Through the Racial Looking Glass

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'd better get used to it."

The listeners chuckled, secure in their own freedom from prejudice and convinced that the grinning Dizzy was simply clowning as usual. A few nights later, a group of British jazzmen held a private party in honor of Dizzy. Toward dawn, Gillespie burst into an impromptu lecture: "You people had better just lie down and die. You've lost Asia and Africa, and now they're cutting out from white power everywhere. You'd better give up or begin to learn how it feels 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 non-token white friends; but Dizzy's irrepressible race pride does partly symbolize the accelerating change in American Negroes' attitudes toward 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 in the country." Some of the winds are 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 with varying techniques by such groups as the N.A.A.C.P., 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, nor will ever be again, controlled by white America's image of him." The intensity and extent of this 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 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 his own self. Because he do things around us because we don't count that his friends know nothing about."

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

Beyond this sense of having a superior knowledge of the battleground, there is the belated, 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 to pose eating watermelon. He was very fond of the fruit, but he told the photographers he hated watermelon rather than help reinforce a national caricature. Now Floyd Patterson can say to the press: "I used to think Jesus was a white man. All the pictures I've ever seen of Him showed Him as a white man, but I can no longer accept that. He either is a Jesus of no color, or a Jesus with a skin that is all colors."

On all fronts in the Negro revolution there is angry wonder at the extent to which Negroes have allowed themselves to be molded by whites. As a Nashville intellectual told Dr. C. Eric Lincoln while the latter was researching his book, The Black Muslims in America: "Negro children grow up, and they don't know who the hell they are. They aren't white, and white rejects 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 against the white world — and against themselves. Alison Burroughs-Cuney taught for a while in a Day Care Center in New York and a large majority of her pupils consisted of members of minority groups. In Freedom-ways: A Quarterly Review of the Negro Freedom Movement, she wrote:

"Most of these children sooner or later grew tough, as a matter of self-preservation; you expected it. But I was especially dismayed to note that the Negro child 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 that he does not feel. He is '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 he can. He swallows the false values of this white society; he is brutalized, and he all too often becomes delinquent."

On occasion, a teacher is able to break through the fortifications, but a poignant 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 Negro child. " 'I love Miss Lemon,' the little boy said. Another child taunted him. 'She white, man, she white.' Weeping, kicking, the boy swung wildly at the other child and screamed, 'She's no white lady ... She's colored ... just like me ... colored.' "

At home, too, there has been the measure of whiteness. James Baldwin remembers: "One's hair was always being attacked with hard brushes and combs and Vaseline; it was shameful to have 'nappy' hair. One's legs and arms and face 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 and more painful acquaintance with soap than any other 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 side by side." In Atlanta, for example, where the Negro community has a long history of forthright struggle against discrimination, "in one prominent family of light-skinned Negroes, the mother sought to discourage an unacceptably dark-skinned college student from calling on her near-blonde daughter by playing Deep Purple on the piano whenever he put in an appearance." Sarah Vaughan recalls of her childhood: "I often wished I was a medium-brown skin color. I imagined people of that color were regarded more highly than I. To most persons who knew 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 the temporary quality of this transformation. One learns to guard against moisture of any type, perspiration or rain, for fear that one's hair will go 'back.' One develops a mind-set against swimming, unless it is just before one is to go 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 reasons for my revolution and why I am wearing my hair the way 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 jazz musicians who are now stating publicly what (continued on page 70)Racial Looking Glass(continued from page 66) many — not all Negro jazzmen — have been telling each other for decades. The bluntest is composer-pianist Cecil Taylor: "The greatness in jazz occurs because it includes all the mores and folkways of Negroes during the last 50 years. No, don't tell me that living in the same kind of environment is enough. You don't have the kind of cultural difficulties I do. Even the best white players only simulate the 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, Night Song: "Tell us about jazz and American art and how us niggers did it. Sheeeeeeeeet! This is my business. This is all I know, man ... Ain't no spade critics. All the spade deejays, they playin' rock 'n' roll. Ain't but a few spade joints 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 chronically enraged, nonfictional Negro jazz musician actually began to plan a public assault on Al Hirt to dramatize what he termed white exploitation of "our" music. A friend reminded him that Miles Davis and Erroll Garner weren't exactly starving, and 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 as bigoted as he accuses most whites of being. 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 American Negroes has, of course, been the swift emergence 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 these states do exist has had a profound effect on nearly all Negroes who recall their shame in childhood at seeing American movies about Africa. They cringed at the natives, since they were convinced those primitives reinforced the barbarous cartoons which represented the way most whites looked at all blacks.

