Races: The Other 97%

RACES

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Through an angry summer of racial rioting, the pillagers, the arsonists and the snipers, the anarchists, the loudmouths and the demagogues have held the center of the stage. When the fury abates and the fires die down, a wholly different cast of characters will move in to repair the damage. These are the real revolutionaries, the men who have been laboring undramatically for years, and in some cases for decades, to secure for the Negro a more equitable share of America’s affluence. “These are the people who can do more,” says Massachusetts Republican Edward Brooke, the first Negro in the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction. “They can accomplish something that the militants cannot.”

They can, that is, unless the Negro Revolution follows the classic pattern and devours the very men who did most to set it in motion, replacing them with extremist firebrands. In the wretched Negro slums, the more moderate Negro leaders pack no clout with the young buckoes who toss Molotov cocktails and chant murderous antiwhite slogans. “A black man today,” insists one Black Power advocate, “is either a radical or an Uncle Tom.” In fact, only a fraction of America’s 22 million Negroes falls into either category. What worries the moderates is that increasing numbers of ghetto dwellers seem more susceptible than ever to the “Burn, baby, burn!” appeal of the radicals. Whitney M. Young Jr., 46, executive director of the National Urban League and probably the most effective man in the nation when it comes to drumming up jobs for Negroes, says: “Whether the moderates can prevail will be determined by whether there is an immediate and tangible response to the riots from the white community.” Adds Young, in the phrase with which he addresses mayors and businessmen: “You’ve got to give us some victories.”

Broad Paths. Young’s concern is shared by other top-echelon Negro leaders—most notably A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Associa tion for the Advancement of Colored People; and Martin Luther King, winner of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Each has explored broad pathways to Negro advancement: Randolph in the labor movement, Wilkins by affirming legal rights, King by awakening the nation’s conscience, Young by opening up economic opportunity. None of the advances came easily or swiftly.

Now come the militants—mostly men with minuscule followings and even less in the way of concrete accomplishment for their race—to confront the nation’s Negroes with a choice. “They can try to solve their problems,” says Philadelphia’s U.S. District Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, a Negro, “by supporting people who have programmatic effectiveness, like Whitney Young. Or they can place their faith in others and have another century of increasing chaos.”

Wilkins, for one, sees “no discernible danger that the moderates will be overthrown.” Young, similarly, estimates that no more than 3% of U.S. Ne groes applauded or participated in recent outbursts. What troubles him is that Congress, “in its obvious efforts to avoid rewarding the rioters,” will embark on “a course of retaliation, revenge and vindictive activity” that will ultimately punish innocent Negroes as well and thereby play right into the hands of the extremists. “Such a course,” says Young, “would simply change the 3% to 97%.”

Errand Boys. When Harlem erupted in 1964, touching off a four-year span of summer riots, Bayard Rustin, director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute and organizer of the 1963 March on

Washington, was attacked as an Uncle Tom merely for trying to calm people down. His reply then was: “I’m prepared to be a Tom if it’s the only way I can save women and children from being shot down in the street.”

Today Young and the others are called Toms—or worse—for the very reason that they have assiduously maintained communications with the white community. Philadelphia’s volatile Cecil Moore, suspended last month as head of the local N.A.A.C.P., calls them “the white man’s black errand boys.” Saul Alinsky, a self-styled white radical who prefers pressure to persuasion, compares Young to the “cooperative natives in the Congo” who were used by the colonial rulers “to keep the rest of the natives quiet.” Few of the teen-age rioters even know who Young is.

Yet, as Rustin says, “relevant is the word” where Young is concerned. “Whitney Young is relevant—more than any other person today. He has been getting work for people.” Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Raymond Pace Alexander, a Negro, agrees: “He has done more for the elevation of the Negro in the industrial world than anyone else.”

Time Running Out. Tall and burly (6 ft. 2 in., 208 Ibs.), with greying sideburns and modest mustache, Young looks like a mellow Gamal Abdel Nas ser. He would cut an imposing figure in any executive suite—and, judging from his success, has already done so in quite a few. Last year alone, the Urban League found jobs for 40,000 unemployed Negroes, got better jobs for another 8,000.

Little publicity attended this accomplishment—or those of the other moderates. Understandably, they resent it. Said Wilkins last week: “Every militant who comes up and stamps his foot and says a dirty word and shakes his fist and pounds the desk and tells the mayor to go you-know-where—he is instantly the harbinger of a new trend.” To be sure, the moderates acknowledge that the militants have helped them in one way. With every incendiary statement from the Black Power evangelists, the moderates find a more receptive audience among whites, who see them as constructive alternatives to the nihilists.

