwhelming realization among Negroes that even though they have intimately known white weaknesses, they have nonetheless allowed their own self-image to be imposed on them by the majority culture. There is an awakening insight that they need no longer be perpetually and pervasively on the defensive.

When Joe Louis first came to New York from Detroit, he stubbornly refused photographers' requests that he pose eating watermelon. He was very fond of the fruit, but he told them he hated watermelon rather than help reinforce a national caricature. Noe Floyd Patterson can say to the press: "I used to think Jesus was a white man, but I can no longer accept that. He is either a Jesus of no color, or a Jesus with a skin of all colors.

On all fronts in the Negro revolution there is an angry wonder at the extent to which Negroes can be molded by whites. As a Nashville intellectual told Dr. C. Eric Lincoln was the latter was researching his book, The Black Muslims In America; "Negro children grow up, and they don't know who in the hell they are. They aren't white, and the whites reject them. But white is all they know about. And you talk about adjustment. It's a wonder any of us survive."

Many have survived by becoming hardened agsinst the white world and against themselves. Alison Burroughs-Cuney taught for a while in the Day Care Center in New York and a large majority of her pupils consisted of members of minority groups. In Freedomways: A Quarterly Review of the Negro Freedom Movement, she wrote:

"Most of these children sooner or later grow tough, as a matter of self-preservation; you expected it. But I was especially dismayed to note that Negro children often grew tougher... The other children were, in many cases, just as poor, and aggressive enough, but not with the bitterness of hopelessness and desperate impudence of the Negro children... (The Negro child) may display a boldness he doesn't feel. He is just `loud,' he will be heard, he will exist. His sensibilities are blunted, he cares for no one-not even himself-but he will survive by any means that he can. He swallows the false values of white society; he is brutalized and all too often he becomes delinquent."

On occasion, a teacher is able to break through the fortifications, but a poignanant index of the damage that has already been done is this conversation reported in a Life story on a slum school in New York. A white teacher has reached a small child. "`I love Miss Lemon,' the little boy said. Another child taunted him. `She white, man, she white.' Weeping, kicking, the boy said, `She's no white lady, she colored, just like me... colored."

At home too, there there has been a measure of whiteness. James Baldwin remembers, "One's hair was always being attacked with hair brushes and combs and Vaseline; it was shameful to have `nappy' hair. One's legs and arms and face were were always being greased so that one would not look `ashy' in the wintertime. One was always being mercilessly scrubbed and polished, as in the hope that a stain could thus be washed away. I hazard that the Negro children, of my generation, anyway, had an earlier more painful acquaintence with soap than any children anywhere."

Whites have largely been ignorant about how many Negroes felt about themselves, nor have they been aware of the color caste system that has existed so long within the American Negro community. In Negro Digest, Dr. Lincoln has pointed out that "self-hatred and the rejection of the hated stereotype often exist sides by side." In Atlanta, for example, where the Negro community has a long history of forthright struggle against descrimination, "in one prominent family of light-skinned Negroes, the mother sought to discourage an unacceptably dark-skinned college girl from calling on her near-blond daughter by playing “Deep Purple” on the piano whenever she put in an appearence. Sarah Vaughan recalls of her childhood: "I often wished I was of medium-brown skin color. I imagined people of that color were regarded more highly than I. To most persons who know me, I thought, I was just another little black girl for whom the future was just as dark as it was for thousands of others like me."

The word of the new pride in being black has not yet reached most Negro children, but one illustration of the rapidly altering self-image among adults is the rebellion among Negro women against hair straighteners as more of them wear their hair in the close-cropped, "natural" African style. Writer Margaret Burroughs has complemented James Baldwin's description of Negro boyhood: "The girl-child's hair is washed, pressed curled or waved. At an early age, one is made aware of this temporary quality of transformation. One learns to guard against moisture of any type, perspiration or rain, for fear that the hair will go back. One develops a mind set against swimming, unless it's just before one goes to the beauty parlor. I wonder how many Negro swimming champions have been lost to us because of this consideration. Perhaps now you understand the reason for my revolutuion and the reason why I am wearing my hair as God made it... We women who now wear our hair natural are being our own true selves. We have ceased to look for the key to unlock the spiral in our hair.

