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Home , Bayard Rustin, Bob Moses (activist), Direct action

NO.1 IN A SERIES OF OCCASIONAL PAPERS

FromProtest toPolitics:

The Future of the By

Reprinted from Commentary February, 1965 by the

LEAGUE FOR INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 112 E. 19 Street , N . Y. 10003 FROM TO : THE FUTURE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

BAYARD RUSTIN

I To attempt to disentangle these three strands is to do violence to reality. David Danzig's percep­ HE DECADE spanned by the 1954 Su­ tive article, "The Meaning of Negro Strategy,"· T preme Coun decision on school de­ correctly saw in the Birmingham events the segregation and the will victory of the concept of collective struggle over undoubtedly he recor'led as the period in which individual achievement as the road to Negro the legal foundations of racism in America were freedom. And Birmingham remains the un~ destroyed. To be sure, pockets of resistance matched symbol of g-rass·roots protest involving remain; but it would be hard to quarrel with the all strata of the black community. It was also in assertion that the elaborate legal structure of this most industrialized of Southern cities that the segregation and discrimination, particularly in single·issue demands of the movement's classical relation to public accommodations, has virLUa lly stage gave way to the "package deal." No longer coll apsed. On the other hand, without making were Negroes satisfied with integrating lunch light of the human sacrifices involved in the counters. They now sought advances in employ­ direct-action taClics (sit-ins, freedom rides, and ment, housing, school integration, police protec~ the rest) that were so instrumental to this tion, and so forth. achievement, we must recognize that in de­ Thus, the movement in the South began to segregating public accommodations, we affected auack areas of discrimination which were not so instiLUlions whidl are relatively peripheral both remote from the Northern experience as were to the American socio-economic order and to the Jim Crow lunch counters. At the same time, the fundamental conditions of life of the Negro interrelationship of these apparently distinct people. In a highly industrialized, 20th-century areas became increasingly evident. \Vhat is the civilization, we hit Jim Crow precisely where it value of winning access to public accommoda~ was most anachronistic, dispensable. and vulner~ tions for those who lack money to use them? able-in hotels, lunch counters, terminals, librar~ The minute the movement faced this question, it ies, swimming pools, and the like. For in these was compelled to expand its vision beyond race forms, Jim Crow does impede the flow of relations to economic relations, including the commerce in the broadest sense: it is a nuisance role of education in modern society. And what in a society on the move (and on the make). Not also became clear is that all these interrelated surprisingly, therefore, it was the most mobiJity~ problems, by their very nature, are not soluble conscious and relatively liberated groups in the by private, voluntary efforts but require govern~ Negro community-Iower·middle·class college Stll~ men[ action- or politics. Already Southern dents-who launched the attack that brought demonstrators had recognized that the most down this imposing but hollow structure. effective way to s!rike at the police b"utality they The term "classical" appears especially apt for suffered from was by getting rid of the local this phase of the civil rights movement. But in sheriff-and that meant political action, which in the few years that have passed since the first flush turn meant, a nd still means, political action with~ of sit~ins, several developments have taken place in the Democralic party where the only meaning­ that have complicated .matters enormously. One ful primary contests in the South are fought. is the shifting focus of the movement in the And so, in Mississippi, thanks largely to the South, symboliled by Birmingham; another is the leadership of , a turn toward political spread of the to the North; and the action has been taken. ~1ore than voter registra~ third, common to the other two, is the expansion tion is involved here. A conscious bid for of the movement's base in the Negro community. political power is being made, and in the course of that effort a tactical shift is being effected: BAYARO RUSTIN, who organized lhe on Washing Lon direct~action techniques are being subordinated to and has been a dose associaLe or Martin Luther , is a strategy calling for the building of community widely recognized. as the leading Lactician o[ the civil rights movement. Thi.s is his first appearance in COMMENTARY. ·COMMENTARY, February 1964. COMMENTAR Y/FEBRUARY 65 institutions or power bases. Clearly, the implica­ presence in this country, were forbidden by law tions of this shift reach faT beyond Mississippi. to read or wri teo Second. Jews have a long What began as a protest movement is being history of family stability, the importance of challenged to translate itself into a political which in terms of aspiration and self-image is movement. Is this the right course? And if it is, obvious. The Negro family structure was totally can the transformation be accomplished? destroyed by slavery and with it the possibility of cultural transmission (the right of Negroes to II marry and rear children is barely a century old). HE VERY decade which has witnessed Third, Jews are white and have the option of T the decline of legal Jim Crow has relinquishing their cultural-religious identity, in­ also seen the rise of de facto segregation in our termarrying, passing, etc. Negroes, or at least the most