A Rumble of Thunder. Actually, Young dislikes the term moderate. Says he: “It isn’t a question of moderate v. militant but of responsibility v. irresponsibility, sanity v. insanity, effectiveness v. ineffectiveness.” Nor does he consider himself a “gradualist.” Young saw the present crisis developing more than three years ago. In his 1964 book, To Be Equal, he warned that “the March on Washington was just a beginning, and the Freedom Rides, sit-ins, kneel-ins and pray-ins thus far have been only a rumble of thunder on the horizon signaling the storm that will surely engulf all of us if tangible, meaningful results are not achieved with speed and sincerity.”

Since then, the Negro has made significant civil rights gains—and gone on a senseless rampage in well over a hundred cities. Why? For one thing, says San Francisco State College Psychology Professor Louis S. Levine, “there is far less exultation among Negroes over their improved status than the white assumes.” For another, their advances have placed them in the position of those prisoners who, as they near the end of their terms, in Levine’s words, “are more likely to attempt an escape than during the early phases of their confinement.” More to the point, the Negroes’ social and economic gains have not matched their expectations.

In the biggest cities, Negro unemployment runs from two to four times higher than white joblessness. The overall rate is 3.5% for Cleveland, but it is 15.6% for the black slum of Hough. Life expectancy for the Negro male has risen to 61.5 years, a level reached in 1931 by whites, who now have an expectancy of 67.7 years. Despite all the publicity designed to discourage Negro youngsters from quitting school, unemployment among Negro high school graduates is 16.1%, while the rate for Negro dropouts is only 16.3%.

The big-city slums—where three-fourths of U.S. Negroes now live—are a daily test of endurance. Robert Waite, a Sierra Leone native who heads Mayor John Lindsay’s Harlem task force, likens the Manhattan ghetto to “an underdeveloped country.” It lacks indigenously owned business, gets little risk capital, and keeps losing its talent to bigger industries elsewhere—just as in underdeveloped countries. “In underdeveloped areas,” he adds, “colonial banks were the only source of credit, and rarely did an indigenous businessman receive a loan until independence permitted the establishment of local banks.”

Until two Negro-run banks opened in Harlem, “the same situation existed,” with the big outside banks uninterested in promoting new business in the area. Gross sales of Negro-owned stores in Harlem account for only 8% of the total: most of the profits flow out of the community.

In every slum, the chronically hard up residents actually pay more for most goods than do wealthier whites in better neighborhoods. During a brief outburst of rioting in Watts last year, the arsonists’ first target was a supermarket chain that habitually stocked the shelves of its slum stores with scraggly meat and wilted vegetables that white customers had rejected in other outlets. In Detroit’s slums, a 5-lb. bag of flour costs 14¢ more than in fashionable Grosse Pointe, Mich., peas 12¢ more per can, eggs up to 250 more per dozen. A television set selling for $124.95 in downtown Detroit costs $189 in a ghetto shop. In many slums, door-todoor salesmen saddle unsophisticated buyers with shoddy furniture and clothing that is overpriced to begin with and sometimes costs twice as much as the original price when exorbitant time-payment rates are added. To avoid gouging, slum dwellers in Harlem and other areas have begun forming co-ops aimed at keeping prices down.

Copulative Approach. “In the kind of jungle in which these people live,” says Young, “it takes great strength to survive. If only we could build on this strength.” A number of schemes have been put forward. They range from Black Nationalist demands for complete separation of the Negroes in their own tract of land (Blackistan? Negronia?) to what a writer in Manhattan’s Vil lage Voice calls “the copulative approach,” aimed at complete elimination of racial differences through intermarriage (though if Brazil and the Philippines are any measure, subtle new discriminations would arise based on how much cafe one inherited and how much laif). Harlem Black Nationalist James Lawson even demands “reparations” amounting to $7,000 for every black person in America.

As for the “moderate” Negro leaders, they have come up with proposals that only recently might have struck many Americans as most immoderate. One such scheme is A. Philip Randolph’s “Freedom Budget,” originally proposed two years ago. It would wipe out the ghettos, provide a guaranteed annual income, increase spending on education, housing, vocational training and health services. The price tag: $185 billion over a ten-year period.