Singer Abbey Lincoln, another woman who has gone natural goes beyond Miss Burroughs and adds a different chauvinistic criterion for attractiveness: "I think that the black woman is the most beautiful and perfectly wonderful woman in the world."

Similarly, there are Negro jass musicians who are now stating publicly what many-not all Negro jazzmen-have telling each other for decades. The bluntest is pianist Cecil Taylor: "The greatness of jazz occurs because it includes all the mores and folkways of Negros during the last 50 years. No, don't tell me that living in the same environment is enough. You don't have the same cultural difficulties I do. Even the best white players can only simulate a feeling of the American Negro.

The same dissonance is being sounded in Negro fiction. A character based on Charlie Parker says sharply in John Williams' novel, NightSong: "Tell us about jazz and American art and how us niggers did it. Shooooot. This is my business. This is all I know,Man. Ain't no spado critics. All the spade deejays they playin rock `n' roll. Ain't but a few spade joints that can pay my way...You white, it's your world. You won't let me make it in it and you can't. Now ain't that a bitch?"

One cronically enraged, nonfictional Negro jazz musician actaully began to plan a public assault on Al Hirt to dramatize what he meant by white "exploitation" of our music. A friend reminded him that Miles Davis and Errol Garner wern't exactly starving, and that the kamikaze project was dropped. The musician is now conducting a private census of the booking offices and jazz-record companies to determine how many Negro executives and secretaries they employ. "You can't call this crazy behavior," he told his friend defiantly, and his friend admitted that indeed he could not.

Another musician has decided he will employ no more whites in his band and is totally resistant to the argument that he is thereby bigoted as he accuses most whites to be. His fixed position is an example of the distortion of values that has occasionally accompanied this surge of defiant self-appreciation among some Negroes. Another illustration was an editorial by James Hicks, editor of the New York Amsterdam News, one of the country's leading Negro weeklies. When India invaded Goa and violated both the United Nations' charter and Nehru's own frequently proclaimed precepts of moral behavior among nations, Hicks could only see the event in terms of color: "For the first time in my more than 40 years of existence I have seen a black nation take something away from a white nation by force. And I'm glad." The Amsterdam News, however, has been silent concerning a black leader, Nkrumah of Ghana, suppressing black opposition by force.

A major impetus to the spiraling pride of race among Negroes has, of course, been the swift emergenge into power of the independent African nations, and Hicks is far from alone in being uncritical of their admittedly complex transitional periods as they try to establish internal order. The fact, however, that those states do exist has had a profound effect on nearly all Negroes who recall their shame in childhood at seeing American movies about Africa.

Today the African political leader is a source of satifaction as well as of irony. A few months ago, Dizzy Gillespie went to a Northern Airport to meet a Nigerian diplomat. "You should see," he told a friend, "the dignity and respect these Africans get-and they're the same as me. In the crowd with them I was in the clique, and for the first time in my life I felt free. A lot of white people thought I was African, and man, they were "Tomming" me.

Among a small but vociferous group of American Negro militants, Africa has their primary allegiance. Insisting that Negroes will never be accorded full equality here, they have established such Afro-oriented political organizations as the New Alajo Party in New York's Harlem. Its leader Ofuntola Oserjeman proclaims: "Our liberation must be complete. Every technique of slavery must be wiped out. We must begin with our so-called leaders. Support Africanizaton. Note to men: cut the brims off your hats, you will look like you should, and less like an imitation...Our names, our clothes, our clubs, our churches, our religion, our businesses, manners and customs-all must change.

Thes Negro Zionists however are fragmentized into splinter groups. Much more significant are the equally separatist but much larger and tightly organized Black Muslims who have grown into a number of 100,000 with at least 70 temples and missions in 27 states. Their numbers are drawn mostly from Negro poor and their credo has distilled the long dormant pain and hatred of these underground men. The muslims advocate strict social separation of the races; economic autonomy for the American Negro through his own businesses and banks, a separate educational system comcontrating on Negro history and Negro superiority; and eventually a political enclave of their own that will consist of several states to be paid to the Negro as an indemnity for slavery. In reacting against white stereotypes of the Negro, the Black Muslims create and savor their own caricatures of white men who, according to Elijah Muhammad are by nature "murderers and liars."