Today the African political leader is a source of satisfaction 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 the white people thought I was African, and man, they were 'tomming' me!"

Among a small but vociferous minority of American Negro militants, Africa has become their primary allegiance. Insisting that Negroes will never be accorded full equality here, they have established such Africa-oriented political organizations as the New Alajo Party in New York's Harlem. Its leader, Ofuntola Oser-jeman, proclaims: "Our liberation must be complete. Every technique of slavery must be wiped out. We must begin with our so-called leaders. Support Africanization! Note to men: adopt the African look; 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 schools, businesses, holidays, games, arts, manners and customs — all must change!"

These 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 from less than 30,000 in 1959 to over 100,000 with at least 70 temples and missions in some 27 states. Their numbers are drawn mostly from the 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 concentrating on Negro history and Negro superiority; and eventually, a political enclave of their own that will consist of several states to be paid to American Negroes as 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 ("The Messenger of Allah to the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in North America"), 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 situation becomes so irrational that the hundreds of thousands of American Negroes who now sympathize with but do not join the Muslims finally feel there is no longer any realistic hope for their ascent within the larger society and choose Muhammad's demonology in desperation.

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

One of the newer manifestations of Negro militancy is a string of committees, generally led by young Negro intellectuals, and called by such urgent names as "Freedom Now" or "On Guard for Freedom." One in Atlanta is simply titled "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 occasionally they organize their own demonstrations against discrimination. They admit no whites because their goal is direction of the Negro masses and they contend they could not gain trust among 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 a few months ago, Malcolm 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 Muslims politically ingenuous and regard the N.A.A.C.P. and the Urban League as too "assimilationist" and too slow. They disdain the philosophy of nonviolence that activates C.O.R.E. and Martin Luther King's legions. Their hero is Robert (continued on page 86)Racial Looking Glass(continued from page 70) Williams, a 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. After a complicated situation involving Williams' alleged kidnapping of a white couple in Monroe during a day of racial skirmishes, Williams fled to Cuba. He remains, however, a bristling symbol to those 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 Committee in New York, laid it on the line before a mixed meeting of liberals in New York last fall. "We are," he said, "engaged in a cleansing process, an internal rebellion against the black Uncle Toms and also against the white liberals and radicals for whom the Negro has existed as a social illustration rather than a person. And you," he looked at the earnest young white members of the Young Peoples Socialist League in the front rows, "will have to suffer because we cannot trust any of you any longer. Sure, we'll make mistakes and there may be ugliness in our militance, but you cannot expect a man to wallow around in the mud for 300 years and come up saintly."

In this last respect, Hicks was emphasizing an unpalatable but inevitable fact. It is unrealistic to expect all American Negroes to forgive and forget their history in this country without at least a decade and probably more of emotional catharsis. Kenneth Clark, a psychology professor at C.C.N.Y. — on whose studies concerning the effects of discrimination the Supreme Court partially based its 1954 school desegregation decision — expresses the hope of Negro and white integrationists that the storm must eventually subside because "Hate is an extremely difficult emotion to sustain over a prolonged period of time."

