Mood Ebony

The Negro Revolution is now ten years old. The new Jacobins, the angry young men and women who rose up to claim what belonged to them, are responsible for transforming a well-intentioned but slow-moving cause into a full-fledged revolutionary movement. What the new Jacobins demand today is total war to achieve total rights. If there is any word in this struggle more hated by these young militants than "moderation." it is "tokenism." This revolution exacts from its revolutionists and requires of its friends and allies a staunch and thoroughgoing commitment in both motivation and concrete actions. Nothing short of this absolute commitment is acceptable anymore. If anyone who fancies himself a supporter or an ally or even a leader does not, in the opinion of the revolutionists, "feel" the movement, does not, in the vernacular, "dig" the struggle in the streets, no number of words or even good deeds will fully qualify him for the Jacobins' trust. If, on the other hand, he appears to "dig" the movement but falters before the totality of its demands, then he is at best friction within the revolution's machinery, at worst a traitor.

The sudden emergence of the Negro's revolutionary mood caught many of his friends, particularly among labor and the liberals, unaware. Satisfied with their own good intentions, they were geared to a gradual approach to equality. Now they are puzzled and offended by the criticisms that impatient Negroes have leveled at them. The tension between the Jacobins and these men of good (if incomplete) will may yet lead to tragedy within the movement--and for the country.

But if the new Jacobins judge their friends harshly, they are even more rigorous in their demands upon themselves and upon one another. Discomfort, danger, suffering are commonplace. To face brutality is routine; to risk death, prosaic. All the revolutionists, being human, experience fear to some extent, but to yield to human frailty under stress is the supreme disgrace. These exacting standards are not new in human experience. But they are new in the Negro's struggle for equality in America.

What happened to the movement and to CORE after the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 was a kind of wedding of two forces, both bred by the war: They were the founders of CORE--means-oriented idealists of pacifistic turn of mind, for whom nonviolence was a total philosophy, a way of life; and the new Jacobins--ends-oriented militants, disillusioned with America's rhetoric of equality, who saw in direct action a useful weapon and viewed nonviolence only as a tactic. Without such a fusion, no revolutionary mass movement could have emerged. Without its new Jacobins the movement could never have grown to mass proportions, and without the idealists it could not have developed revolutionary dimensions. The anger of one without the disciplined idealism of the other could have produced only nihilism. Without the indigenous anger of the Negro masses, the idealists, for all their zeal, would have remained largely ineffectual and would have gone on talking to themselves and whispering through an occasional keyhole to another human heart.

The idealists warn that the ends do not justify the means, and the militants assert with equal validity that means are worthless which do not achieve substantial reform. Out of the creative tension between the two has come a third position which I believe more accurately reflects the movement. Today, nonviolence is no longer a philosophy, or a tactic, but a strategy involving both philosophical and tactical elements, in a massive and widening direct-action campaign to redeem the American promise of full freedom for the Negro.

This does not mean that all of the hundreds of thousands of Negroes involved in the street campaigns for equality accept nonviolence as a strategic or tactical method of accomplishing their ends. It is only the leaders and members of the nonviolent movement who accept it in any way as an integral part of the struggle. The masses who now join sit-ins and protest marches share only a newfound willingness to become individually physically involved and to risk suffering or jail for common goals. They come from the pool halls and taverns as well as the churches, from the ranks of the unemployed and the alienated and the rootless. They are not yet wedded to nonviolence, nor may they ever be; they are wedded, indeed, only to their own fierce indignation. Yet they are necessary to the revolution; their absence would brand the movement as counterfeit and ultimately destroy it. Obviously it will be difficult to maintain nonviolence amidst the stresses of a mass direct-action movement. And that, precisely, is one of the chief tactical dilemmas before the freedom movement.

Small, disciplined groups are easy to control. Untrained masses are more difficult. Violence used against us by our opponents is a problem only insofar as it may provoke counterviolence from our ranks. Thus far, as we have seen, sporadic incidents of violence, where they have occurred in the movement, have been contained and have not become a contagion. We have been lucky, but we cannot afford any longer to leave such a vital matter to chance. Widespread violence by the freedom fighters would sever from the struggle all but a few of our allies. It would also provoke and, to many, justify such repressive measures as would injure the movement. More than that, many of our own nonviolent activists would turn away in disenchantment. None would profit from such developments except the defenders of segregation and perhaps the more bellicose of the black nationalists.

I have often heard it said in criticism of Core that in becoming a mass movement it fatally compromised its principles of brotherhood. It is alleged that a cadre of lovers became an army of haters. First, let me insist that we do not hate: far from it. We are not the paragons of love we once were, to be sure, but we do not hate. There are haters afoot and I shall be speaking of them later, but we are not they. Second, I wish to emphasize that the changes in Core have not taken place as a compromise or even, as is otherwise alleged, as a revolutionary necessity. We have simply learned from the experience of over 20 years that the world is more complex than we had imagined, and the techniques necessary to change it are more varied and larger in scope than we had ever dreamed. The original Core vision was excessively interpersonal and private. There were not men, nor time, nor spirit enough to change each lunch-counter owner's heart, one by one. We learned, when we finally met them, that our people did not wish to wait that long, and out of love for them we did not wish them to. We learned, too, that before the millennium we could at least after the behavior and conditions that created injustice. We dreamed of a better America, and still we dream. We have learned from the Jacobins. Today we are all Jacobins.

But one Core principle has remained unaltered from the first. We believed then and we still believe now that men must achieve freedom for themselves. Do it for them and you extinguish the spark that makes freedom possible and glorious. Men must act on their own behalf: they must aim to move the world and sense its movement under their impact. They must speak as well as act and they must speak with their own voice. Is it hoarse sometimes with frustration and anger? Still, it is our voice.