Although the Muslims have made progress in setting up their own businesses and schools, the wild unreality of their ultimate political solution is bound to limit their membership, unless the whole American racial system becomes so irrational that the hundreds of thousands of American Negroes who now sympathize but do not join the Muslims finally feel that there is no longer any realistic hope for their ascent within the larger sociaety and choose Muhammad's demonology in desperation.

"The Muslin movement," James Baldwin warned, "has all the evidence on its side; unless one supposes that the ideal of black supremacy has virtues denied the idea of white supremacy, one cannot accect the conclusion that the Muslims draw from this evidence. On the other hand, it is quite impossible to argue with a Muslim concerning the actual state of the Negroes in this country; the truth, after all, is the truth." Baldwin wrote in the New York Times magazine which is an indication that he sees raw truth, as he sees it, at least being disseminated among those who can add ne evidence before the Muslims grow appreciably more stronger.

One of the newer manifestations of Negro militancy is a string of committees, generally lead by young Negro intellectuals, and called such urgent names as "Freedom Now" or "On Guard for Freedom". One in Atlanta is simply called the "Now-Nows". They are based in most of the larger cities and while they have not yet fused into a nationally coordinated movement, they keep in contact. These actionists work as pressure groups to spur established Negro leaders into stronger positions and ocasionally they organize their own demenstrations against descrimination. They admit no whites because their goal is direction of the Negro masses and they contend they could not gain the respect and trust of the most frustrated Negroes if they themselves were integrated. A few have white wives and are finding this a problem. At one New York meeting of various Nationalist groups, Malcom X, the shrewd chief strategist for Elijah Muhammad, pointed at two leaders of the "On Guard for Freedom Committee" who are wedded to white girls and thundered, "No one involved in a mixed marriage can speak for Afro-Americans."

These committees consider the Muslim movement politically ingenuous and regard the N.A.A.C.P. and the Urban League as too "assimilationist" and too slow. They disdain the philosphy of nonviolence that activates C.O.R.E. and and Martin Luther King's legions. Their hero is Robert Williams, former N.A.A.C.P. chapter head in Monroe, North Carolina, who was removed from his position by that organization for arming Negroes in his city against white marauders. Williams is a bristling symbol to these young Negroes who feel as one has said, "We have no other cheeks to turn. We Afro-Americans will be heard by any means you make it necessary for us to use."

Calvin Hicks, chairman of the board of the On Guard for Freedom Comittee in New York, laid it on the line before a mixed metting of liberals last fall. "We are," he said, engaged in a rebellion against the black Uncle Toms and also against the white liberals and radicals for whom the Negro has existed as a social illustration not a person. And you," he looked in earnest at the young members of the Young Peoples Socialist League, "will have to suffer because we cannot trust you any longer."

For those American whites who would like to try to imagine themselves being Negro. columnist P.L. Prattis of the Negro Pittsburgh Courier has started the game for his side with a blunt message to the Negro: If we were to take our freedom as seriously as our white fellows take theirs, or the freedom of the West Berliners, wouldn't all of us small-fry Negroes be able to tell the big ones like Martin Luther King and Roy Wilkins... We want our freedom now, or we're going to make it mighty rough for somebody with those home-mades short range bombs we have stuck away in our cellars.

Prattis does not mean that there is actually a large, secret arsenal ready for a racial Armageddon. He is, however, verbalizing a fantasy that has occured to many Negroes and that might well occur to whites in a game of role reversal.

A major concern, therefore, of Negro leaders who want these wounds to heal and not to fester is that this bitterness, however thereputic, and cause new and deeper chasms. For this reason and for the sake of simple justice, even previouslyiously "moderate" Negroes are agreed that unless progress toward full equality is markedly accelerated, the Black Muslims and similar products of despair will continue to grow in strength.

Also potentially dangerous are these still unqualified, and unaffiliated and chronically unemployed Negroes who have become distrustful of all organized power groups, racist or integrationist. These pockets of hopeless rage are nor unaffected by change, and individuals among them can finally explode into violence. A few months ago, a white man was stabbed on the steps of a Brooklyn church. The murderer, a 29 year old Negro laborer told the police, "I killed him because I felt like it. I killed him because he was white. I don't know why I did it. I want to save my race."