Yet there are other close observers of American race relations who share Clark's opinion but who also agree with Morroe Berger, Associate Professor of Sociology at Princeton, that up to a point, "Hate is very often useful. What has happened on this question of hate is that we have gotten a glimpse into the Negro community ... The whites have not known what the Negroes were thinking and now ... white people are beginning to find that Negroes are very critical, very bitter, and many of them hate whites."

It would have been educational, for example, for whites to observe the differences in reactions to the 1958 movie The Defiant Ones in Negro neighborhoods from their own. At the movie's end, Sidney Poitier, a convict on the edge of freedom, chooses to reject his escape route and instead rescue his white companion. Liberal whites were moved at so noble a gesture of reconciliation. Some Negro audiences, outraged, yelled at the screen, "Get back on the train, you fool!"

In sum, there can be no organic resolution of racial divisions until this reservoir of fury is recognized by responsible white and Negro leaders. A British professor of psychology, John Cohen, has suggested that one way of relieving international tensions is to play a game he calls "role reversal." Americans, for example, should try to imagine themselves Russians, and the reverse should take place. The aim of role reversal, says Cohen, "is not necessarily to convince, but to communicate."

For those American whites who would like to try to imagine being Negro, columnist P. L. Prattis of the Negro Pittsburgh Courier has started the game for his side in a blunt message to Negroes: "Just suppose we took our freedom as seriously as our white fellow Americans take theirs, or the freedom of West Berliners." If Negroes did, Prattis continues, would not "all of us small-fry Negroes tell all the big Negroes like Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King ... and others who lead the pack: 'We're tired of just playing around trying to get along with those white people ... We want our freedom NOW, or we're going to make it mighty rough for somebody with those homemade, short-range bombs we have stashed in our cellars'?"

Prattis does not mean there actually is a large, secret arsenal ready for a racial Armageddon. He is, however, verbalizing a fantasy that has occurred 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 therapeutic, may roar out of control and cause new and deeper chasms. For this reason as well as for the sake of simple justice, even previously "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 those still unaffiliated, unskilled and chronically underemployed Negroes who have become distrustful of all organized power groups, racist or integrationist. These pockets of hopeless rage are not unaffected by the winds of change, and individuals among them can finally explode in violence. A few months ago, a white man was stabbed to death on the steps of a Brooklyn church. The murderer, a 29-year-old, unemployed Negro laborer, told 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 census, the Negro population has grown to 18,871,831. In the past 20 years, it has increased 46.7 percent while the overall population gain was 35.7 percent. Now 10.5 percent of the population, Negroes earn less than five percent of the nation's income. Furthermore, in the last decade, unemployment among Negroes has never dropped below 10 percent as contrasted with an average of five percent for the total population.

The majority of Negro workers, prevented by local employer prejudice and by 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 kind of job that is rapidly disappearing as automation and other technological improvements increase (some 2,000,000 of these jobs now vanish annually). The result, as labor writer Michael Harrington has observed in Commonweal, is that more and more Negroes over 40 "will certainly never find another job as good and may well be condemned to job instability for the rest of their lives."

The young Negro entering the labor market finds the same obstacles — very often union-made — toward learning a craft. Throughout the country, Negroes make up less than two percent of the apprentices in 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 for him to be a plumber." The Negro worker, in short, is caught in a circle of inadequacies. Prevented by union and employer prejudice from acquiring skills, he is indeed less qualified on the average for advanced employment opportunities when they do occur.

Moreover, as Dr. James Conant has indicated in his book Slums and Suburbs, and in many speeches to educational associations, there is the further inflammable fact that unemployment among all youth under 20 is currently 20 percent. "The problem," he emphasizes, "of unemployed youth in the large cities is in no small part a Negro problem ... The existence in the slums ... of thousands of youths ... who are both out of school and out of work is an explosive situation. It is social dynamite."

Realizing that rootless Negro youth and despairing 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 of 1962, A. Philip Randolph, who founded the Negro American Labor Council in 1959 because the A.F.L.-C.I.O. was not moving fast enough to democratize its affiliates, told a church audience in Harlem that the Negro must organize for power because "there are no reserved seats. You keep what you can take." The same audience was told by an executive member of the North Carolina 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 in the South."