Masses of Negroes have now achieved a measure of spiritual emancipation with which Lincoln's proclamation could not possibly have endowed them. The barriers of segregation in America have ceased to be an extension of our minds. We are no longer chained to the ancient stereotypes. We do not feel inferior and do not believe that we are; we are no longer comfortable in the confines of the caste. We feel dignified. We are dignified.

This new dignity has many manifestations, not the least significant of which is a great and burgeoning sense of individual worth, released, ironically, through a mass movement. In a way, it is a rediscovery of the individual in American society. The average American feels submerged, powerless, a cog in a giant machine. But in his revolution the individual Negro has found a new meaning for himself. People who formerly felt small and insignificant now, in their own eyes, stand ten feet tall. As one student in Atlanta put it: "I, myself, desegregated that lunch counter on Peachtree Street. Nobody else. I did it by sitting-in. by walking the picket line, by marching. I didn't have to wait for any big shots to do it for me. I did it myself." Never again will that youth and the many like him see themselves as unimportant.

Several years ago a white Core worker, a pretty girl of about 20, was mugged in the corridor of her apartment house. She described her assailant in some detail for the police--height, approximate weight, eyes, teeth, clothing--but she omitted one vital point: He was black. She didn't mention that simple fact for fear of indicating prejudice.

This young lady was a true child of the "old" Core. No organization was so aggressively color-blind, so ideologically committed to the utter irrelevance of race, as we were. If only the races could get to know each other--living, working, playing in each other's sight--what purpose would there be in noting a man's race? We told uplifting stories to one another--like the one about the little boy who came home from school with the news of a wonderful new friend. The mother, becoming suspicious, asked, "Is Johnny white or colored?" And the boy replied, "I don't know. I'll have to go back tomorrow and look and see." We laughed. Oh, how we laughed. Brothers and sisters, is this not indeed the way it will be someday? Our work and fellowship were dominated by these sentiments; members of both races strove to make sure (continued on page 126)mood ebony(continued from page 108) that color wouldn't count in our daily activities, just as it wouldn't count on the Great Day that was coming.

Today these color-blind sentiments seem to me to be somewhat out of touch with the real lives and the real needs of the Negro community--and inappropriate, even, to the real tasks of our movement. Today, when the name Negro is sweet to Core's ears, we laugh that there was ever a day when it was otherwise. We have found the cult of color-blindness not only quaintly irrelevant but seriously flawed. For we learned that America couldn't simply be color-blind. It would have to become color-blind, and it would only become color-blind when we gave up our color. The white man, who presumably has no color, would have to give up only his prejudices, but we would have to give up our identities. Thus we would usher in the Great Day with an act of complete self-denial and self-abasement. We would achieve equality by conceding racism's charge: that our skins are an affliction: that our history is one long humiliation: that we are empty of distinctive traditions and any legitimate source of pride. All this we were asked to do while learning to love ourselves, and making the name Negro a name to conjure with.

In the movement for equal rights we discovered a history: Had not the slaves rebelled tirelessly against their lot as we now rebelled? We found heroes and examples from our own past: Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Harriet Tubman. Sojourner Truth, Samuel E. Cornish, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois. We sensed the presence of black men all over the world who were engaged in efforts parallel to our own. In the movement we found an identity. Was that not jealousy we spotted in the eager eyes of white youths who flocked to our cause knowing that our efforts constituted the most significant activity in all of America? Didn't we know that, far from having no history, no one in America had a history but us? Didn't we know now that for the sake of our American ideals we had to speak in our rightful, our given, our now legitimate name--Negro?

Early in 1964 I called a meeting of all the Core chapters in the Bay Area of San Francisco. I had heard of rather serious strife there between nationalists and integrationists within the organization, and when we all had gathered in a hotel room one night, I said, "All right, let's let our hair down and level with one another. What's it all about?" One fellow, a Negro, immediately said. "Brother Farmer, we've got to dig being black." He kept repeating it over and over again, and I knew exactly what he meant. He meant that blackness of the skin had been accepted as a deformity by Negroes, that it had to cease being that, and had to become a source of pride, and so did all the culture and memories that went with it.

Thus, in subtle ways, racial considerations have begun to enter the inner politics of our organizations. For reasons both real and symbolic, it is important that Negroes be placed in positions of leadership and prominence. It is difficult for some whites to understand how deeply Negroes feel about this. For years the great Negro organizations--NAACP, Urban League--have been strongly influenced by whites who have served as presidents of these organizations, as members of governing boards or, significantly, as treasurers. Another brand of white support came in the form of aggressive advice from influential and allied organizations--church groups, civil rights commissions, labor unions, parents' and teachers' associations. It is not disrespectful to their often sincere and effective efforts to point out that their advice was not always motivated by the immediate interest of the black man. The evil of slavery--and to some degree Negroes are still enslaved--is in the way it permitted white men to handle Negroes: their bodies, their actions, their opportunities, their very minds and thoughts. To the depths of their souls, Negroes feel handled, dealt with, ordered about, manipulated--by white men. I cannot overemphasize the tenacity and intensity of this feeling among Negroes, and I believe any lair-minded person pondering the history of the Negro's enforced posture in a world of white power would concede the justice of the feeling. So, as Negroes began to sense that the civil rights movement was their movement, an instrument for their self-expression, their freedom, it became difficult to convince them that once again they must be led by whites.