Young’s proposal, put forward four years ago, was for a “Domestic Marshall Plan” that would cost $145 billion over ten years. He noted that the Negro suffered a “discrimination gap” caused by “more than three centuries of abuse, humiliation, segregation and bias.” Because he is consequently incapable of competing equally with whites, said Young, he needs “more-than-equal” treatment.

The Inside Man. When the plan was first announced, it was considered hopelessly Utopian—and Young was considered rather radical for even daring to suggest it. Last week, however, everybody seemed to be embracing it. Hubert Humphrey and ten House Democrats called for a “Marshall Plan” for the cities. Roy Wilkins told a Washington audience that “if we can under write the economies of Germany, France, Italy and England and see that these people recover their equilibrium, then we can underwrite the cost of re covering the equilibrium of our own native black people.”

None of those who urged a Marshall Plan for the cities named the original author of the plan. Politicians rarely do—and that is one of the problems with which the Negro moderates must cope. Actually, the sort of work Young does rarely brings him public notice, but knowledgeable observers are aware of its value. “No matter who is shouting for Negro rights in the streets,” says Clarence Hunter, spokesman for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “you must still have Young to go inside and deal for the jobs and the training.” Says Young: “You can holler, protest, march, picket and demonstrate, but somebody must be able to sit in on the strategy conferences and plot a course.” Though the Urban League has in many ways changed almost beyond recognition from the National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes that was set up in New York in 1910, its role and its goal—”not alms but opportunity”—have remained essentially the same.

Founded by white and Negro social workers and philanthropists only a year after the N.A.A.C.P., the league’s first job was to help the Negro migrants who were just beginning to pour from the fields of the South into the big cities of the North. Starting with a budget of $8,500, it provided travelers’ aid, trained Negro social workers, conducted studies of social and economic condi tions among Negroes in the cities. By 1913, it had begun meeting with business and labor leaders to seek job openings for Negroes, still its biggest concern. When the U.S. entered World War II, 46 local branches were scattered around the country, and the league, through Industrial Relations Laboratories in 300 defense plants, was able to place more than 150,000 Negroes in jobs never before open to them. “What the Urban League means to the Negro community,” said Gunnar Myrdal in An American Dilemma, his classic 1944 study of U.S. race relations, “can best be understood by observing the dire need of its activity in cities where there is no local branch.”

“Green Power.” Today the league has affiliates in 84 cities, from San Diego to Springfield, Mass., Tampa, Fla., to Seattle. The budget has mushroomed to $3.5 million, while some 8,800 paid and volunteer league staffers administer foundation-and Government-funded projects that cost another $20 million.

The league has a score of concerns and dozens of separate programs, but “the most important thing that we do,” says Young, is still “to get jobs for people. ‘Green Power’ is important for the Negro now. Pride and dignity come when you reach in your pocket and find money, not a hole.”

Under Young, who joined the league as executive director in 1961, the organization has made a particular effort to find jobs that have never before been open to Negroes or have what the league calls a symbolic “role model” significance. Secretarial positions, for example, are particularly coveted, because a Negro secretary or receptionist, sitting outside the boss’s office, tells everyone in a company—more effectively than a dozen interoffice memos—that its policy is to hire Negroes. “If you’ve got them up on the executive floor,” notes Young succinctly, “there is no question.” More than 300 Negro girls in six cities are going through league-sponsored courses in typing, shorthand, English and office procedures.

Whitney Young is the nation’s only Negro—and one of the few Americans —who has instant access to almost any corporate boardroom in the U.S. Without retreating one iota from his own ideals or minimizing his demands, Young manages to communicate with America’s top executives on their own level—and more important—bring them over to his side.

All Those Panels. He and the N.A.A.C.P.’s Roy Wilkins are the two civil rights leaders closest to President Johnson, and Young presently holds seats on five presidentially appointed panels, has served on four others now disbanded. Nor is his influence purely temporal. After a 15-minute audience with Pope Paul last June, he met with the Vatican Cabinet for four hours to promote a papal encyclical on racial justice. The Vatican is now considering the question.

Not the least of Young’s accomplishments has been the revitalization of the Urban League itself, which, for all its good works, was showing signs of arteriosclerosis as the civil rights era of the ’60s began. Changing its watchword from “improvement” to “equality,” he set up a Washington bureau, separate from the local league office to bird dog federal funds, established five regional centers around the country to ride herd on local offices, and extended branches aggressively throughout the South, a hitherto almost forbidden ground to a Negro organization that counted heavily on the help of local community-chest drives. To the surprise of many, the chests proved generous; and Southern newspapers, contrasting the nondemonstrating league with the other civil rights groups, have recently been almost embarrassingly fervent in their approval of the league.

