“The Awful Roar”

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

—Abolitionist Negro Frederick Douglass, 1857

In 1963, that awful roar is heard as never before.

“My basic strength is those 300,000 lower-class guys who are ready to mob, rob, steal and kill,” boasts Cecil Moore, 48, head of the Philadelphia branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Says Mel Ladson, 26, a Miami leader in the Congress of Racial Equality: “I want to be able to go in that restaurant and eat, and it doesn’t mean a damn to me if ,the owner’s guts are boiling with resentment. I want to nonviolently beat the hell out of him.”

Predicts Dr. Gardner Taylor, 45, Negro pastor of Brooklyn’s Concord Baptist Church: “The streets are going to run red with blood.”

Cries the Rev. James Bevel, a Mississippi official of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference: “Some punk who calls himself the President has the audacity to tell people to go slow. I’m not prepared to be humiliated by white trash the rest of my life, including Mr. Kennedy.”

These are voices—some voices—of the Negro revolution. That revolution, dramatically symbolized in this week’s massed march in Washington, has burst out of the South to engulf the North. It has made it impossible for almost any Negro to stay aloof, except at the cost of ostracism by other Negroes as an “Uncle Tom.” It has seared the white conscience—even while, in some of its excesses, it has created white bitterness where little or none existed before. And right up to the President of the U.S., it has forced white politicians who have long cashed in on their lip service to “civil rights” to put up or shut up.

The Welcome Pressure. Like every revolution, the Negro revolution is formless. It is, as ex-Slave Douglass said it must be, an oceanic tide of many waters. The voices of hatred are in the minority—so far. But they often drown out softer, equally determined and far more effective Negro voices.

Obviously, no Negro can speak for all. No organization can represent all Negro aspirations. But in the late summer of 1963, as the revolution intensifies, if there is one Negro who can lay claim to the position of spokesman and worker for a Negro consensus, it is a slender, stoop-shouldered, sickly, dedicated, rebellious man named Roy Wilkins.

Wilkins, 62, is executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the oldest (founded in 1909), biggest (400,000 members, and growing at the rate of 5% a year), and most potent of U.S. civil rights organizations. Wilkins himself is a professional in the business of protest. As a reporter and managing editor of Kansas City’s crusading Negro weekly, the Call, for eight years, and as a fulltime N.A.A.C.P. worker for 32, he was a racial rebel in the days when the white man’s answer was not just a paddy wagon but, all too often, a lynch mob’s rope.

Among many young, highly militant Negroes, it has become fashionable to denounce the N.A.A.C.P. as oldfashioned. Wilkins is keenly aware of the challenge. “Sure, young people pressure us,” he says. “I welcome it.” But, he insists, “many young Negroes today don’t know the history of the fight to end segregation.” There cannot, in fact, be any real understanding of the Negro revolution of 1963 without some understanding of the Negro’s centuries-long struggle in America.

Toward Jim Crow. Negroes helped blaze trails in America, sometimes as slaves but often as scouts and valued aides to many of the famed explorers. They were with Columbus, Balboa, Ponce de León, Cortes, Pizarro, Menéndez, De Soto. Free Negroes were among the first pioneers to settle in the Mississippi Valley in the 17th century. In Virginia, Negro colonists knew no inferiority of status, owned land, voted, mingled with whites. Some 5,000 Negroes fought the British as troops in George Washington’s army.

Many of the first slaves in America were, in fact, Indians. In bondage, however, the Indian proved sickly, often died. Indentured white servants were used for a time but too often broke away, easily lost their slave identity among white colonists. Only after such failures did the white man begin large-scale enslavement of the Negro, who possessed two ideal qualities: he was strong, and if he fled, his face stood out in a crowd.

Contrary to the notion that his revolution is of relatively recent origin, the Negro has always fought against his servitude. Before the Civil War ended, there were at least 250 slave revolts or conspiracies in the U.S., including the slaughter of 60 Virginia whites in 1831. Between 1810 and 1860, some 100,000 slaves, valued at more than $30 million, slipped away to freedom in the North. Others protested in more subtle ways. They took to their beds with mysterious “miseries.” They “accidentally” ruined plows and wagons. They “forgot” to cinch a saddle tightly—and many a master took a painful fall.