The tension between Negroes and whites in Core is a necessary and creative tension. Some form of nationalism is necessary, even healthy, though the willfully color-blind refuse to acknowledge this. The old Core idealists are correct when they warn that Negro group pride and group assertiveness can deteriorate into the most narrow-minded chauvinism. This "Negritude," they argue, will produce the same stultification of thought that has been so often attributed to the "Yiddishness" of Jews. Of course, integration--color-blindness--is ultimately valid, but we have to come to realize that we must live here and now rather than in eternity. I do not define this tension as one between the real and the ideal, with the black nationalists playing the realists and the white integrationists playing the idealists. The doctrinaire color-blind often fail to perceive that it is ideally necessary for the black man to be proudly black today. And the black nationalists, for their part, often do not see that it is only realistic to maintain touch with white people, for we cannot live in our dreams nor carve a nation for ourselves in our mind's eye alone. We must dwell in this land of ours--America.

If we make ourselves over to satisfy any one definition--nationalist or integrationist--we will lose a precious part of ourselves. So, in some ways, I applaud the tension between black and white and invite whites in to embarrass us with our occasional narrowness, asking them only to be tactful and remember who and what it is they serve.

What can explain this new "mood ebony"? The reasons are many and complex, but I would like to suggest two in particular. (1) Each achievement of the civil rights movement aimed at making color irrelevant has counted to us as a Negro achievement, earned by Negro effort, and indicative of a long rebel tradition in Negro history. The movement has become a movement of and by Negroes in addition to a movement for civil equality, and it has become a source of great pride and has inspired a renewed search for our black identity. We have learned that what is needed is not invisibility but a valid and legitimate visibility. This new pride, which has grown out of the movement, is especially noteworthy in the Negro middle classes, which until very recently stood aloof from the struggle. But in civil rights it has often been the middle classes--especially the students--who have led the militant way. Then, too. a new generation of Negro writers--James Baldwin, Ossie Davis, John Williams. John Oliver Killens, Louis Lomax--have given our new pride the impetus of their eloquence. (2) The present-day black nationalist groups--the best-known of which is the Black Muslims--and figures like the late Malcolm X have influenced us perceptibly. Sympathetic whites are often surprised at the solicitude Negroes display for the nationalists, the Muslims in particular. "How can anyone take all that mumbo jumbo seriously?" they ask. And in righteous tones they quickly dismiss this "racism in reverse," this cult of opportunistic violence, as juvenile and positively un-American. Many Negroes see the juvenility, of course, but they see more: The black nationalists tell the Negro that he is somebody and that his salvation depends upon the proud acceptance of his own blackness. White civilization, say the nationalists, taught the Negro to hate himself: this was and remains a tactic of white domination, for if the Negro did not hate himself, he would have been a most troublesome servant, indeed. Stripped of a sense of history, deprived of his majesty, brainwashed by a white man's religion, without a name or any claim to fame, the (continued on page 172)Mood Ebony(continued from page 126) Negro has been a man without cultural memories and a dignifying self-definition. Therefore, as the first order of business, before economic or social reforms, the nationalists say we must mend black souls and replace shame with pride. There are very few Negroes who are not moved by this rudimentary appeal. As a result, many educated Negroes are willing to forgive the exotic myths the Muslims spin to dress up their message.

But the Muslims and others recommended themselves not only by what we might term their insight into the black heart, but also by their simple success as well. They succeeded, as no one else, in eliminating narcotics addiction, prostitution and juvenile delinquency among their members. Within the group almost puritanical standards of sexual and personal morality prevail; frugality, hard work, character building are considered cardinal virtues. The Muslims and other nationalists bade the Negro to help himself by himself, by cleaning up his own mind and his own streets, by educating himself, by starting his own businesses, by patronizing and hiring blacks. Much of this is simply a black version of the Protestant ethic, and it appeals to the basic American middle-class values held by most Negroes. Unfortunately, the Muslims do not apply these moral scruples to those who leave the sect, many of whom are dealt with ruthlessly. And there have been charges of immorality in the upper echelons. Still, even if these charges are accurate, they do not gainsay the legitimate achievement of the Muslims in regenerating many down-and-outers in the ghetto.

Malcolm X, the Muslims' late ex-major-domo, had a considerable impact on my own thinking. His own tragically brief career exemplified the best and worst in the Muslim influences. From an uneducated, narcotics-addicted denizen of the New York underworld, Malcolm became an articulate and extraordinarily disciplined spokesman for the Muslims. He was a regenerated man, fascinating and powerful. He spoke with great, if untutored, lucidity, and he had a following of admirers far wider than is apparent if one simply counts Muslim membership. A year before his assassination on February 21, 1965, Malcolm broke with the Muslims to found the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the very name of which indicated his desire to bring all Negroes--separationists and integrationists, Muslims, Christians and others--under a single nationalist tent.

I met Malcolm shortly before the Freedom Rides, just after I had assumed direction of Core. We were brought together on the Barry Gray show, a late-evening discussion program in New York City, and I must say, I had completely underestimated him. Malcolm was defending the Muslim line of establishing a black nation somewhere in the United States, and it was not difficult to ridicule the impracticality of that idea: but when he spoke to me directly, calling me "black man," calmly drawing some of the bitterness out of me, I listened. And later I found my thoughts returning quite often to his message of racial self-pride and self-love. I got to know Malcolm quite well in the two years before his death. He kept predicting that I would be a nationalist by year's end and I predicted he would become an integrationist, and we may both have been right; for at the time of his death, Malcolm was entering a civil rights movement he had derided as foolish, and I was beginning to understand some of the psychological, if not political, sense of his words.