The N.A.A.C.P. as a whole, bristling at charges from young Negro intellectuals and Southern direct actionists that it has become too "soft." is increasingly militant. Although high N.A.A.C.P. officials have criticized those who overstress demonstrations when the long-term successes are to be won in the courts, Roy Wilkins, N.A.A.C.P. executive secretary, has reached the point at which he too speaks of the "growing disenchantment of the Negro community with sweet reason and with customary channels."

This past January, President Kennedy sent a message of congratulations to Wilkins on the occasion of a dinner 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 "disappointing" because Kennedy had made the "basic error" of approaching the problem by executive action alone instead of pressing for legislative redress. The Amsterdam News was ecstatic in approval. "Show me," wrote editor James Hicks, "another Negro leader who will stand up and give the President of the United States 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., pointing out, among other evidences of progress, the increase in Negro attorneys in the Justice Department during 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 accommodating Negro leaders, men willing to accept partial gains now for promise of more to come, is nearly over. Among those tolling their end is the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a Montgomery, Alabama, minister and close associate of Martin Luther King in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. "For too long," Abernathy told a Nashville rally of nonviolent demonstrators, "we have been invited downtown, the big Baptist preacher, the Methodist Bishop, 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 men have said, 'We wouldn't mind giving you this integration if all of the 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.' The time has passed for us to sell our people out for a cup of tea and a cookie! ... I get so sick and tired of traveling across the country and Negroes coming up to me with their chests stuck out: 'I'm the only Negro in the City Council.' 'I'm the only somebody on a committee.' We don't want no only anything! You don't have anything to boast of until you can get five or six Negroes on the City Council. Then let me hear you boast. Here we don't have but four Negro Congressmen in the United States of America — and we boast about the only this and the only other."

The kind of Negro described by Abernathy is on the defensive in Negro communities 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 also changing. After hundreds of Negroes were imprisoned 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 day-to-day segregation. The white people we meet are usually interested in selling us, 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 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. Even the 1954 Supreme Court decision, great as it was, did not arouse the Negro community like this did."

Nor is this stiffening of racial pride limited to the North or to those Southern cities that have been invaded by the direct actionists. In the small town of Elloree, South Carolina, there used to be an annual Christmas parade which was climaxed by Santa Claus tossing candy and toys to all the children in sight. In fact, says Negro reporter John McCray, the adult Negroes "had considered whites a sort of Santa Claus. White men gave them jobs, made them loans for crops, farm implements, and food and clothing for their families. They handed down discarded wearing apparel and excess food and scraps from their tables. Then came the U.S. Supreme Court's decision."

After 60 Negro parents in Elloree had joined in a petition for desegregation of the schools, Negro workers began to be fired and farmers lost their credit. At the end of the 1955 Christmas parade, Santa Claus threw gifts only to the white children. Ever since, there have been separate Santa Clauses in Elloree. "To hell with all white people now," said an elder of the Negro community a couple of years ago. "We know they ain't no damned Santa Claus."

With moderation and Santa Claus discredited, 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 really 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 and completely enough, we're all in 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 sit-ins, "selective buying campaigns" in the South startled Negroes as well as 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, 400 Negro ministers in Philadelphia convinced at least one-third of that city's 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.

In North Carolina, the N.A.A.C.P. threatened a statewide boycott against all A&P stores that did not hire Negroes as cashiers. The A&P has begun to yield. A decision to picket a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Champaign, Illinois, was called off after the company president agreed that the "next driver-salesman hired here by Coke will be a Negro." In New York, the state N.A.A.C.P. has instituted a selective buying campaign focused on three prominent cigarette manufacturers because all have barred Negroes from apprentice training programs. When the manager of a linen service in Albany, Georgia, proclaimed that he was going to fire any of his Negro employees who had engaged in desegregation demonstrations, Negro barbers told him they would no longer be his customers. The manager changed his mind.