The Civil War brought the Negro his “emancipation,” and Reconstruction gave him an intoxicating power in Southern state legislatures that he was totally unprepared to exercise responsibly (Negroes outnumbered whites in the South Carolina legislature in 1868). Easily led by the Northern white carpetbagger, the Negro lawmakers, like those in some young African nations today, indulged in an orgy of pork-barreling and political corruption. It was in direct reaction to such abuses that Southern whites, on regaining political control, enacted Jim Crow laws. The first, passed by the Tennessee legislature in 1881, imposed segregated seating in railroad cars. Other Southern states followed in other, more oppressive ways. By 1910, most of the laws that Negroes are fighting today were on the books.

Two Rows for a Bad One. It was the first decade of the 20th century that gave birth to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1905, the brilliant but eccentric Dr. William E. B. Du Bois,* one of the founders of the American Negro Academy, set up a narrowly based protest group of Negro elite known as the Niagara Movement (its first meeting was held near Niagara Falls in 1905). Declared Du Bois: “We claim for ourselves every right that belongs to a freeborn American—political, civil and social—and until we get these rights, we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America with the story of its shameful deeds toward us.” A well-to-do New York white woman, Mary White Ovington, covered that speech for the New York Evening Post, with other liberals conceived the idea of a national biracial conference on the Negro question. She helped persuade Post Publisher Oswald Garrison Villard, who later edited the Nation for 15 years, to write a “Call to Action” that led directly to the formation of the N.A.A.C.P. Among those who issued the call on Lincoln’s Birthday 1909 were Professor John Dewey, William Lloyd Garrison, Jane Addams, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Lincoln Steffens.

The N.A.A.C.P.’s lifetime is covered almost exactly by that of Roy Wilkins. The grandson of a Mississippi slave, he was born in St. Louis in 1901. His mother died of tuberculosis, and because his father was not able to keep the family together, Roy was reared in St. Paul by an aunt and an uncle. In a poor but racially mixed neighborhood, Roy’s best friends included three Swedish kids named Hendrickson. To help pay for his sociology studies at the University of Minnesota, Wilkins worked as a redcap in St. Paul’s Union Station and as a dining car waiter on the Northern Pacific, also labored on the cleanup squad at the South St. Paul stockyards in a room where congealed cattle blood was sometimes 18 inches deep.

After graduation from college, Wilkins landed a job on the Call in Kansas City—and it was there that he first really learned what it can mean to be a Negro in the U.S. “Kansas City ate my heart out,” he recalls. “It was a Jim Crow town through and through. There were two school systems, bad housing, police brutality, bombings in Negro neighborhoods. Police were arresting white and Negro high school kids just for being together. The legitimate theater saved half of the last row in the top balcony for Negroes. If the show was bad, they gave us two rows.”

The Rope’s End. As one expression of his protest, Wilkins intensified his N.A.A.C.P. activities. But when the organization offered him a job on its magazine, the Crisis, he turned it down, fired off a frankly critical letter to N.A.A.C.P. headquarters in New York.

The letter so impressed organization officers that they called Wilkins in for an interview and wound up hiring him as an aide to Executive Secretary Walter White.

At that time, the N.A.A.C.P.’s most massive efforts were directed against lynchings—and it is difficult for Americans today to realize just what terror that word held for Negroes. For the 30 years ending in 1918, the N.A.A.C.P. lists 3,224 cases in which people were hanged, burned or otherwise murdered by white mobs. No Negro could feel really safe—for reasons perhaps best described in the well-authenticated report of one famed lynching: “A mob near Valdosta, Ga., frustrated at not finding the man they sought for murdering a plantation owner, lynched three innocent Negroes instead; the pregnant wife of one wailed at her husband’s death so loudly that the mob seized her and burned her alive, too.” Says Roy Wilkins of the priority given by the N.A.A.C.P. to its antilynch efforts: “We had to stop lynching because they were killing us. We had to provide physical security.”

Wilkins himself suffered his first (and one of his few) arrests as a picket in Washington in 1934 after Franklin Roosevelt’s Attorney General Homer Cummings failed to include lynching on the agenda of a national conference on crime. But as the N.A.A.C.P. had already discovered, and as Wilkins soon learned, the overt physical demonstration is not necessarily the most effective way to achieve Negro aims.

In the antilynch battle, the most powerful weapon of the N.A.A.C.P. was publicity. Wilkins’ boss, Walter White, was a superb propagandist. Actually one sixty-fourth Negro in family-tree terms, White insisted upon classifying himself as a Negro. He was blond and blue-eyed, and one of his favorite tactics was to go out to investigate a lynching, pass himself off as a white newsman, win the confidence of local law officials—and return to write a brutally detailed report.