fundamental socio-economic institutions. overwhelming majority of them, do not have this More Negroes are unemployed today than in option. There is also a fourth, vulgar reason. If 1954, and the unemployment gap between the the Jewish and Negro communities are not races is wider. The median income of Negroes comparable in terms of education, family has dropped from 57 per cent to 54 per cent of structure, and color, it is also true that their that of whites. A higher percentage of Negro respective economic roles bear little resem­ workers is now concentrated in jobs vulnerable blance. to automation than was the case len years ago. This matter of economic role brings us to the More Negroes attend de facto segregated sehools greater problem-the fact that we are moving today than when the Supreme Court handed into an era in which the natural functioning of down its famous decision; while school integra­ the market does not by itself ensure every man tion proceeds at a snail's pace in the South, the with will and ambition a place in the productive number of Northern schools with an excessive process. The immigrant who came to this country proportion of minority youth proliferates. And during the late 19th and early 20th centuries behind this is the continuing growth of racial entered a society which was expanding territori­ slums, spreading over our central cities and ally and/ or economically. It was then possible to trapping Negro youth in a milieu which, what­ start at the bottom, as an unskilled or semi-skilled ever its legal definition, sows an unimaginable worker. and move up the ladder, acquiring new demoralization. Again, legal niceties aside, a res­ skills along the way. Especially was t1,is true ident of a racial ghetto lives in segregated when was burgeoning, giving housing, and more Negroes fall into this category new dignity and higher wages to organized work­ than ever before. ers. Ttxlay the situation has ehanged. We are not These are the facts of life whieh generate expanding territorially, the western frontier is frustration in the Negro community and settled, labor organizing has leveled off, our rate challenge the civil rights movement. At issue, of economic growth has been stagnant for a after all, is not civil Tights, strictly speaking, but decade. And we are in the midst of" a social and economic conditions. Last summer's technological revolution which is altering the were not race riots; they were outbursts of fundamental structure of the labor force, class aggression in a society where class and color destroying unskilled and semi-skilled jobs-jobs in definitions are converging disastrously. How can whieh Negroes are disproportionately con­ the (perhaps misnamed) civil rights movement centrated. deal with this problem? Whatever the pace of this teehnological Before trying to answer, let me first insist that revolution may be, the direction is clear: the the task of the movement is vastly complicated lower rungs 01 the economic ladder are being by the failure of many whites of good will to lopped off. This means that an individual will understand the nature of our problem. There is no longer be able to start at the bottom and a widespread assumption that the removal of work his way up; he will have to start in the artificial racial harriers should result in the middle or on top, and hold on tight. It will not automatic integration of ' the Negro into all even be enough to have certain specific skills, aspects of American life. This myth is fostered for many skilled jobs are also vulnerable to by facile analogies with the experience of various automation. A broad educational background, ethnic immigrant groups, particularly the Jews. permitting vocational adaptability and flexibility, But the analogies with the Jews do not hold for seems more imperative than ever. We live in a three simple but profound reasons. First, Jews society where, as Secretary of Labor Willard have a long history as a literate people, a Wirtz puts it, machines have the equivalent of a resource which has afforded them opportunities high school diploma. Yet the average educational to advance in the academic and professional attainment of American Negroes is 8.2 years. worlds, to achieve intellectual status even in the Negroes, of course, are not the only people midst of economic hardship, and to evolve sus­ being affected by these developments. It is taining value systems in the context of ghetto reported that there are now 50 per cent fewer life. Negroes, for the greater part 01 their unskilled and semi-skilled jobs than there are FROM PROTEST TO POLITICS high school dropouts. Almost one-third of the self-improvement. Obviously, where self-improve­ 26 million young people entering the labor ment activities succeed in imparting to their market in the 1960's will be dropouts. But the participants a feeling of some control over their percentage of Negro dropouts nationally is 57 per environment, those involved may find their cent, and in , among Negroes 25 appetites for change whetted; they may move into years of age or over, it is 68 per cent. They are the poli tical arena. without a future. III To what extent can the kind of self-help campaign recently prescribed by Eric Hoffer ET ME sum up what I have thus far in the New York Times Magazine cope with L been trying to say: the civil rights such a situation? I would advise those who think movement is evolving [rom a protest movement that self-help is the answer to familiarize them­ into a full-fledged -an evolution selves with the long history of such efforts in the calling its very name into question. It is now Negro community. and to consider why so many concerned not merely with removing the barriers foundered on the shoals of ghetto life. It