Also certain to spread, especially in the North, are C.O.R.E.-style sit-ins against housing discrimination. As responsible a housing expert as Harris L. Present, chairman of the New York City Council on Housing Location, is convinced that "the time has come in the City of New York where the techniques used by the freedom riders and sit-in demonstrators will have to be applied to get more equitable treatment for tenants." Meanwhile, after growing success in the East, C.O.R.E. has already begun a "Freedom Dweller" campaign in Chicago in addition to another in Los Angeles.

So sensitive, in fact, is the Negro community becoming to discrimination that the 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 at a fund-raising dance. 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 a yearning for a Cadillac as a status symbol." It was too late to send the car back, but the head of the chapter promised 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 the 3,000,000 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 opportunities. Much credit for the narrow win of New Jersey Governor Richard J. Hughes over former Secretary of Labor James Mitchell is given to Phil Weight-man, an insistent integrationist who organized a huge registration campaign for Hughes among New Jersey's Negroes.

In Detroit, Jerome Cavanagh, a political unknown, defeated the incumbent mayor, Louis C. Miriani, even though the latter was supported by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Negro voters turned against Miriani in protest against police brutality and against the mayor's silence on a proposal made just before the mayoralty campaign by Negro City Councilman William Patrick that would have strengthened the antidiscrimination powers of the city's community relations commission. In the November vote for the Council, Patrick himself rose from seventh to third place in total number of ballots. Political writer R. J. Widick concluded in New America: "The exceedingly high vote in the Negro and working class districts put an end to the theory that 'you don't have to worry about them, they won't vote,' a theory that infuriated Negro leaders in Detroit who were determined once and for all to break through the benevolent paternalism with which too many people, including some top labor leaders, have treated them."

The first Republican municipal victory in Louisville in 28 years last November was largely due to Negro bitterness at reigning Democrats who had refused to desegregate public accommodations. In addition, a Negro, Mrs. Amelia Tucker, became the first Negro woman to be elected to a Southern state legislature since Reconstruction. Negroes already have the majority of the vote — 57 percent — in Atlanta, and were responsible last year for the election of a liberal mayor as against a segregationist.

Negroes are now served at lunch counters in Savannah because enough of them bloc-voted to throw out a slate of city officials who had opposed integrating the eating places. In Durham, North Carolina, Negroes form 25 percent of the population but turn out 30 percent of the vote. Accordingly, public schools are beginning to be integrated and Negroes are being hired by, as well as served at, downtown lunch counters. More Negroes, moreover, are to be found on public boards and commissions. John Wheeler, Negro president of the Mechanics & Farmers Bank in Durham, says flatly: "I can't point to anything here that we got that didn't have pressure in the background. The political structure here listens to us because we have a strong balance of power."

In the deep South, fear still keeps many Negroes from registering, and apathy born of hopelessness holds down the number of voters in the North. Nonetheless, the percentage of Negroes everywhere who are being persuaded to register 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 the Republican candidate for mayor: "If Governor Nelson Rockefeller, State Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz and other state and city Republican leaders expect to win elections this year or next, they are going to have to improve on their 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 the dinner."

Nonseparatist 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 eight years after the Supreme Court school decision, only seven percent of Negro pupils in the South are in mixed classes. When the border states are omitted, that figure drops to one percent. They are equally angered by the less-publicized phenomenon of "resegregation." As whites move to the suburbs and leave neighborhoods 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 school systems than before the 1954 decision.

As a result, there will be mounting campaigns for Federal open-housing laws and executive orders to that effect. The core of prejudice everywhere is lack of neighborhood, day-to-day contact between the races as equals. 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 in New York State has not yet fully recovered from the shock of a federal judge telling it that it had been operating a segregated school system through its venerable "neighborhood policy" of allocating children to schools.