The N.A.A.C.P. never did achieve its main aim, that of a federal antilynch law. But it did impress itself enough on the white conscience to end lynching.

Slowly, tortuously, the lynch rate fell from 64 in 1921 to 28 in 1933 to five in 1940 to, for the first time, none in 1952. To be sure, white hoodlums still love to lob bombs at the homes of Negro leaders, but the last real lynch killing that the U.S. has known was that of Mississippi Negro Mack Charles Parker in 1959. Says the N.A.A.C.P.’s Wilkins: “We have completely changed the thinking of the country on lynching. At one time it was defended in the Senate, and even in the pulpit. There is no comparison now with the fear we once knew.”

“Paper Decrees.” Once the struggle against lynch law was won, the N.A.A.C.P. could give top priority to another drive—against segregated education. By deliberate decision, the organization made that assault not so much in the press, or on the streets, or in the lobbies of Congress, but in the courts. N.A.A.C.P. Special Counsel Thurgood Marshall pleaded the cause of school integration before the Supreme Court, was upheld in the historic decision of 1954—and in the minds of many Negroes at the time, that decision opened the way to real racial equality in the U.S.

This expectation fell far, and tragically, short of fulfillment. In both South and North, public officials found all sorts of ways to delay, avoid or simply ignore implementation of the Supreme Court’s order. Dashed to the ground, Negro hopes arose once more in 1957, when President Eisenhower ordered federal troops into Little Rock to enforce token high school integration.

But even after Little Rock, progress seemed agonizingly slow. And in their disappointment, a multitude of Negroes began blaming the N.A.A.C.P. for its reliance upon the slow, stolid processes of the courts. Declared Negro Journalist Louis Lomax, 41: “The Negro masses are angry and restless, tired of prolonged legal battles that end in paper decrees. The organizations that understand this unrest and rise to lead it will survive; those that do not will perish.” Asked if he thought his national leaders were asleep at the switch, Jersey City N.A.A.C.P. President Raymond Brown snapped: “Hell, they don’t even know where the switch is.” Some Negroes furiously turned to such Negro nationalist groups as the Black Muslims, whose New York leader, Malcolm X, tells whites: “The N.A.A.C.P. is a white man’s concept of a black man’s organization. Don’t let any of those black integrationists fool you. What they really want is your woman.”

In this epochal era of Negro frustration, new leaders and new organizations began bursting out all over. Perhaps the most successful has been the Rev. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1955-56, Baptist King, an exponent of the Gandhian technique of massive but passive protest, successfully led a boycott to end bus segregation in Montgomery, Ala. The post-Little Rock disappointments gave King’s movement even greater impetus. King himself has explained: “We were confronted with blasted hopes, and the dark shadow of a deep disappointment settled upon us. So we had no alternative except that of preparing for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and national community.”

The Fangs. Last April, King sent out marchers, including troops of Negro schoolchildren, to protest discrimination in hiring and at lunch counters, rest rooms and other public facilities in Birmingham. Many civil rights leaders, both Negro and white, thought the effort was singularly ill-timed—after all, a new, perhaps more moderate, city administration was about to take over Birmingham. But the way it turned out, King’s demonstrations may reasonably be considered the sparking point for the Negro revolution of 1963.

King’s accomplishment came only with the inadvertent help of Birmingham whites, particularly that of Public Safety Commissioner Eugene (“Bull”) Connor, who during the Birmingham crisis became an international symbol of blind, cruel Southern racism. When King sent out his marchers, Connor had them mowed down by streams from fire hoses. Shocking news photos splashed across the pages of the world’s press—of a young Negro sent sprawling by a jet of water, of a Negro woman pinioned to the sidewalk with a cop’s knee at her throat, of police dogs lunging at fleeing Negroes.

With that, millions of people—North and South, black and white—felt the fangs of segregation and, at least in spirit, joined the protest movement. The revolution was on—in earnest. Places little known for anything else became bywords for racial conflict—Anniston, Ala., Albany, Ga., Prince Edward County, Va., Cambridge, Md., Englewood, N.J., Greenwood and Greenville, Miss., Goldsboro and Greensboro, N.C.

Baltimore Postman William Moore, a white man murdered as he walked along an Alabama highway wearing an integration sign, and Mississippi N.A.A.C.P. Leader Medgar Evers, shot in the back outside his home, became martyrs to the cause. Direct-action protests proliferated. There were more “freedom walks” and “freedom marches”—and then came the “freedom calls,” in which Negroes harass white city officials by calling them on the telephone, murmuring “Freedom” and hanging up.