With a membership that puts Negroes alongside a city’s top business leaders (the National League’s board of directors reads like a Who’s Who of American Business), some local leagues are just about the only link between the Negro and white communities. “Anybody,” notes Young, “can get a bi-racial commission together after a riot. The league provides an opportunity for dialogue and candid discussion before the riot.”

Getting the Message. Before he took over, Young had won from the league’s directors an assurance that they recognized the new climate in the civil rights movement and the need for change. Fearful that the league might lose its business support and its valuable status as a charitable organization —thus making any contributions tax deductible—some of the directors nonetheless bitterly opposed Young’s decision to put the league behind the 1963 March on Washington. Young persisted, and contributions rose dramatically. More important, the league once again joined the mainstream of the Negro movement, a position it has retained ever since.

Today the league is striving desperately to reach and communicate with the young and the alienated. Thirteen storefront “academies” are attempting to educate New York’s “five-percenters”—the 5% who have been given up as hopeless by the public schools. Some of the teachers, and many of the students, are Black Muslims who have about as much in common with the Urban League as the Ku Klux Klan.

Proud Precedent. For his work with the league, Young is paid $32,000, though he has turned down a $75,000-a-year vice-presidency with at least one major corporation. Young had a proud precedent for that decision. Back in 1920, his father quit a $300-a-month job as an electrical engineer with the Ford Motor Co. to teach at Lincoln Institute, a white-run school for Negroes at Lincoln Ridge, Ky., at $68 a month.

Whitney Jr. was born at Lincoln Ridge in 1921. Although Kentucky was rigidly segregated at the time, growing up on campus was not too unpleasant. His father became the institute’s first Negro president; his mother was commissioned postmistress of Lincoln Ridge, the first Negro postmistress in the U.S. In grade school, Whitney studied under a white tutor. Yet an excur sion to Louisville meant taunts from white toughs, the black balcony in the movie house, the back door of a beanery for a hamburger. He prepped at Lincoln, got straight A’s, and was graduated at 14. At segregated Kentucky State College, he took a premedical course and earned high grades.

Member of the Wedding. That he emerged from boyhood free of bitterness is another legacy from his father. Young still recalls the paternal lecture on white bigots: “These people are to be pitied rather than hated. They need Negroes to look down on for the sake of their own security.” Whitney Sr. repeatedly reminded his son that he was like a ballplayer batting .400 in the minor leagues. The real competition would come in the integrated world.

The first test came with World War II. Young enlisted, was sent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for an intensive course in electrical engineering. At first, his white roommate from Mississippi refused to speak to him. Within six months, the Mississippian asked Young to be best man at his wedding (Young accepted) and suggested that he would tolerate Young as a brother-in-law (he declined). Instead, he married Margaret Buchner, a stunning schoolteacher whom he had met at Kentucky State College. She now writes children’s books on civil rights and Negro history. They have two daughters, Marcia, 20, and Lauren, 13.

Life’s Work. Despite his bachelor’s degree from Kentucky State and electrical-engineering training at M.I.T., Young went to Europe as an enlisted man in a Negro road-construction company that was principally officered by Southern whites. “I had to negotiate between them,” says Young. “I insisted on the officers’ treating the men with dignity, giving them passes, and eliminating all forms of brutality. I suppose it was this experience that made me decide that I wanted to make my life’s work race relations.”

After the war, Young went to the University of Minnesota, where he earned a master’s degree in social work (his thesis topic: a study of the Urban League in St. Paul) and helped organize a chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. He worked for Urban League groups, first in St. Paul and then in Omaha, while lecturing at colleges in both cities. He then became dean of Atlanta University’s School of Social Work. In Georgia, Young joined the N.A.A.C.P., eventually rose to become its state president before joining the National Urban League.

Wry & Romantic. Young wears his commitment on his lapel, in the form of a disk bearing the algebraic equal-sign ( = ). It is made of platinum, and he calls it his “more-than-equal button.” His personal style is a beguiling mixture of the realistic, the wry and the romantic. He frankly lists among his assets as a Negro mediator with the white world his knowledge of “what happens in the sauna bath at the Harvard Club.” When he feels he has pushed a white audience as far as he can, he turns a joke on himself. He admits facetiously to having felt “some anxiety” the first time he flew with a Negro pilot. “That shows how much I had been brainwashed.” If the subject is Negro immorality, he points out that he did not get his relatively light color “because of an overly aggressive grandmother.”