The immediate cause of this man's frustration-and that of millions of Negroes-is economic discrimination. Most whites do not fully realize the height of economic barriers. As of the 1960 cencus, the Negro population has grown to 18,871,831. In the past 20 years, it has increased 46.7 percent. Now 10.5 percent of the population. Negroes earn less than 5 percent of the nation's income. Furthermore, the last decade has shown that that unemployment has never dropped below a 10 percent average as contrasted with an average of 5 percent for the total population.

The majority of Negro workers, prevented by the local employer predjudice and discriminatory Union rules from entering skilled vocations, perform not only the most menial, lowest paying work with the least seniority; but they are involved in precisely the type of job which is disappearing becasuse of automation. The result as labor write Michael Harringtom has observed in "Commonweal", is that more and more Negroes over 40 "will cetainly never find another job as good, and will be condemned to job instability for the rest of their lives."

The young Negro entering the labor market also finds the same obstacles—very often union made—toward learning a craft. Throughout the country, Negroes make up less than 2 percent of the apprentices an the various trade-union training programs for skilled jobs. "It's almost easier," says Gus Edwards of the Urban League," for a colored kid to become a nuclear physicist than it is forhim to become a plumber." The Ngro worker, in short, is caught in a circle of inadequacies. Prevented by union and employer predjudice from acquiring skills, he is indeed les qualified on the average for advanced employment opportunities when they do occur.

Realizing that rootless Negro youth and despariring older Negro workers make easy prey for the racist demagogues on street corners, Negro labor and civic leaders have hardened their stands and all agree that this is going to be a decade of unremitting, organized pressure for basic change. On New Year's Day 1962, A. Philip Randolph who founded the Negro American Labor Council in1959 because the A.F.L. C.I.O. was not moving fast enough to democratize its affiliates, told a church audience in Harlem that that the Negro must organize for power because "there are no reserved seats." The same audience was told by an executive member of the N.A.A.C.P. that political power must be accumulated along with economic force. "You may look free," he told the New York Negroes, "but you are just as subordinated as we are in the South."

This past January, President Kennedy sent a message to executive secretary Roy Wilkins of the N.A.A.C.P. to congratulate Wilkins on the occasion of a dinner held in the latter's honor. Wilkins brushed off the President's praise, telling Kennedy that the N.A.A.C.P. regarded his first year's record on civil rights "Dissapointing" because Kennedy had made the basic error of approacing the problem by executive action alone instead of pressing for legislative redress. The Amsterdam News was esstatic in approval. "Show me," wrote editor James Hicks, "the Negro leader who will stand up and give the President hell just 24 hours after the President has got through saying, `this is my kind of colored boy.' "

Representatives of the Kennedy Administration have tried to reason with the N.A.A.C.P., pointed out, among other things, the increase in Negro attorneys in the Justice Department in the past year from 10 to 50. One answer, impatient and sounding not too dissimilar from what a Black Muslim might say, came from Clarence Mitchell, director of the N.A.A.C.P.'s Washington Bureau: "The Republicans and the democrats don't want to give us civil rights, but the big difference is that the democrats have more Negroes who can explain why we don't need such rights.

The day of accomodating Negro leaders, men who are willing to accept partial gains for a promise of more to come, is nearly over. Among those tolling their end in the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a Montgomery, Alabama minister and a close associate of Martin Luther King in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. "For too long," Abernathy told a Nashville Rally of nonviolent demonstraters, "we have been invited downtown, the big Baptist preacher, the Methodist bischop, the Negro undertaker and one or two other Negroes. In a hotel, the Chamber of Commerce serves us tea and cookies and the Negroes have eaten all the cookies and drunk up all the tea and the white man said, `We wouldn't mind giving you this integration if all Negroes were like you. But you are different from the rest. They leave the meeting with their chests stuck out, saying to themselves, `You know we are different from the rest of those Negroes.' I get so sick and tired or traveling across the country and Negroes coming up to me and saying: `I am the only Negro on the City Council.' You don't have anything to boast about until you get five or six Negroes on the City Council. Then let me hear you boast. Here we don't have but four Negro Congressman in the United States-and we boast about the only kind of this and the only other."