goes to full opportunity but with achieving the fact without saying that any effort to combat de­ of equality. From sit-ins and freedom rides we moralizat.ion and apathy is desirable, but we must have gone into rent strikes. . community understand that demoralization in the Negro organization, and political action. As a con­ community is largely a common-se nse response to sequence of this natural evolution. the Negro an objective reality. Negro youths have no need today finds himself stymied by obstacles of far of statistics to perceive, fairly accurately, what greater magnitude than the legal barriers he was their odds are in American society. Indeed, from attacking before: automation, urban decay, de the point of view of motivation, some of the facto school segregation. These are problems healthiest Negro youngsters I know ~re juvenile which, while conditioned by Jim Crow, do not delinquents: vigorously pursuing the American vanish upon its demise. They are more deeply Dream of material acquisition and status, yet rooted in our socio-economic order; they are the finding the conventional means of attaining it result of the total society's failure to meet not blocked off, they do not yield to defeatism but only the Negro's needs, but human needs resort to illegal (and often ingenious) methods. generally. They are not alien to American culture. They These proposluons have won increasing are, in Gunnar Myrdal's phrase, "exaggerated recognition and acceptance, but with a curious Americans." To want a Cadil1ac is not un­ twi~t. They have formed the common premise of American; to push a carl in the garment center two apparently contradictory lines of thought is. 1f Negroes are to be persuaded that the which simultaneously nourish and antagonize conventional path (school, work, etc.) is each other. On the one hand, there is the superior, we had better provide evidence which reasoning of the New York Times moderate who is now sorely lacking. It is a double cruelty to says that the problems are so enormous and harangue Negro youth about education and complicated that Negro militancy is a futile training when we do not know what jobs will be irritation, and that the need is for "intelligent available for them. When a Negro youth can moderation." Thus, during the first New York reasonably foresee a future free of slums, when school , the Times editorialized that the prospect of gainful employment is realistic, Negro demands, while abstractly just, would we will see motivation and self-help in abundant necessitate massive reforms, the funds for which enough quantities. could not realistically be anticipated; therefore Meanwhile, there is an ironic similarity the just demands were also foolish demands and between the self-help advocated by many liberals would only antagonize white people. Moderates and the doctrines of the Black Muslims. Profes­ of this stripe are often correct in perceiving the sional sociologists, psychiatrists, and social work­ difficulty or impossibility of racial progress in the ers have expressed amar.ement at the Muslims' context of present social and economic policies. success in transforming prostitutes and dope But they accept the context as fixed. They ignore addicts into respectable CIUzens. But every (or perhaps see all too well) the potentialities prostitute the Muslims convert to a model of inherent in linking Negro demands to broader Calvinist virtue is replaced by the gbetto with pressures for radical revision of existing policies. two more. Dedicated as they are to maintenance They apparently see nothing strange in the fact of the ghetto, the Muslims are powerless to affect that in the last twenty-five years we have spent substantial moral reform. So too with every other nearly a trillion dollars fighting or preparing for group or program which is not aimed at the wars, yet throw up our hands before the need for destruction of slums, their causes and effects. overhauling our schools, clearing the slums, and SeU-belp efforts, directly or indirectly, must be really abolishing poverty. My quarrel with these geared to mobilizing people into power units moderates is that they do not even envision capable of effecting social change. That is, their radical changes; their admonitions of moderation goal must be genuine self-help, not merely are, for all practical purposes, admonitions to the COMMENTARY/FEBRUARY 65

Negro to adjust to the status quo, and are seek only to enjoy the fruiLS of American society therefore immoral. as it now exists, their quest cannot objectively The more effectively the moderates argue their be satisfied wi thin the framework of existing case, the mOTe they convince Negroes that political and economic relations. The young American society will not or cannot be Negro who would demonstrate his way into the reorganized for full . Michael labor market may be motivated by a thoroughly Harrington has said that a successful war on bourgeois ambition and thoroughly "capitalist" poverty might well require the expenditure of a considerations, but he will end up having to $100 billion. Where, the Negro wonders, are the favor a great expansion of the public sector of forces now in motion to compel such a com· the economy. At any rate, that is the position the mitment? If the voices of the moderates were movement will be forced to take as it looks at raised in an insistence upon a reallocation of the number of jobs being generated by the national resources at levels that could not be private economy, and if it is to remain true to confused with tokenism (that is, if the moderates the masses of Negroes. stopped being moderates) , Negroes would have The revolutionary character of the Negro's greater grounds for hope. Meanwhile, the Negro struggle is