Agitation in New York City is rising. Although an "open enrollment" plan now allows elementary and junior high school children to transfer to a mixed school outside of their neighborhoods, that plan does not cover high schools. Ninety percent of the Negro pupils at high school level are assigned to 20 percent of the city's high schools. Last year a suit was filed against the Board of Education to end this practice, because fewer Negro parents are willing to wait until they can move their families into integrated neighborhoods. Their children are in school now, and now is when they want changes made. Already the Superintendent of Schools has promised major concessions, and the suit has been dropped.

Court action has been started to abolish neighborhood boundary policies in the Chicago and Detroit school systems, 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 ever present in Northern states." Zuber, too, is making use of the "role reversal" game 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 the first order of every state legislature and city council in the Northern states."

In view of this mood, it was 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 compete mentally in the classroom with whites when he is young, he may well grow up feeling inadequate, insecure and inferior when he has to compete with whites later on in life. The result will be that he will not, because of this psychological factor, be able to compete successfully. The obvious consequence will be a limitation on Negro progress and a retardation of the integration process."

"Now Conant is an intelligent and conscientious man," said a Negro judge, "and yet he still could not understand that simple a point. This controversy shows how much you whites still have to learn."

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

A recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League on the way minorities are treated in secondary school textbooks makes a point that has yet to occur to many whites but is a gnawing source of dissatisfaction among Negroes: "Historically, American Negroes continue to be portrayed primarily as simple, childlike slaves and as uneducated, bewildered freedmen. Most textbooks do not chronicle the achievements of this people in the years from 1876 to the present. Where attention is given to outstanding Negroes in American history, the presentation is insufficient to counterbalance the previously created stereotype of a racially inferior group."

"I once asked a white teacher when I was in grade school," says a Muslim leader, "about my people's history. She told me we didn't have any."

As a group, textbook publishers are notoriously unwilling to antagonize any section of the country and have consequently been largely reluctant to act on criticisms of Negro coverage in history and social science texts. It is a safe prediction, however, that many publishers will yield by the end of the decade, and probably before then. More Negroes are being elected to school boards and more Negro parents are prepared to keep their children out of school for the sake of principle and strategy.

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 charges of softness. A. Philip Randolph has single-handedly forced George Meany to invite the once "outlaw" Negro American Labor Council to work with the A.F.L.-C.I.O. in ending union discrimination. Randolph continues to dramatize the gulf between labor's promises and results and will not let "big labor" rest. Yet a Negro nationalist paper, African News and Views, referred scornfully last November 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 in Harlem from a white landlord. "If a camel driver," the newspaper continued, "could come all the way from Pakistan and become the owner of a deed to one square inch of land in Texas, certainly the Pullman Porters could become owners of at least one square foot of real estate in Harlem where they have been located for more than 30 years."

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 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 now forced to lead, and he is more skilled in theology than in the tactics of social dislocation. "One of my weaknesses as a leader," he has said, "is that I am too courteous and I'm not candid enough. However, I feel that my softness has helped in one respect: people have found it easy to become reconciled around me."

In any case, King has no intention of withdrawing from the battle. His Southern 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 Riders. 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 Negro college students who have pledged to stay out of school for at least a year. They work in the rural vastnesses of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

"Snick," as the committee is called, insists that its workers live among the Negroes they are trying to register. "The people we deal with," says one of its organizers, "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 that would otherwise fall on them."

Members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee draw $40 a week — when it's available. They function as an autonomous organization, and privately, most of them consider the N.A.A.C.P. too cautious and Martin Luther King too concerned with speechmaking rather than with accelerated action. "He lost me," says one girl, "when he was missing on those Freedom Rides into Mississippi. And how come he's moved his headquarters into a predominantly white office building in Atlanta with segregated toilets?"

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

Charles McDew, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, emphasizes: "I'm fighting for a position of choice. I want to be able to make up my own mind as to how much of this society I'm willing to integrate with. Too many of the 'freedom riders' don't think beyond integration. But men ought not to live and die for just washing machines and big television sets. When this part of the fight is over, I expect to go on and work for organic change in this country's political and economic structure so that integration will be worth having."