Malcolm was well aware that his extremism served the worth-while purpose of helping militant organizations like Core by making their nonviolence respectable in comparison to his own talk of violence. One thing is clear; he could not long stand aside from any fight his people were waging. He loved them, and however much he scoffed at the futility of making do in a white world, he cheered the great efforts we have made to do just that. Shortly before his death, Malcolm appeared in Selma, Alabama, to help inspire voter registration. For all his talk of black separatism and for all his apparent racism, I do not think Malcolm fully grasped or truly wished that these ideas should exclude him from the Negro's future in this country. This seems to me the tragedy of so many nationalists. Hung up on a bogus mythology, committed to their loose threats and big talk, they do not even contemplate the possibility that the Negro will survive in America with his soul intact and his future legitimate and secure. They feel kinship with the "movement," but are prodded into scoffing and posturing by their own rhetoric.

I have tried many times to think how we could better have used Malcolm's talents as a leader. His brand of fiery nationalism was, of course, unacceptable to Core. But perhaps we, too, were at fault for not knowing sooner that some form of nationalism, or groupism, or ethnocentrism--there is no suitable name yet for this mood I am trying to describe--can be incorporated into Core's inner life without fatally compromising its ultimate ideals.

Even Malcolm's theories of violence demand attention. The editorial pages of the nation's liberal newspapers dismiss the Muslims as reverse racists and advise us to banish this inverted Ku Klux Klan from our house. I once heard Malcolm snap at a newspaperman who asked him the differences between the Muslims and the Klan: "We haven't lynched anyone. They've got a lot of years and a lot of blood on us." As callous as that answer may seem, it reflects the way many Negroes think: The white man has been free to murder and maraud for centuries; with impunity he has raped our women and emasculated our sons. In how many lands would such known murderers as those hundreds who walk Southern streets this very day feel as safe as they do in this country? Yet we are not even permitted what every other age and society has respected as an apt response to brutal oppression--personal revenge. The very moment Negroes entertain the same thought that embattled and deeply wronged men have always entertained, we are lumped with the Klan. This equation of K. K. K. violence with the Negro's desire to defend himself, it seems to me--as it did to Malcolm--shows a monstrous deficiency of moral sense. Malcolm stated the case for self-defense quite persuasively: It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks. It is legal and lawful to own a shotgun or a rifle. We believe in obeying the law. In areas where our people are the constant victims of brutality, and the Government seems unwilling or unable to protect them ... we should form rifle clubs that can be used to defend our lives and our property in time of emergency... . When our people are bitten by dogs, they are within their rights to kill those dogs. We should be peaceful, law-abiding ... but the time has come for the American Negro to fight back in self-defense whenever and wherever he is unjustly attacked.

With much of the doctrine of self-defense stated here I have no objection. There are particular and extenuating circumstances in which self-defense is justified and even constitutional. In 1925 Dr. Osian Sweet, a Negro physician living in Detroit, shot a man while defending his newly purchased house from an attacking mob. He was charged with murder, and defended in court by the great Clarence Darrow. The court, presided over by Frank Murphy (later a Supreme Court justice), issued a landmark decision when it ruled him not guilty on the ground that a man has the constitutional right to defend his hearth and home. Today, in Jonesboro and Bogalusa, Louisiana. Negro men, for years harassed and terrorized by marauding whites, have organized rifle clubs for self-defense. They call themselves Deacons. And to my mind, conditions there warrant this. The simple fact is that the concept of equal justice and equal protection has broken down in these places, if it ever existed there to begin with, and the law is a mask for white oppression.

The danger of Malcolm's doctrine is that it may readily be subverted into an excuse for generalized and indiscriminate violence; into an excuse for war, white vs. black. I think Malcolm often succumbed to this danger, at least verbally, and many young people still under his spell openly advocate a kind of purgative violence. Mostly they just talk and talk. Actually, if these violence-mongers were serious about what they say, they wouldn't say it. They would plan their violence privately, execute it clandestinely, and then brave the consequences. The sabotage that usually accompanies revolution is always best effected by an organized underground.

But serious or not, this constant advocacy of violence can backfire, for the rage it encourages often can be vented only within the Negro community. There is an enormous incidence of senseless violence within the Negro community, and I believe much of it results from such inverted anger. Many said Malcolm's assassination was a case of violent chickens coming home to roost--and whether one agrees with this particular interpretation of the assassination or not. it is true that Malcolm's death symbolized again the futility and the immorality of violence. Gandhi, too, was assassinated--by a Hindu rival. Certainly his assassination was not a case of violence coming home to roost. We should resist the simplistic invitation to interpret Malcolm's death as only a case of poetic justice. Malcolm's killers have not been convicted, and I have a hunch the real story of his death will surprise those who saw in it a case of Muslim revenge. Malcolm was warring on the international narcotics interests in Harlem, and they were not pleased about it.

As mistaken and misguided as Malcolm's philosophy may be doctrinally, it has a certain psychological validity. I have mentioned the resentment Negroes feel at the way whites swarm over them with criticism the moment they abandon pure love and consider the notion of self-defense. The hypocrisy of this criticism is galling. The Negro sees analogies everywhere. There was silence in the press during the years in which thousands of Congolese were being slaughtered: but then there came the huge headlines: "50 Whites Killed In Congo." Why not an airlift to Mississippi, they ask? The Negro has been silenced from speaking his mind for centuries, and now many whites are trying to silence him again. Is it any surprise that with the freedom gained in recent years we should now hear in public the angry, preposterous, extravagant and all-too-human talk of revenge that Negroes have been keeping to themselves for centuries? One of the glories of the liberty gained in the last decade is that it has freed Negroes to speak up and talk back to whites. Some have reveled in the opportunity.