The kind of Negro described by Abernathy is one on the defensive in Negro Communitities everywhere. His main bastion used to be in the south, but as an aftermath of the sit-ins and freedom-rides by Negroes of a new generation. The older gradualists are now changing. After hundreds of Negroes were imprisioned in Albany, Georgia, last winter during a demonstration, a wealthy Negro real estate man in that city told a Wall Street Journal reporter,

"This jailing was a wonderful thing. Before it happened, I guess we professional people were inclined to go along with the whites. We wanted to keep the masses pacified. We didn't come in contact with the day-to-day segregation. The white people we meet were usually interested in selling us something, and we don't use the buses or feel any economic pressure. It was easy to forget the lives most Negroes have to live."

In Jackson, Mississippi, a Negro attorney added:

"When the freedom riders kept coming into Jackson, I thought that this was not the right method. But since the overall picture has developed, C.O.R.E. and the other young people have done more to advance the cause of civil rights in the state than anything in the last 25 years. Event the 1954 Supreme Court decision, great as it was, did not arouse the Negro community like this did."

The prognosis for the immediate future is a diversity of uncompromising tactics. As one strategist in Tennessee puts it:

Racism will be eliminated when Afro-Americans make life inconvenient for anyone in our way. And I mean racism on both sides. If we-who want to be a fully participating part of American life-win, the Muslims and the disaffiliated intellectuals will be isolated. If we do not succeed quickly we're all in for trouble.

One weapon which will be increasingly employed is the boycott. In the past 25 years, it has been used only intermittently in the North, but during the sitins, "selective buying campaigns" in the South startled both Negroes and whites by the extent of their effectiveness. In Savannah, one such boycott caused retail sales in some large stores to drop as much as 50 percent. Last year, some 400 Negro ministers in Philadelphia convinced at least one third of that cities 700,000 Negroes to join in a "selective patronage" program which forced a baking company, a major soft drink concern, and an oil and gas colossus to upgrade employment opportunities for Negroes.

So sensitive, in fact, is the Negroe community becoming to descriminations that a New York branch of the N.A.A.C.P. recently got into trouble with its membership for having a Cadillac as a door-prize for a fund raising campaign. Negro salesmen for other auto concerns complained that Cadillac's employment policy excluded them. Other members-as in the case of Joe Louis and the watermelon- objected because, as one said, "Negroes have too long been identified with yearning for a Cadillac as a status symbol." It was too late to send the car back, but the head of the chapter promised that the incident would not be repeated.

Concerted political action is also increasing. The Negro press is not letting the president forget that he received 80 percent of Negro votes cast in 1960. In city after city, candidates are being measured by more and more Negro voters in terms of their positions on immediate projects to expand Negro opportunites. Much credit for the narrow win of New Jersey Governor Richard J. Hughes over former Secretary of Labor James Mitchell is given to Phil Weightman, an insistent integrationist who organized a huge registation program for Hughes among New Jersey's Negroes.

In the deep South, fears still keep many Negroes from registering, and apathy born of hopelessness holds down the number of voters in the North. Nonetheless, the percentage of Negro voters everywhere, who are being persuaded to vote by the N.A.A.C.P., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is inexorably rising. White politicians are increasingly conscious that Negroes can push them off the public payroll. In New York City, the local Republican organization was sorely distressed last summer at the lead paragraph in The Amsterdam News' report of a campaign dinner for a Republican candidate for Mayor: "If Governor Nelson Rockefeller State Attorney Louis Lefkowitz and other state and city Republican leaders expect to win this election they had better improve race relations... Not only did the GOP State Committee not have a single Negro on the program, but there wasn't even a token Negro among 61 persons seated on the dais at dinner.

Nonsepartist Negro leaders are as intransigent in fighting for equal rights in education as they are in making their political weight felt. They are disturbed at the fact that after eight years of the Supreme Court ruling, only 7 percent of Negro pupils in the South are in mixed classes. While the border states are omitted, the figure drops to only 1 percent. They are equally angered by the less publicized phenomonon of "resegregation," As whites move to the suburbs and leave neighborhodds into which Negroes are finally being admitted, newly desegregated schools quickly become nearly all-Negro in such cities as Washington, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oklahoma City and Miami. There is now more segregation in the Baltimore and St. Louis area than before the Supreme Court decision in 1954.

