Books: Fierce Logic

THE LUMINOUS DARKNESS by Howard Thurman. ] 13 pages. Harper & Row. $3.

Somewhere in the South, a Negro seats himself in a newly integrated café. “Do you have any collard greens?” he asks the waitress. “Do you have any pigs’ feet or pigs’ tails? Do you have any mustard greens and corn bread?” To each question, the answer is no. “Well,” says the Negro, “you folks aren’t ready for integration.”

With that apocryphal story, Author Thurman makes several points. The white South is indeed not ready for integration. Integration cannot fully arrive as long as the Negro feels he must strip himself of his folkways to enter the white man’s world, or as long as the white man expects him to.

Forces of Segregation. Dr. Thurman, an author, a lecturer and a Negro, is dean emeritus of Boston University’s campus chapel. Into this book he has packed a lifetime’s contemplation on a matter to which no man should have to give a second thought: the color of his face. It is Thurman’s personal interpretation of what segregation means to the Negro, to the white man and to the human spirit. His words, though softly spoken, will give comfort to none of the three.

Until 1954, Thurman argues, the , Southern white liberal had been willing to improve the Negro’s lot−better colored schools, better ghettos−so long as the system remained intact. But after 1954, the liberal could go on helping the Negro only by declaring himself an integrationist under the terms of the Supreme Court decision. And since he was no integrationist, he withdrew.

That left the field open to the segregationist, says Thurman. No voice rallied the liberal, or that far larger body of moderates who seldom move without a command, during that vital interval before the forces of segregation, then disunited, gathered and took charge. The only voice that might have prevented this, says Thurman, that might have stirred the moderates and won the liberals, was President Eisenhower’s−and Eisenhower kept silent until the situation had already degenerated into violence at Little Rock.

Inspirational Leadership. Dr. Thurman gives even poorer marks to the church. By perpetuating the Southern pattern of separation, the church “lost the initiative to inspire” in a struggle that sorely needed inspirational leadership. “The right to act as a result of religious conviction has been forfeited and has to be reclaimed.”

He ends with a plea: “If the Christian limited his practice to other Christians, thereby guaranteeing that the church, wherever it existed, at whatever cost, would not tolerate segregation within its body, then there would be a kind of fierce logic in its position. It would make for a kind of arrogance and bigotry toward those who were not fortunate or wise enough to put themselves in the way of being Christian. Men would knock at the door of the church to find out what they need to do to become what, in evidence, the Christian is.”