After leaving the Muslims, Malcolm mostly talked. He had no program and no stomach for organizing a really effective organization: the Organization of Afro-American Unity could not have numbered more than 250 at the time of his death. In part he was the creature of the press, which has inflated more than one black reputation with its attention. Yet he was a poet and a leader who stirred many a black heart as he stirred mine more than once. One young Core worker sized up his appeal brilliantly: "I'm sick of all this active nonviolence," he said. "I'm going to join Malcolm and get some nonactive violence."

Precisely because so much of what he said was so valid psychologically. Malcolm and his heirs have succeeded in discrediting the whole philosophy of nonviolence in the eyes of many Negroes. Certainly, they have planted seeds of doubt in the minds of the near militant. Medgar Evers, who was murdered in Mississippi, once said to me, "Jim, I must confess that I am not a believer in nonviolence." He showed me the gun hidden in his car. Evers never went for a ride without checking under the hood of his car for a bomb. On the road at night he would never let another car pass him. I have often wondered whether Evers should have had to apologize to me for wishing to protect himself. Perhaps we at Core have failed to show how effective and virile nonviolence can be. We must show that nonviolence is something more than turning the other cheek, that it can be aggressive within the limits a civilized society will permit. Boycotts, picketing, civil disobedience, unflinching courage and brute persistence are virile enough for any man whose aim is to accomplish something. But even Gandhi himself said that he would prefer to see a man resist evil with violence than fail to resist evil out of fear. The choice, therefore, is not at all between pure love and violence. Between them are many psychologically valid and politically effective paths.

Core is fully aware of the dangers of nationalism. There are sinister characters lurking in the shadows of the literally hundreds of tiny black nationalist sects that breed in the sprawling black ghettos of our cities. A doctrine of noble martyrdom, which may not be so easily silenced by tactical considerations, is abroad. "The black man, having had enough, is prepared to die so that he may not live as a dog... . Ours may well be the sacrificed generation," writes the magazine Liberator. This counsel could take hold. Martyrdom can be heady wine for young men and women who feel they have nothing to live for anyway. Unquestionably. Chinese-style Communists and professional revolutionaries of other stripes are seeking to capitalize on nationalist sentiment in the ghetto. And they will try to set the Negroes to fighting the "Yankee imperialists" at home as their black brothers will be said to be fighting them abroad. Their appeal is potent: "Join us in the world-wide struggle of colored against white. In America you are a minority; in the world we are by far the majority. History is on our side. The white imperialist must be crushed and you must help shoulder the burden. Perhaps you will not see the triumph of the black man in your lifetime, but you cannot honorably desist from playing your role. History will honor your efforts." The Negro playwright LeRoi Jones goes even further in his attempts to persuade us of the necessity to annihilate not only the white imperialists but the entire "diseased" white race. But as of today, there are very few Negro Communists, for Negroes historically have always frustrated every attempt at Communist infiltration of their ranks. Core itself closes membership to Communists. But if foreign affairs should be dominated by news of racial warfare, and the great mass of people now swarming in the ghetto are convinced that our system holds no hope for them, the dangers from black nationalist organizations infiltrated and influenced by Chinese-style Communists will increase.

I do not wish to be misunderstood on this point. I think there is a danger from Chinese-style Communists--Maoists working through black nationalist organizations in the North. But I do not wish this statement linked with the casual charge one hears more and more often today--that the civil rights movement, particularly in the South, is "Communist infiltrated." With regard to the South and the civil rights movement there (the black nationalists are in the North and are not part of the civil rights movement), the charge is a red herring.

What lessons has Core learned from these reflections? First of all, it is clear that we must not, we cannot, abandon the ghetto to the rabid nationalists. For it is in the urban ghetto that Negro history will be made in the foreseeable future. In the last 30 years millions of Negroes have moved into the great cities of the North, and more and more are moving to those cities of the South that will soon be more urban than Southern. Today more than 60 percent of America's 20,000,000 Negroes live in large cities and about 40 percent live in 15 great Northern cities. All trends indicate that the urbanization of the Negro will continue. By 1975, Negroes may constitute a majority or near majority of the populations of several major cities: Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia and Newark. The average inhabitant of these vast black pockets will be uneducated, untrained and, often, unemployed. Of those who are employed, many will be performing the most low-paying and life-sapping labor. Indeed, we are creating a massive underclass of black men ill-suited temperamentally and materially for life in this cybernetic society. Today, about 55 percent of Negro youths from 18 to 25 years of age are school dropouts. Even if we can miraculously redeem unborn generations, there is the present one that faces a desperately hard future. There have been great gains in job opportunities and educational opportunities for Negroes over the last few years, and with organizations like Core demanding justice, these opportunities will continue to expand. But we can no longer evade the knowledge that most Negroes will not be helped by equal opportunity. These are staggering problems for which the traditional Core program of antidiscrimination is ill-equipped. We are seeking new techniques and emphases that will serve not only today's Negro masses but also tomorrow's teeming millions.

Politically, the potential power of the ghetto is enormous; we have dropped Core's traditional neutrality with regard to politics, and now must organize the Negro community--house by house, block by block--into political units. There will be hundreds of neighborhood associations, apartment-house councils, block committees; we will then begin to forge these small units into larger alliances. We must engage in political education, demonstrating to people in the ghetto that there are connections between the local demand for a rat-extermination campaign and the larger demands for public-works programs and stiffer civil rights legislation. At all times we must serve the people and let them govern their own activities. As the Muslims did, we must enter pool halls and reeking tenements, looking for new leaders and followers. We must begin, in short, to shape an articulate sense of communal aspiration among the black masses and bring to the ghetto Core's conviction that the people can help themselves.