As a result, there will be mounting campaigns for Federal open-housing laws and executive orders to that effect. The core of predjudice everywhere is lack of neighborhodd, day-to-day contact between races. Meanwhile, there is an increasingly fierce struggle against the extension of segregation-by-neighborhood to the schools and this fight is beginning to awaken many Northern whites to Negroes' impatience with gradualism. The school board of New Rochelle of New York State has not yet fully recovered from the shock of a federal judge telling it that it had been operated a segregated school system through venerable "neighborhood policy" of allocating children to schools.

Court action has been started to abolish neighborhood boundary policies in the Chicago and Detroit areas and other cities are on the list. Leading many of these actions is New York attorney Paul Zuber who asserts: "The North must realize that the `New Negro' that they have read about in the South is becoming everpresent in the North." Zuber, too, is making use of the game of role reversal in his speeches. "If white people," Zuber has stated "were compelled to live in a society where new legislation would determine whether or not their historical rights were going to be protected, new legislation would be first in order of every state."

In view of this mood it is no surprise when Negro leaders united to condemn Dr. James Conant's resistance to bursting through neighborhood boundary lines in schooling. Conant feels that it is more important to improve slum schools than to "effect token integration by transporting pupils across attendance lines." The essence of the counterargument was given by Samuel Pierce, a Negro member of the New York City Board of Education: "If a Negro never gets an opportunity to associate or compet mentally with whites in the classroom when he is young, he may well grow up feeling inadequate, insecure and inferior, when he has to compete with whites later on in his life. The result will be that he will not, because of a phychological factor, be able to compete successfully. The obvious consequence will be a limitation on Negro progress and a retardation of the integration process."

Another drive just starting is an insistence that textbooks be radically changed to omit distortions about the Negro and to cover more fully the richness and complexity of Afro-American achievments and of the pre-colonial civilization in Africa itself. In a Cleaveland high school that is 95 percent Negro, a pupil finally asked her history teacher last fall, "Sir, why do all these history books show us picking cotton, why I've never picked cotton in all my life."

The inescapable point is that even if they wanted to-and they do not- Negro leaders cannot let up on the pressures they are applying in any of these areas because they in turn are being pushed. No Negro leader is immune to the charges of softness. A. Philip Randolph has singlehandedly forced George Meany to invite the once outlaw Negro American Labor Council to work with the A.F.L. C.I.O. in ending descrimination. Randolphe continues to dramatize the gulf between labor's promises and results and will not let big labor rest. Yet a Negro Nationalist paper, The African News and Views, referred scornfully last Noverember to the fact that Randolph's Pullman Porters Union employs a white lawyer, a white auditor, and a white economist., and that it leases space from a white landlord in Harlem.

Nor is Martin Luther King safe from criticism from his own followers. In the past year, although King remains a very meaningful symbol to many college students in the "movement", there have been sounds of dissatisfaction. King has been charged with lack of administrative ability and, more seriously, with a lack of fire. He concedes there is some truth to both accusations. A shy man, he would prefer a much more contemplative life than he is forced to lead, and he is more skilled in theology than in the tactics of social dislocation. "One of my weaknesses as a leader," King has said, "is that I am too courteous and I'm not candid enough."

In any case, King has no intention of withdrawing from the battle. His Southeren Christian Leadership Conference is intensifying its projects to get Negroes registered in the South. C.O.R.E. is also expanding its activities, and there will be more waves of freedom rides. A newer force, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee represents the toughest cadre of nonviolent commandos in the South. Most of its basic staff of 16 are Negroes in college who have pledged to stay out of school for a year at least. They work in the rural vastness of Alabama Mississippi and Louisiana.

"Snick" as the committe is called, insists that its workers live among Negroes who are trying to register. "The people we deal with," says one organizer, "are so afraid of retaliation that at first, many will not even talk about voting. The only way we can make progress with them-and we have-is to stay long enough, eat what they eat, live where they live, and thereby gain their confidence. Also, by being there, we act as a buffer and take upon ourselves much of the white anger which would otherwise fall on them."

