Nation: New Directions

Anthropologist Margaret Mead last week outlined some of the directions the nation might take to resolve “racial inequality within the premises of American culture.” Writing in the New York Times, she listed: 1) “immediate integration for those [Negroes] with the education to use their gifts” (primarily “statesmen and scientists, lawyers and doctors, poets and musicians”); 2) “political black power in the slums of the inner cities” (a la LeRoi Jones); and 3) “a new economic and social base in the South” on which “the old pattern of kin and caste [could be changed] to a new pattern of kith and kin,” thus hopefully checking the burdensome and continuing flow of rural Negroes into city slums.