Economically, we will urge a variety of self-help programs. Years ago in Chicago, a Core project organized unemployed Negro youth in a slum-cleanup campaign. We then went to City Hall and left a bill enumerating the costs of the effort--as it were, doing public works before they were authorized. The bill was unpaid, but an important example to other Negro communities was set. There are a thousand such tasks to be done in any community that are thoroughly within the capacities of the unskilled workers. Then, too, Core has plans to organize food co-ops and credit unions: we will encourage small businesses by providing expert advice and perhaps even some financial backing. We can even seek to develop larger businesses and industries in the community. In Boston. Core has compiled a list of Negro builders and set about getting work for them; this technique has great possibilities. Another important task will be to train aspiring plumbers, carpenters and the like to take the tests that lead to apprenticeship programs. Many talented youngsters simply do not know how to take tests. These are only a few possible ideas. We are setting ourselves to developing others.

There is also a great need for remedial education services and job training. Much of the money for this will be coming from such Government programs as the War on Poverty and from private foundations. It is crucial that this money be distributed by the community through its own channels. The Government could very well commit the errors of the welfare agencies, tending to free people rather than empowering them to free themselves. But with our political arm we can help persuade the Government to provide the people with the services they demand and need, and dissuade it from telling them what they should demand and need. The Government could very well be persuaded to underwrite new growth and healthy development in Negro community life. It could also kill it by unwise efforts.

Finally, there is cultural work to be done, and this is perhaps most important of all. Like the nationalists, we must try to conquer the Negro sense of inferiority. We feel this will be possible only when it is legitimate to be a black man in this country. And here Core has a unique contribution to make. Core knows that Negro identity will emerge only in the midst of purposive and realistic effort in America. The nationalists offer doctrine. We must offer program as well. The nationalists talk and harangue--their radical anger breeds radical and foolish thoughts--because they are doing nothing; they have no stake in the world, no stake in the land, and hence, little hope. This dissociated situation breeds only bravado. Though I believe there is some psychological validity in what they say, there is also a great potentiality for destructiveness. With no real work to do in America, their advice to love blacks turns into a program to hate whites. Eager to act manfully, they can only imagine petty schemes of violence and revenge. Core must get the Negro community to work on itself and on America. With its proven techniques of nonviolent direct action, it must inject Negro activity into the political life of the community. It must teach Negroes to act upon America in America in the presence of Americans. It must begin the great task of redefining nationalism and integration, so that we can incorporate proud black men and self-assertive black communities as legitimate partners in a new America.

Gripped by a new wave of self-pride and group-pride, many Negroes are beginning to ask still other critical questions: How can we be nationalistic without advocating an inverted form of "separate but equal"? Is self-pride another term for self-segregation? Must we renounce ourselves and our community for the sake of integration?

We have demanded integrated schools and housing and employment. We have won integrated commercial messages on television, integrated casts on opera and dramatic stages, and integrated movies and mayors' committees and civic-planning boards. But what does this word "integration" mean? For some the term means complete assimilation, a kind of random dispersal of Negroes throughout the society and the economy. There would be no Negro neighborhoods, no Negro schools, no jobs reserved for Negroes. America would be a land of individuals who were American and nothing else, and Negro individuals would differ from their fellow Americans only in skin color--that most visible but least significant of human differences. No one can deny the ultimate goodness of this ideal. The question is: Is it too good to be true?

Integration has been the nation's implicit ideal since America was a glint in Jefferson's eye. It is nothing but Jeffersonian individualism extended to all people. But it did not become a practical political goal until quite recently, and the reasons for this make an important story. Like most Americans, Negroes were still accepting "separate but equal" as the law of the land as recently as the mid-Forties, and our major efforts were expended in making the "equal" of "separate but equal" a reality. In the decades before the 1954 Supreme Court decision desegregating schools, the NAACP brought to the Court cases treating discrimination in education, voting, interstate and intrastate travel, public facilities and selection of juries. The Court in those years invariably found that Negro facilities were palpably unequal and ruled that segregation was constitutional only if facilities were truly equal. In other words, the whole burden of the civil rights movement's case then was: If facilities are going to be separate, at least make them equal. "Separate but equal" was reaffirmed.

Toward the end of the Forties, NAACP lawyers and strategists began to argue that in certain respects separate facilities could never be equal. For example, a Negro relegated to education in a Negro law school could not hope to make professional contacts that would enable him to swim in the mainstream of the profession as readily as someone at a white law school: and this was true no matter how beautiful the buildings and how well-stocked the library at the Negro law school were. By a natural process of evolution, the demand for what we might term equal-if-separate turned into a demand for desegregation.

To argue that a beautiful Negro law school was inferior to its white counterpart demanded some subtlety; but to argue that the segregated public school system treated Negroes as second-class citizens demanded no subtlety at all. Comparison of expenditures per student, school facilities, teachers' salaries, experience and training of teachers, books and supplies, and other measurable factors, made it clear that throughout the country, and in the South particularly, the Negro, forced by law and fact into segregated schools, was being deprived of equality under law. The 1954 Supreme Court decision attempted to correct this intolerable inequity in the only way practical and intelligent men could--by eliminating the dual school systems.