There is an anguished echo of McDew in James Baldwin: "People always tell me how many Negroes bought Cadillacs last year. This terrifies me. I always wonder: Do you think this is what the country is for? Do you really think this is why I came here, this is why I suffered, this is what I woukl die for? A lousy Cadillac?"

Another voice in this chorus of fundamental dissent is that of the Reverend James Lawson, a former leader of the Nashville sit-ins. Lawson works with Martin Luther King but is considered much more penetrating a theorist than King and a more daring actionist. There is evidence that Lawson aspires to the eventual leadership of the nonviolent "movement." In 1960, he criticized the N.A.A.C.P. as "too bourgeois." Last year, Lawson told the annual meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference: "Serious revolution is total and maintains a question mark over every aspect of society. No institution is taken for granted ... Most of us work simply for concessions from the system, not for transforming the system ... Does not our political system encourage segregation? It is not just the lack of Negro voting, but the failure of systems to provide real choices for voters. The economy of the South encourages segregation — with cheap labor, keeping certain groups of Negroes and whites pawns of financial interests, using race hate to stop unions ... We must recognize that we are merely in the prelude to revolution — the beginning, not the end, not even the middle."

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

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' engagement in 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 says: "He cannot be content to demand integration and personal acceptance into a decaying moral structure. He cannot help his country gird itself for the arduous struggle before it by a willingness to share equally in a tottering structure of moral hypocrisy, social insensitivity, personal despair and desperation. He must demand that the substance and strength 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 barriers in this country. The pressures are working. In Macon, Georgia, the home until two years ago of the Grand Imperial Dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Mayor Edgar Wilson admits: "We've been watching these freedom rides and boycotts in other cities, and we're getting the picture. Even Robert E. Lee finally had to surrender, didn't he?"

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 movement. 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 3,500,000 — agreed not only to end discrimination on Government projects but in every area of their work and in all units, subsidiaries and divisions 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 legislative and executive coercion 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 neighborhoods.

More slowly but just as inexorably, changes are taking place in individuals. Last fall, a Negro civil rights leader lectured at a Southern white college. She needed transportation to a Negro school some 40 miles away, and a white student volunteered to drive her. "You might get into trouble," she warned. "Ma'am," the boy answered, "you don't understand. I need to do this. I've been waiting for this moment a long time."

Percy Sutton, head of the New York City branch of the N.A.A.C.P., was jailed in Jackson, Mississippi, a few months ago. While in the station house, he later told Murray Kempton of the New York Post, "A policeman came up to me and said not to look at him and go on smoking my cigarette while he talked. He said that he only wanted to say that he had worked in Negro sections all his life and wondered how Negro women could respect Negro men who had to come in at the back door all the time and that he understood."

More and more Negroes at the same time are working through their distrust and hatred for whites to agreement with Martin Luther King that "black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy." Jazz trumpeter Donald Byrd, for one, has disassociated 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 harmony and melodic concepts ... I think that contrary to the views of many people in jazz, it is time we joined with other musicians, classical and otherwise, to create music purely for the joy of creating it."

Even the image of Santa Claus is beginning to change in so previously unlikely a place as Atlanta where, Jet magazine reported last Christmas, a Negro Santa Claus was hired for a white-owned record shop. "Although he is the first Negro Santa Claus 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 Claus and the Negro stops thinking of white as the Devil's color. For many generations, pockets of hatred will remain among both whites and Negroes, but the strong likelihood is that the major issues between the races in America will be resolved in from 10 to 20 years, some of them sooner. Thereafter, the next stage of dissent in this country may well be led by a new kind of integrated minority demonstrating against all the rest of us, Negro and white, in an attempt to broaden and deepen the social revolution.

Judging by the composition of many of the 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 the nuclear fallout shelter program." 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."