Young carries in his pocket the lyrics to The Quest, a song from Man of La Mancha, and will read the lines to himself or others at the slightest provocation. To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe,/ To bear with unbearable sorrow, to run where the brave dare not go. Last week, when a well-known Negro intellectual voiced his despair over the future of moderate leadership, Young rushed over to buck up his friend. First, he reminded him that the “wild men” among the militants would like nothing better than to see responsible leaders opt out of the civil rights cause. Then the romantic Young read the La Mancha lyrics.

Young making like Don Quixote? The superficial resemblance is slight. For exercise he mounts not a nag but an Exercycle in the recreation room of his $35,000 split-level home in a white section of New Rochelle, just north of New York City. For transportation he rides a commuter train through Harlem to his midtown Manhattan office, along with white suburbanites. Yet he has more of the knight errant in him than merely the song. On the night of June 22, after New York police disclosed a plot by the Revolutionary Action Movement to murder Young and other Negro leaders, he paid a late visit to Harlem to see for himself how he stood in the ghetto, where Martin Luther King was once stabbed by a Negro. Young found no menace, but one Harlemite asked him: “When are we going to get smart and stop killing each other?”

Operation Breadbasket. Young is convinced that nothing will end the tragedy more effectively than jobs, jobs and more jobs. So are most other Negro leaders. “Teenagers with jobs,” says Randolph, “don’t throw Molotov cocktails through store windows.” Wilkins is trying to get more construction jobs for Negroes with “a massive assault on discriminatory hiring practices,” has urged some 1,500 N.A.A.C.P. branches to picket federal and state building projects worth $76.5 billion unless more openings are made available.

King has launched “Operation Breadbasket” in more than 40 cities, aimed at getting new or better jobs for Negroes. King credits Breadbasket with getting jobs for 2,200 Chicago Negroes, hopes to open up as many as 60,000 new jobs a year for Negroes in cities with populations exceeding 100,000.

Similarly wide-ranging is the Opportunities Industrialization Center program launched by the Rev. Leon Sullivan three years ago in a converted Philadelphia jail. Some 3,000 Negroes have already been trained in Philadelphia alone, for jobs ranging from cook to electronics technician, and now 65 U.S. cities from New Haven, Conn., to Los Angeles are setting up similar centers.

Self-Help. In scores of cities, Negro self-help projects are under way. “Operation Bootstrap” in Watts, launched with a $1,000 loan and Negro-run, has placed 175 graduates in skilled jobs in the past six months. In Indianapolis, Schoolteacher Mattie Rice Coney organized 500 block clubs to clean up the ghetto, figures that her group has swept up 42,000 tons of trash in the last year. “Slums are made by people,” she says, “not by plaster or bricks. Civic rebuilding begins with people who care about themselves.”

Chicago’s “Jobs Now,” as one of its founders explains, concentrates on “the kids who can strip a car in ten minutes but can’t pass a mechanical-aptitude test.” Half a dozen churches with predominantly Negro congregations have rehabilitated apartments in communities from Cleveland to Kiloch, Wis. In the Hough slum, former Cleveland Browns Football Star Jim Brown and Team mate John Woolen formed the Negro Industrial and Economic Union to help Negroes start their own businesses with the help of no-interest loans.

Such projects generate an immense —and justified—pride. “We’ve been treated unfairly,” says Indianapolis’ Mattie Coney, “but fairness isn’t the argument. Black people are easily identified—they just plain have to be better behaved or they give the prejudiced white man a weapon.” In a letter made public last week, the late William Faulkner offered similar advice to a former butler. Since Negroes “are a minority,” the novelist wrote in 1960, “they must behave better than white people. They must be more responsible, more honest, more moral, more industrious, more literate and educated. They, not the law, have got to compel the white people to say, ‘Please come and be equal with us.’ ” This is a point of view that Roy Wilkins, for one, angrily rejects. “We condemn the propaganda that Negro citizens must ‘earn’ their rights through good behavior,” he told the N.A.A.C.P.’s 50th convention in 1959. Young, however, urges Negroes to try to be “more than equal,” and for a time his theme song was Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.