manifest in the fact that this struggle movement cannot escape a sense of isolation. may have done more to democratize life for It is precisely this sense of isolation that gives whites than for Negroes. Clearly, it was the sit-in rise to the second line of thought I want to movement of young Southern Negroes which, as examine-the tendency within the civil rights it galvanized white students, banished the ugliest movement which, despite its militancy, pursues features o( McCarthyism £rom the American what I call a "no-win" policy. Sharing with many campus and resurrected political debate. It was moderates a recognition of the magnitude of the not until Negroes assaulted de facto school obstacles to freedom, spokesmen for this tendency segregation in the urban centers that the issue of survey the American scene and find no forces quality education for all children stirred into prepared to move toward radical solutions. From motion. Finally, it seems reasonably clear that the this they conclude that the only viable strategy civil rights movement, directly and through the is shock; above all, the hypocrisy of white resurgence of social it kindled. did liberals must be exposed. These spokesmen are more to initiate the war on poverty than (Jny often described as the radicals of the movement, other single force. but they are really its moralists. They seek to II will be-it has been-argued that these change white hearts-by traumatizing them. Fre­ by-products 01 the Negro struggle are not quently abelted by white self-flagellants, they revolutionary. But the term revolutionary, as I may gleefully applaud (though not really agreeing am using it, does not connote violence; it refers with) because, while they admit he to the qualitative transformation of fundamental has no program, they think he can frighten institutions, more or less rapidly, to the point white people into doing the right thing. To where the social and economic SLTucture which believe this, of course, you must be convinced, they comprised can no longer be said to be the even if unconsciously, that at the core of the same. The Negro struggle has hardly run its white man's heart lies a buried affection for course; and it will not stop moving until it has Negroes-a proposition one may be permitted to been utterly defeated or won substantial equality. doubt. But in any case, hearts are not relevant But I fail to see how the movement can be to the issue; neither racial affinities nor racial victorious in the absence of radical programs for hostilities are rooted there. It is institutior:s­ full employment, abolition of slums, the recon­ social, political, and economic institutions-which struction o( our educational system, new are the ultimate molders of collective sentiments. definitions of work and leisure. Adding up the Let these institutions be reconstructed today, and cost of such programs, we can only conclude that let the ineluctable gradualism of history govern we are talking about a refashioning of our the formation of a new psychology. political economy. It has been estimated, for My quarrel with the "no-win" tendency in the example. that the price of replacing New York civil rights movement (and the reason I have so City's slums with public housing would be $17 designated it) parallels my quarrel with the billion. Again, a multi-billion dollar federal moderates outside the movement. As the latter public-works program, dwarfing the currently lack the vision or will for fundamental change, proposed $2 billion program, is required to the former lack a realistic strategy for achieving reabsorb unskilled and semi-skilled workers into it. For such a strategy they substitute militancy. the labor market-and this must be done if Negro Bot militancy is a matter of posture and volume workers in these categories are to be employed. and not of effect. "Prefer..:ntial treatment" cannot help them. I am not trying here to delineate a total BELLEVE that the Negro's struggle for equality program, only to suggest the scope of economic in America is essentially revolutionary. While reforms which are most immediately related to Imost Negroes-in their hearts-unquestionably the plight of the Negro community. One could FROM PROTEST TO POLITICS speculate on their political implications-whether, demonstrate power through the non-exercise of it, for example, they do not indicate the obsolescence also point to the Negro "swing vote" in crucial of state and the superiority of urban areas as the source of the Negro's regional structures as viable units of planning. independent political power. But here they are Such speculations aside, it is clear that Negro closer to being right: the urban Negro vote will needs cannot be satisfied unless we go beyond grow in importance in the com.jog years. If there what has so far been placed on the agenda. How is anything positive in the spread of the ghetto, are these radical objectives to be achieved? The it is the potential political power base thus answer is simple, deceptively so: through political created, and to real ize this potential is one of the power. most challenging and urgent tasks before the There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil civil rights movement. If the movement can rights movement which would remind us that wrest leadership of the ghetto vote from' the power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of machines, it will have acquired an organized power also corrupts. But this is not the view I constilUency such 3.5 other major groups in our want to debate here. for it.is waning. Our prob­ society now have. lem is posed by those who accept the need for But we must also remember that the effective· political power but do not understand the ness of a swing vote