Civil Rights: End of the Road?

The responsible civil rights movement, which has accomplished much for the Negro in the 1960s, today faces a crisis of survival. Powerless to quell insensate violence in the slums, its leaders are equally helpless in the face of rising white impatience with riots and those who incite them. The plight of moderate Negro leadership was demonstrated anew last week. Items:

> In Atlanta, white Socioeconomist Dr. Robert Theobald told concerned and dispirited delegates to the convention of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference that “the civil rights movement is dying because it no longer has a vision to inspire its members, let alone the rest of the country.”

> In a desperate bid to wrest command from extremists, King declared nonviolent war to remedy the slum dweller’s plight in Northern cities, promising a wave of civil disobedience, school boycotts, marches, sitdowns and sit-ins instead of fire bombs and snipers. “Mass disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force,” declared King. But there were doubts about whether his S.C.L.C. could actually organize such nonviolent rebellion—or keep it nonviolent.

> Also in Atlanta, far-out racists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee moved deeper into black isolationism and drew angry denunciations from Jewish-American organizations for a shoddily printed anti-Israeli broadside featuring smudgy photographs of an alleged “massacre” of Arabs by Jews and 32 “facts” about Israel that could have been written by Gamal Abdel Nasser. The newsletter also revealed that S.N.C.C. had its own problems. Accused of seeking Arab money, S.N.C.C. confessed it was financially in extremis. Pleaded its newsletter: “Help! Help! We’re sinking fast!”

> In New York, S.N.C.C.’s 23-year-old nonstudent advocate of violence, H. Rap Brown, could also have used some cash. At week’s end Brown was behind bars, unable to raise $25,000 bail, after federal agents seized him for transporting a .30-cal. semiautomatic carbine across state lines on flights to and from New Orleans while under indictment in Maryland for inciting a riot. On the latest charge he faces a maximum of five years in the penitentiary and a $2,000 fine. Meanwhile, Stokely Carmichael, Brown’s predecessor as chairman of S.N.C.C. was reported en route from Havana to Hanoi to inspect American “atrocities.”

— In Flint, Mich., Negro Mayor Floyd J. McCree sadly announced that he was quitting his largely ceremonial, $9.23-a-week post because the city council had voted down an open-housing ordinance. “I’m not going to sit up here and live an equal-opportunity lie,” said McCree. Flint (pop. 205,000) was the first major American city to boast a Negro mayor.