Gilding the Ghettos. Rewarding as self-help projects may be, they cannot come close to soaking up all the available Negro manpower. King and Wilkins want massive WPA-style programs to provide public-works jobs for Negroes. In the wake of the rioting, a number of public officials moved quickly to reduce unemployment. Philadelphia Mayor James Tate sent out “job-mobiles” that recruited 504 unemployed ghetto residents for city work, then met with businessmen and got pledges of 1,200 more jobs. Maryland’s Republican Governor Spiro Agnew mapped a job program for unemployed Negroes in Baltimore. Mayors of the riot-ravaged cities, of course, did not have to worry about creating jobs. In Detroit, hundreds of men can be kept busy for years at the task of reconstruction.

Urban Coalition. The most significant effort may prove to be the Urban Coalition formed in Washington last week by 22 leaders of industry, local government, churches, labor unions and civil rights groups. The goal is to persuade “every American to join in the creation of a new political, social, economic and moral climate, which will make possible the breaking up of the vicious cycle of the ghetto.” Among its founding members: Whitney M. Young Jr. Another member, New York’s Mayor Lindsay, liked the idea so well that he formed a New York coalition aimed at rehabilitating the slums and helping Negroes to become “their own butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.”

Initially, the White House reacted coolly to the coalition. One reason for its concern was the fact that Lindsay urged the Administration to “reorder the nation’s priorities.” To Lyndon Johnson, that sounded like the opening gun for an attack on his Viet Nam policy and an appeal to end the war on any terms so that he could plow the money into the cities.

As for Young’s view on Viet Nam, he personally regrets the size and cost of the U.S. commitment. Nonetheless, in Warsaw last fall, he outlined the U.S. position to Polish Premier Jozef Cyrankiewicz with eloquence and grace.

No apologist for the Administration, Young explained that he did so because American policy was being challenged one-sidedly by Communist officials, who were plainly surprised and impressed when Young, a Negro, took the stand that he did.

Young, the only national Negro leader to visit Viet Nam besides Senator Brooke, does not make the simplistic argument—as does King—that an end to the war would instantly transfer billions of dollars to the cities. The main thrust of racial progress, as he sees it, is by political and psychological means. Indeed, despite the Supreme Court’s reapportionment rulings, the U.S. Congress is still a predominantly rural body, unlikely to be too sympathetic to the needs of the central cities. In the House, 225 of the 435 members hail from towns of 50,000 or less; in the Senate, the ratio is 56 to 44.

“I Believe.” As Young sees it, the process of rooting out discrimination will take both political action and an intensive educational effort, directed as much at whites as at Negroes. “The lower middle class in America thinks that status means exclusiveness,” he says, “that those white, antiseptic, bland ghettos called suburbs are the place to go. We need a generation of people who have the commitment and creativity to try integration—to explore the creative possibilities of diversity.” Young professes optimism. “But I don’t think it rests in the hands of the Negro,” he argues. “He has already said in a thousand ways that he believes in America. Now the time has come for America to say, ‘I believe in you.’ ”

Pounds & Pages. There were signs that the larger white society was groping for the words. In Los Angeles, Democratic Mayor Sam Yorty, who has never been a conspicuous champion of the Negro cause, declared: “We must find ways of guaranteeing any man who wants to work a job—whatever it costs.” In Detroit, Vice President Humphrey reasoned: “Whatever it will take to get the job done, we must be willing to pay the price.” In a Senate hearing room, North Carolina’s Senator Sam Ervin held up a stack of civil rights bills that ran to 1,212 pages and weighed 15 Ibs. 6 oz., and testily asked the Attorney General: “I’d just like to know how many more pages we’re going to have.” Replied Ramsey Clark: “As many pounds and pages as we need to ensure the rights of all Americans.”

Despite the sudden flurry of interest in the Negro’s plight, the spate of committees ordered to probe the ghettos’ blight, and the rash of ratiocination in the press, Young warns that “time is running out.” Not only for the Negro moderates, who are having more and more trouble persuading the slum dwellers not to turn to violence, but for the rest of society.

“There is a credibility gap beginning to emerge,” says Young, “and there are forces saying that the cause is hopeless, that American white people are so selfish that they will remain silent in this crisis, or that the American white people are congenitally immoral and so bankrupt that it is futile even to try to bring about change. I don’t believe this, but not because I think that a large number of Americans are going to get more moral. They are simply going to get more intelligent.”

The tragedy today is that it should take warfare in the cities to awaken white Americans to the Negro’s dire and manifold needs. It will, of course, be an infinitely greater tragedy for the future if they fail to do so.