SOME THINK INTEGRATION STRUGGLE NOT WORTH IT

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31462, 31 August 1967, Page 5

SOME THINK INTEGRATION STRUGGLE NOT WORTH IT

(From

FRANK OLIVER,

special

itrum special correspondent N.Z.P.AJ WASHINGTON.

It is rather odd that in the row over riots which have caused devastation in 41 American cities this summer, Negro talk of desegregation has been muted to the point of disappearance. The matter simply is not discussed any more and has been forgotten by many.

The nation is within a short distance of the re-opening of schools after the long summer holidays and it is clear from reports coming from the south that this autumn there will be little or no movement towards school integration regardless of court decisions. Not only are the whites discovering techniques of evading the law, but there is, in some parts, Negro reluctance to break down further the barriers to integration which still stand. One Negro leader in Mississippi is quoted in the press as saying that Negro children and their parents feel the struggle for integration "just isn’t worth it—and it isn’t Your children are harassed at school, you get your house shot into, you get your credit cut off. We didn’t even try to get anybody to go this time.” No Drive Planned A report in the “Wall Street Journal,” from the South, says none of the major civil rights organisations is planning a school integration drive this year. Some Negro leaders say this is because the Federal Government does not seem to them to be ready to back them up “and parents aren’t about to do it on their own.” But one reason may be a change that has come over the more aggressive Negro movements. Some of these leaders, such as H. Rap Brown and Stokeley Carmichael, no not appear to want integration at any level anywhere. They are against the white man and all he stands for. He is the enemy. He is hated. One reason the Black Moslems have been reasonably successful in their missionary efforts is (as Negro writers make clear) that they teach the superiority of the Negro and the denigration of the white. These writings make it clear that Negroes who do work with whites, such as Negro policemen and firemen, are widely regarded by other Negroes as traitors, as Negroes who “pick up” to the white man. This appears to explain why, during various riots this summer, the rioters have attacked Negro police and firemen as freely as they attacked the whites. Many Negroes make it clear they want to keep themselves very separate from the hated and despised whites. One book by a Negro which is very frank and obviously honest and clearly not full of anti-white feeling, speaks of how over recent years Negroes have come to detest Harlem shops and other establishments owned and run by whites—taking hard-earned dollars away from Negroes. Negroes, argue such people, should spend their dollars with Negroes. Some of them seem as determinedly segregationist as the white racists of the South, for reasons not too dissimilar. A survey of the acres of print this summer that have recorded statements and writings of Negroes tn many cities make this writer believe that many Negroes are aiming at what was the law before the Supreme Court decisions of 1954. Up to that point and for more than half a century

the law, as stated by an earlier Supreme Court was that Negroes must be “equal but separate.” Of course, the law was never observed either in North or South. Negroes were certainly separated but they were never equal, in education, in job opportunity, in the right to vote or the right to live where they liked. And, of course, they were never accepted equally in the social life of the country. In the South they were not allowed to swim in the same seawater. Beaches were for whites and whites only. But today there is a tendency among many Negroes to want to live as a separate race, a nation within a nation, having little or nothing to do with the white nation, to be really separate and to be really equal. They seem more interested in their children getting an equal education and less in seeing that they get it in mixed classes of white and black. “Population Split” How far these feelings run through the Negro population is impossible to say. It will become clearer after the troubled cauldron of this summer simmers down and the moderate leaders of the civil rights movement are once more heard. At the moment no matter what they say it is lost in the din created by the Rap Browns and the Stokeley Carmichaels.

But whatever section of the Negro population adheres to the new separatism it means that the Negro population is split. The moderate leaders look toward an era in which Negroes get equal education, have free rights to vote, equal economic opportunity, are not discriminated against because of colour and who live at peace with and among their white neighbours and fellow citizens. There is little of that to be found , in the ravings of Rap Brown, Stokeley Carmichael and Adam Clayton Powell. Their ravings and the riots have, it is clear, bred a good deal of antagonism among whites in both North and South. In the South it has lead to a slowing up of school desegregation. One instance in the north is enough. In Boston, an Irish woman is being given the edge in the forthcoming elections for a new mayor. She has the support of those who “resent the sudden escalation of the Negro revolution,” as one newspaper puts it, and she is the undisputed champion of lower and middle-class whites who think that the Negro is trying to go too far too fast and who believe what the candidate says, the Negroes are being appeased by “too much money, too much attention and too much coddling." “I believe in civil rights

but not in preferential rights,” she says. Nonetheless, unless something is done to eliminate ghettoes and bring better conditions for poverty stricken Negroes and some opportunities for Negro teenagers then more city troubles and riots seen inevitable. Last week 1000 community leaders met in Washington to form “ a national coalition” to deal with the troubles that caused this summer’s riots but, as the “New York Times” says, they face a double dilemma. “Their first perplexing ; task is how to get the nation I to see the crisis of the cities : in all of its many forms and terrifying urgency and then ; to persuade the President and ' Congress to re-order national i priorities to meet that crisis.” The President was absolutely correct last week when i he mentioned half a dozen ; bills before the Congress which, if passed, would help : with the problems of the i cities. But there are many - who think he missed the • point and that he should have s collected those parts of many ' bills, added to them, given ; them a high priority and ; matched the urgency of the t problem of the cities with i drama, to catch the ear and ; the heart of the nation as he > did with his speech after the ■ death of John Kennedy and ’ later when he launched his ; Great Society programme.