In addition to their role as the most militant Negroes in the South (except for the Muslims and other separtist groups) the egalitarians of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in yet another way. Unlike many middle-class Nofro students who have participated in sit-ins and freedom rides, Snick's actionists are not certain they will be content when full integration is finally achieved. They join with the young Negro intellectuals in the North in questioning the essential value structure of American society.

Also looking beyond integration is James Bevel, who is in charge of a nonviolent group in Jackson. Mississippi. "If a nonviolent group will work in Missippi," he says, "it will work anywhere. If it can eradicate segregation, it can eradicate any evil. I can see the possibility of a nonviolent movement uniting the students in India and in Russia, or China. I can even see a nonviolent group on a battle-field."

Other Negroes, not nearly so sanguine as Bevel, about the practical potential of nonviolent action, nonetheless do agree that their own function will be to continue to question the foundations of American society. "The question is openly being raised," says Lorraine Hansberry, "among all Negro intellectuals, among all politically conscious Negroes; Is it necessary to integrate oneself into a burning house?"

So far there has been minute recognition of this result of Negroes' engagementin the struggle for their rights. Some young Negroes are evolving into a new role-a social critic not only of discrimination but of the total context of life in America. It is of this Negro that Professor Kenneth Clark speaks: "He cannot be content to demand integration and personal acceptance in a decaying moral structure. He cannot help his country gird itself for the arduous struggle before it by awillingness to share equality in a tottering social structure of moral hypocricy, social insensitivity, personal despair and desperation. He must demand that the substance and strenght inherent in the democratic process be fulfilled rather than cynically abused and disparaged."

The weight of evidence now indicates meanwhile that integration itself may be fully achieved in time to prevent the Black Muslims and other separatist groups from being more than a historical footnote to the period of catharsis among Negroes that preceded the final abolition of racial barriors in this country. The pressures are working.

The labor unions may also be forced to desegregate much sooner than most are willing to, as a result of unrelenting pressure from A. Philip Randolph and other critics within, and outside the labor force. Many employers have already shown a remarkably quick reaction to multiple pressures. In January, for one example the country's 50 leading producers of defense weapons and heavy equipment-with a labor force of over 3,500,000-agreed not only to end descrimination on Government projects but in every area of work and in all units, subsidiaries and divsions of their corporations. Negro leaders complain that this agreement has so far been mainly on paper, but for those companies who lag, there will be increased economic pressure in the form of boycotts as well as inevitable legislation on local and national levels. In similar ways, the schools will be redesegregated by increasing abandonment of the policy whereby children attend only schools in their own neighborhood.

More and more Negroes are working through their distrust of whites to agreement with Martin Luther King, who said, "Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy." Jazz trumpeter Donald Byrd for one, has dissassociated himself from those of his colleagues who are using jazz as a racist expression. He wrote to Down Beat: "I would like to speak solely from the standpoint of a human being-for once not from the standpoint of race-because you must remember that jazz was based on European harmaony and melodic concepts...I think that, contrary to the views of other musicians, classical and otherwise, it is time we joined with all musicians to create music purely for the joy of creating it..."

Even the image of Santa Clause is beginning to change in so previously unlikely a place as Atlanta. Jet Magazine reported last Christmas, a Negro Santa Clause was hired for a white-owned record shop. "Although he is the forst Negro Santa Clause to appear anywhere in Atlanta, he registered surprise that white kids expressed neither shock nor resentment while Negro kids kept rubbing their eyes in disbelief.

There are many abrasions, awakenings and more serious wounds to come before the white man ceases to regard himself as Santa Clause and the Negro stops thinking of white as the Devil's color. For many generations, pockets of hatrod will remain among both whites and Negroes, but the strong likelihood is that major issues between the races in America will be resolved in some 10 to 20 years. Thereafter, the next stage of dissent in this country may well lead to some integrated minority demonstrating against all the rest of us, Negro and white, in an attempt to broaden and deepen social revolution.

Judging from the composition of many burgeoning peace groups, this stage has already begun. A Negro "freedom fighter" recently clipped an Associated Negro Press Bulletin which began: "The Defense Department made clear that it is against segregation in fallout shelters." He grimaced, and said to a friend, "That's where we go from here. I'll be damned if I want to be integrated into oblivion."

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Title: Slate Summer Conference, 1962
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