But the Court added a theoretical dimension to its factual and practical findings: "Separate educational facilities," it said, "are inherently unequal," and it cited as evidence certain psychological data--principally those of Professor Kenneth Clark--which document the serious psychological damage race separation causes in Negro youngsters. For us. the Court's decision was a recognition of what every Negro knows: that the system of segregation was mounted and perpetuated for the purpose of keeping the black man down; that it was and is a conspiracy to instill in the Negro and the white a sense of Negro inferiority. Segregation means inferiority, as indelibly as the scarlet letter meant adulteress to the New England Puritans. The Negro knows this; it was intended that he know this; and so must any American with the most rudimentary sense of history. And now the Court was saying that this country would segregate no more. So we began to protest against segregated schools of all kinds, de facto and de jure, demanding quality integrated education, knowing that we were thereby helping to eliminate the hated meaning that had been assigned to our lives.

As separate schools were inferior, so, too, were separate neighborhoods. Quite obviously, the great white world doesn't want black folk living next to it; anyone who doubts this need only observe the hysteria and violence that almost always ensue when a Negro family moves into a white neighborhood. The effect of living in a ghetto is conveyed graphically in the desolation and wreckage, human and material, in which most Negroes live today. So we moved to desegregate housing, and some aimed at dismantling the ghetto.

Indeed, every instance and symbol of segregation and every invidious discrimination could now be legitimately challenged. There are millions, and we took them on one by one, case by case--at lunch counters, restaurants, rest rooms, swimming pools, amusement parks, beaches, labor unions, banks, factories, offices, department stores, professional societies, churches, colleges. As far as the most rabid integrationists were concerned, every institution of Negro communal life must be dismantled. They saw no reason for a Negro Medical Society; all energies must be directed to breaking down the A. M. A. Negro colleges, churches, newspapers were at best tolerated as unnecessary anachronisms.

Many whites recognized the superiority complex demanded of the white man in a segregated system to be as harmful in its way as the inferiority complex demanded of Negroes. Many quite sincerely set about curing themselves and their neighborhoods and schools of this affliction. In middle-class neighborhoods, housing committees were formed to persuade reluctant white homeowners to accept "respectable" Negroes, and courageous and well-to-do Negroes were sought who would brave white wrath. But when one or two Negroes had entered a neighborhood, the same committees, now with the eager help of the Negroes, organized to keep other Negroes out. We mustn't let the neighborhood tip, they said. Housing developments adopted informal quotas to help engineer integrated living. Dedicated builders, like Morris Milgrim of Philadelphia, began to persuade investors that quality housing projects, open to all, could return a modest profit, and integrated oases soon sprang up in several previously all-white deserts. Many liberals grew uncomfortable with the irony that in order to achieve integration they had to adopt racial quotas of various sorts, designating Negroes in order to eliminate racial designations, as it were; and some became discouraged at the solemn spectacle of Negroes chasing whites from suburb to suburb--in quest of integration. But among white liberals and some black liberals, the dream of complete integration persisted.

Almost imperceptibly the demand for desegregation had shaded into a demand for black dispersal and assimilation. We were told, and for a while told ourselves, that all Negro separation was inherently inferior, and some of us began to think that Negroes couldn't be fully human in the presence of other Negroes. Well, we have since come to learn that separation need not be inferior in all cases and all places. But in America, Negro separation, in fact and in law, does mean segregation, and segregation means slavery. In the context of our civilization, with its history of racism, the Supreme Court said, separate educational institutions are inherently inferior.

When a Negro child goes through the doors of a segregated school--even if it's identical to a corresponding white school--he knows implicitly that his culture is telling him to go there because he is not fit to be with whites, and every time a Negro child hears of a white parent who becomes hysterical at the thought that his child will have to endure the likes of him, he feels the shame and pressure of his inferiority even more painfully. As a result, he is damaged. And this, too, the Supreme Court saw. As long as the ideology of racial inferiority and superiority persists, segregation will be an insult and blackness a stigma.

One does not undo the accumulated injustices of centuries by waving a magic wand. This is tokenism; the belief that by one gesture, one concession, even one sincere cry of the heart, one moment of honest compassion, the country will transform the manifest meaning of traditional life ways. The desegregation fight is crucial to all Americans. What we are attempting is nothing less than to reverse the latent meaning of our lives and practices. Because the foot is on his neck, the Negro has been much more honest about America than the white. He knows this civilization is still segregated in its heart of hearts. He tests the spirit of our ways, and white Americans who would be honest about America should listen attentively when the black man tells them about their country.

This distinction between separation and segregation was often made by Malcolm X. Time and again, he denied that the Black Muslims were segregationists. We are separationists, he said. not segregationists. Some choose to live separately, and Malcolm saw this and tried to make it a legitimate desire. But in one very essential respect I differ strongly with Malcolm. He believed that Negroes can change the manifest meaning of their separated existence solely by the force of their own wills. I believe that there is much Negroes can do for themselves, but I do not believe they can truly separate if the nation does not simultaneously desegregate.

Culturally, Negroes are Americans and, like all men, we know ourselves, in part, by what our culture tells us about ourselves. The fact is that American segregationists take delight in the Black Muslims' program. Even Core's decision to emphasize self-help in the Negro community succeeds in making parents' and taxpayers' associations breathe easier. And Negroes know this. In other words, there is a certain validity to the integrationist insight that separate Negro efforts and institutions simply perpetuate segregation. If, in his heart of hearts, the Negro believes that self-separation is only a rationalization for cowardly acceptance of segregation, then separation will fail. The only way Negro separation will not mean segregation is if the Negro chooses to live separately, and this will happen only when total freedom of choice is a reality in America. Desegregation and the development of Negro self-pride work side by side. Desegregation makes separation possible. What we wish is the freedom to make our own choice. A person should be able to choose where he wants to live and then go and live there. He should be able to work at any job for which he is qualified and equipped, regardless of his color. Jim Brown, a thoughtful man and a pretty good fullback, offended some people when he said that he wouldn't want to live with whites, but that he damned well wanted to know that he could if he wanted to. I think he represents the thinking of many Negroes.