depends solely on "other" nature of the object and therefore lack sound voles. It derives iu power from them. In that strategies for achieving it; they tend to confuse sense. it can never be "independent," but must political institutions wilh lunch counters. opt for one candjdate or the other. even if by A handful of Negroes, acting alone, could default. Thus coalitions are inescapable, however integrate a lunch counter by strategically locating tentative they may be. And this is the case in their bodies so as directly to interrupt the all but those few situations in which Negroes operation of the proprietor's will; their numbers running on an independent ticket might con­ were. relatively unimportant. In politics, however. ceivably win. "Independence," in other words. is such a confrontation is difficult because the in­ not a value in itself. The issue is which coalition terests involved are merely represented. In the to join and how to make it responsive to your execution of a political decision a direct program. Necessarily there will be compromise. confrontation may ensue (as when federal mar­ But the difference between expediency and shals escorted into the University moralilY in politics is the difference between of Mississippi-to turn from an example of selling out a principle and making smaller non-violent coercion to one of force backed up con~essions [0 win larger ones. The leader who with the threal of violence). But in arriving at a shrinks from this task reveals not his purity but political decision. numbers and organizations are his lack of political sense. crucial, especially for the economically disen­ The task of molding a political movement out franchised. (Needless to say, I am assuming that of the March on Washington coalition is not the forms of political democracy exist in America, simple, but no alternatives have been advanced. however imperfectly, that they are valued, and We need to choose our allies on the basis of that elitist or putschist conceptions of exercising common political objectives. It has become power are beyond the pale of discussion for the fashi.onable in some no-win Negro circles to decry civil rights movement.) the white liberal as the main enemy (his Neither that movement nor the country's hypocrisy is what sustains racism); by virtue of twenty ntillion black people can win political this reverse recitation or the reactionary's litany power alone. We need allies. The future of the ( leads to , which leads to Negro struggle depends on whether the contra­ ) the Negro is left in majestic dictions of this society can be resolved by a isolation, except for a tiny band of fervent white coalition of progressive forces which becomes the initiates. But the objective fact is that Eastland eOective political majority in the . and Goldwater are the main enemies-they and I speak of the coalition .which staged the March the opponents of civil rights, of the war on on Washington, passed the Civil Rights Act, and poverty, of medicare, of social security, of federal laid the basis for the Johnson landslide-Negroes, aid to education, of unions, and so forth. The trade unionisls, liberals, and religious groups. labor movement, despite its obvious faults, has been the largest single orgartized force in this HERE A.RE those who argue that a coalition counlry pushing for progressive social legislalion. strategy would force the Negro to surrender And where the Negro-labor-liberal axis is weak, This political independence to white liberals, that as in the farm belt, it was the religious groups he would be neutralized, deprived of his cutting that were most influential in rallying support edge, absorbed into the Establishment. Some who for the Civil Rights Bill. take this position urged last year that votes be The durability of the coalition was interesting­ withheld from the Johnson-Humphrey ticket as a ly tested during the election. I do not believe demonstration of the Negro's political power. that the Johnson landslide proved the "white Curiously enough, these people who sought to backlash" to be a myth. It proved, rather, that COMMENTARY/FEllRUARY 6J economic interests are more fundamental than tendency toward such a realignment; and an prejudice: the backlashers decided that loss of additional 3.6 million Negroes of voting age in social security was, after all, too high a price to the eleven Southern states are still to be heard pay for a slap at the Negro. This lesson was a from. Even the tendency toward disintegration of valuable first step in re-educating such people, the Democratic party's racist wing defines a new and it must be kept alive, for the civil rights context for Presidential and liberal strategy in movement will be advanced only to the degree the congressional battles ahead. Thus the Negro that social and economic welfare gets to be vote (North as well as South), while not decisive inextricably entangled with civil rights. in the Presidential race, was enormously effective. The 1964 elections marked a turning point in It was a dramatic element of a historic mandate American politics. The Democratic landslide was which contains vast possibilities and dangers that not merely the result of a negative reaction to will fundamentally affect the future course of the Goldwaterism; it was also the expression of a civil rights movement. majority liberal consensus. The near unanimity The liberal congressional sweep raises hope with which Negro voters joined in that expres­ for an on the seniority system. Rule sion was, ] am convinced, a vindication of the Twenty·two, and other citadels of Dixiecrat· July 25th statement by Negro leaders calling for a Republican power. The overwhelming of this strategic turn toward political action and a conservative