There are boycotts—Negro leaders prefer to call them “selective patronage movements”—against business firms that discriminate against Negroes in their personnel practices. There are rent strikes against slumlords who refuse to repair Negro tenements. There is the “sit-in” technique and its myriad variations: the “swim-in” to integrate pools, the “wade-in” at beaches, the “pray-in” at churches, the “wait-in” at housing developments. Demonstrators jam restaurant parking lots in “park-ins,” line up at theater ticket booths in “stand-ins,” prostrate themselves before bulldozers at construction-site “lie-ins.” Demonstrators have harassed New York’s Mayor Robert Wagner by a “chain-in,” in which they tried to lock themselves to a city hall pillar. They even dumped tenement trash in City Hall Plaza to protest slum conditions.

The Ex-Heroes. In the rush of the revolution, Negro heroes fall fast. Less than a year ago, with the help of 16,000 federal troops sent in by President Kennedy, Negro James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi. He graduated last week—but as a result of several statements he has made, he is now scorned by many Negroes as being too “moderate.” James Hood, first male Negro ever to be enrolled at the University of Alabama, got along pretty well for a while—to the point that he started saying critical things about Negroes in public. As a result, he was so hounded by other Negroes that to get back on the right side of his own people he turned around and denounced university officials. Two.weeks ago, facing expulsion, he withdrew from Alabama. *

Similarly, the revolution sometimes imposes impossible demands on Negro leaders who try to be truthful. Says a Negro member of the Illinois state legislature: “Now, just by making a sober, honest judgment on how civil rights should be won, you can be called an Uncle Tom by anyone who disagrees. What does this do to Negro leadership? It demolishes it.” And Massachusetts’ Attorney General Edward Brooke, the highest elected Negro official in the nation, has made many Negro enemies because, even while going all out for civil rights, he argues that the Negro, too, has obligations to uphold. Says Brooke about Boston’s Columbia Point Housing Project, which has many Negro tenants: “There’s writing all over the walls, and children defecate right in the halls when there’s a bathroom a few feet away. You can’t just offer people equal opportunities; you have to show them what to do with those opportunities.”

A Variety of Weapons. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as headed by Roy Wilkins (he succeeded White in 1955) has also suffered under the pressures of the Negro revolution. But it has survived them and maintained its leadership. One reason is that Wilkins himself is a firm believer in the idea that the Negro should use every possible means to achieve his rights. If persuasion will serve, that is fine. But if violence is required, Wilkins accepts it. Said he in a recent speech: “The Negro citizen has come to the point where he is not afraid of violence. He no longer shrinks back. He will assert himself, and if violence comes, so be it.”

What Wilkins really believes in is variety in attack. When street demonstrations seem likely to be effective, Wilkins is wholeheartedly for them. “But,” he insists, “demonstrations are like prepping a patient for surgery.

They often serve to get a community ready, and then we can move in with our other approaches. CORE people are good commandos. But Southern whites who regard the N.A.A.C.P. as the most dangerous enemy are correct. We have stuck to our knitting and used all our weapons.” In that same sense, Wilkins is perfectly willing to go along with Martin Luther King’s Gandhian approach —sometimes. Says he: “Wherever Gandhi’s techniques fit, they can be used. But it must be remembered that in India the Indian was in the majority; he could stop the country. In the U.S., the Negro is in the minority; he can’t stop anything very long. Montgomery was made to order for the Gandhi approach, since 70% of the bus riders were Negro. But consider Tallahassee and Baton Rouge, where bus boycotts fell on their faces. These failures reflect on planning and analysis, and that’s why they bother me.” Any realistic analysis of the Negro revolution must take into account at least five fundamental areas of Negro discontent:

∙JOBS. Many whites seem to assume that U.S. Negroes are better off financially today than ever before, but although Negroes made substantial income gains during World War II, they were not permanent. In the past decade, the median family income for nonwhites (now $3,191) has slipped from 57% of white family income to 53%. The nonwhite unemployment rate is now 10.7%, almost double that of whites. In such a situation, the Negro has had little incentive for self-improvement. Says Wilkins: “Until recently, Negro children didn’t think about being an engineer or a scientist. So they didn’t study calculus, algebra, physics or electricity. And then people turn around and say, ‘Why don’t those Negro kids study hard like everybody else?’ You wouldn’t think a plumber’s job was much, but it is. A plumber doesn’t work too hard or too long, but he gets paid big. And Negroes who have that skill would like to get that pay.” But Negroes cannot even become plumbers—if only because of the arrant discrimination of many of the nation’s craft unions. In recent weeks, one of the more dramatic signs of the Negro revolution has been in demonstrations around construction sites in Philadelphia, New York, Newark, Chicago and Elizabeth, N.J. Some Negro leaders argue that Negroes should be given a “quota” of at least 25% of the workers on any construction job. Among the many who think this is wrong is Wilkins. “We’re against quotas,” he says. “Our association does not believe a white person should be discharged to make room for a Negro.” Another is President Kennedy, who said last week at his press conference: “I don’t think quotas are a good idea. We are too mixed, this society of ours, to begin to divide ourselves on the basis of race or color.” But the fact remains that the U.S. Negro wants, and has a right to, better job opportunities.

∙EDUCATION. The most dramatic clashes in the civil rights struggle have occurred over the integration of public schools. Yet last spring in 17 Southern and border states and the District of Columbia, only 7.9% of all Negro pupils attended public schools with whites. The snail’s pace is indicated by the fact that this was an increase of only one-tenth of 1 % over the preceding autumn. Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina still did not have a single Negro child seated in a subcollege public classroom with a white pupil. Georgia had only 44, Louisiana 107, Arkansas—despite Little Rock—only 247. For the upcoming school year, more than 80 Southern school districts have announced plans to desegregate. These include such racial tinderboxes as Birmingham, Baton Rouge and Pine Bluff, Ark.—and in all these, violence is possible. Still, much of the Negro’s attention has shifted to protest against de facto segregation in the North, where segregation created by neighborhood housing patterns presents a far more complex problem. Negro leaders in New York, Boston, Oakland, Calif., Detroit, St. Louis and Chicago (see EDUCATION) threaten a mass “stay-out” by Negro students this fall from schools that are mostly Negro if only by reason of residence. In New Rochelle, N.Y., and several other cities, some Negro children during the next school year will be transported by tax-supported buses to nonsegregated schools. There is even the reverse notion that in the interests of integration white children should be pulled out of schools near their homes and carried to mostly Negro schools. Negro leaders in New York are demanding such transfers throughout the city, but School Superintendent Calvin E. Gross declares: “Some parents are just in terror that their children will be plucked from their neighborhood and taken across town to another school. We are not prepared to bus children involuntarily in a neighborhood switch.”

∙HOUSING. Housing is the most emotional issue. By one means or another, Negroes are generally prevented from moving into desirable white neighborhoods. Around Chicago, only 22 of 253 suburbs have more than 100 Negro residents. In California, less than 2% of the homes built since World War II have been available to Negroes. President Kennedy’s long-delayed executive order barring discrimination in the sale of Government-financed residences so far seems to have had no large-scale effect. Despite statistics to the contrary, the belief that property values inevitably fall when Negroes move into a neighborhood scares many whites who otherwise champion civil rights. In their own minds, at least, the choice is between their idealism and their wallet—and in the showdown, idealism often loses out.

∙VOTING. Despite persistent pressure by the Justice Department and courageous registration drives by Negro organizers in the South, only 29% of the region’s potential of 2,000,000 Negro voters have so far been accepted by local registrars. Many civil rights leaders believe that nothing would improve the Negro’s condition faster than full voting power; yet none see any prospect that this will soon happen. Federal prosecution is tediously slow. The Kennedy Administration’s 1963 civil rights bill, still bogged down in Congress, would speed up the process by automatically qualifying as literate anyone who has a sixth-grade education. Unfortunately, even this would not include a majority of Negroes in Mississippi and Alabama. What some Negroes want is federal cops in the county courthouse. “I don’t see anything wrong with putting a marshal in voter-registration offices on the day that Negroes plan to register,” says Mississippi N.A.A.C.P. Leader Aaron Henry. “It would encourage Negroes to register and dissuade the registrar from giving them trouble.”