But many other Negroes will choose to integrate: they should be permitted to. James Baldwin asks whether it is worth integrating into a sinking ship. Many middle-class Negroes would answer. "You're damned right it is." Many will buy their $20.000 or $30.000 homes and move into neighborhoods that suit them culturally and financially. Indeed, most Negroes integrating such a neighborhood will probably have a higher educational level than their white neighbors, prejudice being what it is. It is easy to scoll at the spectacle of a middle-class Negro shoving his way into a white enclave. Some say, "Does white approval mean that much? Why go where you're not wanted?" But I have known many of these men. They brave abuse nobly and stand courageous witness to noble ideals. Their acts shake the system of segregation, and for that reason their efforts are more closely connected to efforts to eliminate the psychological ghetto than is commonly granted.

We must not forget that there are solid, perhaps incomparable, values in truly integrated living. W. E. B. Du Bois, a proud black man, once said that the real tragedy in our world today is not that men are poor, for all men know something of poverty: nor that men are ignorant, for who is wise: nor that men are wicked, for who is good? The real tragedy is that men know so little of men. It is important for Negroes to know white men and important for white men to know Negroes. I might add that white men should insist that we live among them for their own sakes. And if some Negroes resist white blandishments, they will be better men for having resisted so valuable a temptation.

Those who glibly deprecate "middle-class" Negroes often commit the racist fallacy of demanding that the black man behave according to their definition of him. If a black man wants to skip 5000 lunches, as Dick Gregory says, in order to buy a Cadillac, why shouldn't he? At Core we have come to believe that in a free society many Negroes will choose to live and work separately, although not in total isolation. They will cultivate that pride in themselves which comes in part from their efforts to make this a free land. Even those living and working in "racially balanced" situations will value their Negro identity more than before. In helping themselves, they will come to love themselves. And because they love themselves, they will determine to help themselves. They will be both Americans and Negroes. They will be free to pick and choose from several rich traditions. They may thrill to the example of modern Africa and search out the richness of Africa's past as Du Bois did. Or. as Americans and Westerners, they may seize as models such American cultural heroes as Lincoln or Hemingway or Duke Ellington. Their holidays will be as American as St. Patrick's Day and Columbus Day and Rosh Hashanah.

In the same way, we are beginning now to see a more realistic division of effort within Core and among the groups comprising the entire civil rights movement. Clearly, the desegregation movement must continue unabated. We must demand that segregation end. Tokenism of any kind must be rejected. We shall demand quality integrated education, adding to it, perhaps, the demand that Negro history be taught in the public schools so that our youngsters can learn that they are ancient citizens of this land. There must be open housing and fair employment practices, in law and in fact. In brief, there will be no abatement in the efforts of the last decade. At the same time, we will enter the Negro community, working with those masses who couldn't care less about integrating and couldn't afford it if they did care. Our efforts in the ghettos to help the people build a community life and a community spirit will be spurred by the knowledge that desegregation is taking place simultaneously. In this way, segregation will be transformed into separation. Perhaps "independence" is a better term than separation. We shall become independent men. We will accept, in other words, part of Malcolm X's insight that segregation will become separation only with a separate effort of Negro heart and soul rejecting the notion of some of the older civil rights organizations (and of the original Core) that desegregation and integration in itself will accomplish miracles. But we will correct the Muslims' belief that the Negro can do all things alone. By this amendment we will affirm that we are Americans and that the civil rights movement is an American movement.

Here, then, is the tradition and impetus Core brings to the future: We are, as ever, an organization pledged to make freedom and equality a possibility through that inner emancipation which comes of our direct effort. We know as clearly as ever that freedom cannot be won solely by engineers, although a considerable amount of engineering will be necessary. We stand for action: and in an America that out of comfort or ennui despairs of the possibility of an effective and morally integrated posture, we represent almost uniquely the possibility of a free life. We have become a mass movement and know we are destined to become more of a mass movement. We have an arsenal of techniques in direct action and must restudy their applicability. We stand astride fierce and ambiguous energies--some noble, some not--and will seek to channel these energies constructively: but we will not renounce them. We hold impatience to be a virtue and will not be quickly or easily satisfied. We recall our dreams of brotherly reconciliation and feel we serve them still, in our fashion. But love is a luxurious tactic and the realities of militant nonviolence permit us few luxuries. We are nonviolent, because nonviolence is a weapon tested and proven effective. Prudence, tactical good sense and our ideals demand that we remain so.

How often I have been asked by white middle-class liberals. "But what can I do?" The answer is simple. You can integrate your neighborhoods and schools as purely and diligently as ever. You are responsible for segregation and only you can end it. The white man should be an integrationist. The fact that some Negroes now build their own lives independently and without apology has no bearing upon this white responsibility. Nor, I think, should whites advise Negroes to separate themselves, for that always sounds suspiciously like a demand for segregation. Separation--independence--must be our choice to make and our program to achieve. It should deter the traditional integrationist efforts of civil rights and civil liberties groups, church and labor groups, fair housing and fair employment committees not a jot.

Is it divisive of me to suggest that all parties to the movement will not share identical perspectives? Some think so. But I believe that one cannot be all men at all times and remain himself. There is a twoness in the movement as there is in the Negro, and no synthesis, as far as I can see now, is possible. Perhaps ultimately, God willing. We should not be frightened by slight ambivalences. They are a sign that we are becoming free, and freedom eludes simple definitions.

"The history of the American Negro," wrote Du Bois, "is the history of this strife--this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self... . He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach the Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spat upon."