coalition should also mean progress temporary curtailment of mass demonstrations. on much bottlenecked legislation of profound Despite the controversy surrounding the state­ interest to the movement (e.g., bills by Senators ment, the instinctive response it mel with in the Clark and Nelson on planning, manpower, and community is suggested by the fact that demon· employment). Moreover, the irrelevance of the strations were down 75 per cent as compared South to Johnson's victory gives the President with the same period in 1963. But should so more freedom to act than his predecessor had high a percentage of Negro voters have gone to and more leverage to the movement to pressure Johnson, or should they have held back to narrow for executive action in Mississippi and other his margin of victory and thus give greater racist strongholds. visibility to our swing vote? How has our loyalty changed things? Certainly the Negro vote ONE OF this guarantees vigorous executive or had higher visibility in 1%0, when a switch of legislative action. for the other side of the only 7 per cent from the Republican column NJohnson landslide is that it has a Gaullist of 1956 elected President Kennedy. But the quality. Goldwater's capture of the Republican slimness of Kennedy's victory-of his "mandate"­ party' forced into the Democratic camp many dictated a go.slow approach on civil rights, at disparate elements which do not belong there, least until the Birmingham upheaval. Big Business being the major example. Johnson, Although Johnson'S popular majority was so who wants to be President "of all people," may large that he could have won without such over­ try to keep his new coalition together by whelming Negro support, that support was sticking close to the political center. But if he important from several angles. Beyond adding to decides to do this. it is unlikely that even his Johnson's total national margin, it was specif­ political genius will be able to hold together a ically responsible for his victories in Virginia, coalition so inherently unstable and rife with Florida, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Goldwater contradictions. It must come apart. Should it do took only those states where fewer than 45 per so while Johnson is pursuing a centrist course, cent of eligible Negroes were registered. That then the mandate will have been wastefully Johnson would have won those states had Negro dissipated. However. if the mandate is seized voting rights been enforced is a lesson not upon to set fundamental changes in motion. then likely to be lost on a man who would have been the basis can be laid for a new mandate, a new happy with a unanimous electoral college. In coalition including hitherto inert and dispos· any case, the 1.6 million Southern Negroes who sessed strata of the popUlation. voted have had a shattering impact on the Here is where the cutting edge of the civil Southern political party structure, as illustrated rights movement can be applied. We must see to in the changed composition of the Southern it that the reorganization of the "consensus party" congressional delegation. The "backlash" gave proceeds along lines which will make it an the Republicans five House seats in Alabama, effective vehicle for social reconstruction, a role one in Georgia, and one in Mississippi. But on it cannot play so long as it furnishes Southern the Democratic side. seven segregationists were racism with its national political power. (One of defeated while all nine Southerners who voted Barry Goldwater's few attractive ideas was that for the Civil Rights Act were re-elected. It may the Dixiecrats belong with him in the same be premature to predict a Southern Democratic party.) And nowhere has the civil rights move­ party of Negroes and white moderates and a ment's political cutting edge been more magnif­ Republican Party of racists and economic icently demonstrated than at Atlantic City. where conservatives. but there certainly is a strong the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party not FROM PROTEST TO POLITICS only secured recognition as a bona fide the rest. We need to be calling for public works component of the national party, but in the and training, [or national economic planning, process routeo the representatives of the most for federal aid to education, for attractive public rabid racists-the while Mississippi and Alabama housing-aU this on a sufficiently massive scale to delegations. While I still believe that the FDP make a difference. We need to protest the made a tactical error in spurning the com­ notion that our integration into American life, promise, there is no question that they launched so long delayed, must now proceed in an a political revolution whose logic is the dis­ atmosphere of competitive scarcity instead of in placement of Dixiecrat power. They launched the security of abundance which technology that revolution within a major political institu­ makes possible. We cannot claim to have answers tion and as part of a coalitional effort. to all the complex problems of modern society. The role o[ the civil rights movement in the That is too much to ask of a movement still reorganization of American political life is bauling barbarism in Mississippi. But we can programmatic as well as strategic. We are agitate the right questions by probing at the challenged now to broaden our social vision, to contradictions which still stand in the way of the develop functional programs with concrete "." The questions having been asked, objectives. We need to propose alternatives to motion must begin in the larger society, for there technological unemployment. urban decay, and is a limit to what Negroes can do alone.

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