∙PUBLIC ACCOMMODATIONS. Almost half of about 900 civil rights demonstrations staged since last May have revolved around the right of the Negro to eat in any place that he can afford, to sleep in any hotel or motel, to play in any park, or to enjoy the facilities of any other so-called “public accommodation.” Substantial progress has been made: in the past three months, at least 275 towns have desegregated some sort of public facility. But the average U.S. Negro still seems to view his exclusion from public places as the worst insult of all. “I don’t know anything that humiliates me more than to be out in the car and have one of my daughters ask to go to the bathroom and have to tell her, ‘No, we can’t stop at any of these places,’ ” says S.C.L.C.’s Rev. Andrew Young. “Every time one of them wants to go, it’s a family crisis.” The public-accommodations section is the most controversial of all in the Kennedy Administration’s proposed legislative package on civil rights. But Attorney General Robert Kennedy is determined to fight it through despite the legalistic debate over the best constitutional basis for such a law. “The other sections of the bill are ways of tunneling in to get at the smoldering origins of the fire,” he says. “This one takes care of the flames.”

In striving toward Negro goals in these fields, Roy Wilkins must often tolerate wild men even within his own organization. Perhaps the most outspoken of these “Mau Mau,” as they are called by responsible civil rights leaders, is the N.A.A.C.P.’s Cecil Moore in Philadelphia. Moore pours his venom on everyone: “The Urban League was created to be a beggar. CORE is made up of an infinitesimal number of Negroes and an even lesser number of frustrated whites who are trying to salve their guilt. Half of all social workers are queer.”

Wilkins stands in direct contrast to such demagogic types. The 14-hour days he normally puts in at his job are severely straining his strength. He survived surgery for stomach cancer in 1946, but he has a serious gall-bladder ailment that keeps him off the cigars and social drinking he used to enjoy. It does not, however, keep him out of his ivory Triumph sports car, which he loves to drive along parkways near the apartment he shares with his St. Louis-born wife Minnie in an integrated neighborhood in Queens.

Although he is a rebel whose anger burns fiercely, Wilkins maintains an ability to analyze rationally even the most emotional of problems. His mind drives toward specific detail (it also collects such trivia as the number of Cokes bottled annually in New York City, the timetables of obscure railroad runs) rather than fuzzy generalization. And when Wilkins speaks of his lifetime in the Negro revolution, his subdued eloquence is of the sort that—if anything can—may yet create an accommodation satisfactory both to most Negroes and most whites.

“It’s really thrilling and exciting to be a Negro in the ’60s,” he says. “The whole gamut of Negro life is an adventure if you can roll with the punches and not let it get you into the valley of bitterness. I’ve never been motivated by any persistent strong feeling against white people. Thank God, I’ve never lost my anger, though, and I’ve used it sometimes. White people are like colored. They are glad and sad. They know poverty and trouble and divorce and sickness. I may be an incurable optimist, but I believe there are more people who want to do good than do evil. The Negro couldn’t have made it without the help of some white people.

“Southern whites have a stake in this movement. You can’t keep a man in a ditch without staying in there with him. White people have been prisoners of this situation, just as we have been. The whites living today didn’t cause it and neither did we, but the whites sustain it because it’s comfortable and profitable.

“This urgency? This new push? Well, it’s cumulative. It’s the emergence of Africa. It’s being hungry. It’s military desegregation. It’s the G.I. Bill. It’s major-league baseball with Negroes. It’s the 8,000 to 10,000 Negroes graduating from college each year, 100,000 since the war. It’s the mechanization of farms —the move from farms to Southern cities and then to Western cities. It’s the consumer demand television builds. It’s kids being impatient. That’s why we have it now.

“The back of segregation is broken. A whole new era is before us. This will be a period when the Negro will have to make readjustments. We must counsel our Negro population on induction into an integrated society, teach them that you can’t blame all disabilities on race, because this is self-defeating. A great number of Negroes are ready for all their rights now. A great number are not fully aware of the competition and responsibility which await them in an unsegregated world.

“There’s going to be beer, and doubleheaders with the Yankees, and ice cream and mortgages and taxes, and all the things that whites have in their world, and tedium too. It’s not going to be heaven.”

* Du Bois left N.A.A.C.P.’s research staff under pressure in 1948 because of his leftist political activities. In 1961, at the age of 93, he joined the Communist Party, became a frequent visitor to Russia and Red China. He has lived in Ghana since 1960, became a citizen this year.

* Other Negroes who hurdled racial barriers at Southern colleges amid extensive publicity seem to be faring better. Vivian Malone, who entered the University of Alabama with Hood, has pursued her studies without incident. Cleve McDowell, who followed Meredith at the University of Mississippi, still shares campus quarters with U.S. marshals, sticks to his law studies in lonely but dedicated fashion. Harvey Gantt has earned better-than-average grades at South Carolina’s Clemson College, replies good-naturedly to the teasing of white students: “If you don’t cut it out, I’ll have lunch with you.”