Moving the Mountain

...Booker makes the point that, in the past, Negroes have had their religion to sustain them through frustration and travail but that now religious faith seems to have vanished along with the fear of white power...

...In the early 19th century, when the total Negro population rose to approximately 19 per cent, the racist alarm was sounded...

...Two such books are Equality in America by Alan P. Grimes and Ten Years of Prelude by Benjamin Muse...

...But he does not...

...White, Protestant, rural America pulls in one direction...

...urban America, with its diversity of religious and races, pulls in the other...

...The freedom of the Indians menaced the freedom of the settlers and, in the ensuing struggle for racial ascendancy, the natives proved no match for the well-armed whites...

...But the fact is that the Negro leaders went to Washington fully cognizant of the imperatives of the civil rights struggle...

...They talk and write in glowing terms on democracy and its institutions...

...But the influx of needed immigrants, with different beliefs, made it necessary for the dominant religious group to make the concession of toleration...

...A member of the Atlantabased Southern Regional Council, Muse wrote his book with that organization's cooperation, spending some three years traveling about the South and speaking firsthand with the people involved in either implementing or defying the school desegregation decree...

...The racial landscape painted in Black Man's America is not any brighter than that drawn by Equality in America and Ten Years of Prelude, and is probably grimmer...

...Although we have a serious civil rights problem which exhausts much of our energy," stated the preamble to the Arden House resolutions, "we cannot separate this struggle at home from that abroad...

...or an inflammatory performance by state authorities, as in Little Rock...

...I feel the profession, more than any other, represents the hypocrisy in America to Negroes and corrodes, in too many cases, the faith of those of my people who wish only a fair shake...

...In his chapter on "The Image Makers," Booker speaks with a clarity and directness too seldom present in the rest of the book...

...Grimes sees hope for eventual equality in the compromising pressures of urban living...

...Leaders of the communications industry, the authorities on freedom of speech and the critics of 'news managing' themselves violate a code of integrity and honesty when it comes to the Negro...

...According to Booker, the six Negro leaders "trooped" into the White House with a plan "to develop a more cooperative program by swinging Negro support toward financial aid to Africa...

...Not only were desperate schemes concocted to maintain white purity by colonizing free Negroes in Africa, "modern white racial theory developed as a legitimatizing myth to support the social condition of white superiority achieved through colonialization and slavery...

...Booker, being directly under the boot, is not so sure there will be leisure enough for equalizing forces and the vague inevitable to end racial unrest...

...The mountain of segregation still blocks Negroes from access to the American Dream and, according to Booker, Negroes no longer "wait for religion to move mountains...

...Pure freedom, he maintains, exists only in the absence of conflicting drives for freedom, which is to say that it exists only in cases where man is either alone or where one man or group completely dominates, in which case freedom exists solely for the dominant force...

...The author is Washington bureau chief of the Johnson Publishing Company (Ebony, Jet, Negro Digest, Tan, Ebony Ajrica...

...By a caprice of history and circumstance, the NAACP organizations thus became an accessory of the enforcement mechanism...

...the other, essentially provincial and rural-oriented, seeks to maintain in religion, race, and politics its superiorities of the past...

...It is a conservative book, when compared, say, with the work of James Baldwin or LeRoi Jones, yet its conclusions come close to being the same as those slammed out in the more sulfuric pages of The Fire Next Time and Blues People...

...Simeon Booker's Black Man's America is a report on the nation's racial imbroglio from the nether side of the struggle...

...It has remained, however, a fundamental part of the segregation controversy, for the subordination of Negroes is as essential to segregation as it was to slavery...

...Negroes who were bold enough to launch upon this onerous and often dangerous operation [filing suit in Federal district courts against local school boards, etc.] needed advice, moral support, and, above all, legal counsel," Muse writes...

...From the time that the earliest white settlements were firmly established on the Eastern seaboard until the last cluster of Indians were gathered on the barren desert reservations of the Southwest, the declining power of the Indian was evidenced by their declining status in the dominant white society...

...Protestant America, then, gave way to religious equality because, "Generally, religious toleration has been the consequence of unsuccessful intolerance...

...It ranges wide, taking the reader into both high and low places, among Presidents and demonstrators...

...Obviously, Negroes feel the mountain must be moved...

...It should be noted that the white supremacists cannot be accused of reserving their special benevolence exclusively for red and black folks...

...By all standards of the civil rights pattern, this meeting was a stroke of misfortune...

...His accusations against Southern newsmen, with whom he has worked, are not so surprising —he accuses some of them of forming "an alliance" with police to suppress Negro rights...

...By the time that the "self-evident' truth that all men were created equal was proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence," notes the author, "there were approximately a half-million slaves in America...

...Reviewed by HOYT W. FULLER Managing Editor, "Negro Digest" In the past two or three years there has been a virtual avalanche of books about American race relations, many of them dealing with the topic as if it were something quite new and exotic, like the Twist or the Beatles, to bemuse the reading public...

...Perhaps it is not remembered now, but Muse reminds us that in the wave of terror which shook the South following the Supreme Court ruling, "the sickness was most pervasive in 1958 and 1959...

...The subject concerned greater U.S...

...Where Equality in America treats with the general rationalizations of racism, Ten Years of Prelude spells out the specific methods used to institutionalize and retain white supremacy...

...The different compositions of the constituencies give rise to different values...

...He describes the meeting as a "misfortune" and a failure...

...It is the implication of Grimes' book that, had the English settlers arrived on these shores without their wives, the nation would not now be faced with the terrifying prospect of a Presidential campaign redolent of racism...

...230 pp...

...In the preamble to the resolutions adopted at the Arden House conference, the Negro leaders cited their "special responsibility to urge a dynamic African policy upon our government," interpreting that "special responsibility" partly in "simple terms of historical continuity...

...From the viewpoint of the "Big Six," their mission to Washington hardly made them "look foolish.' The strongest section of Black Man's America deals with the white press and its reported malevolence and indifference toward the Negro quest for equality...

...Fortunately, these books occasionally are counterbalanced by others so strong m their comparative simplicity and pertinence as to seem refreshing...

...Grimes' thesis is that power is the key to the achievement of equality, and the state of equality itself is the détente arrived at by competing groups to preserve peace and prosperity...

...For the most part, the authors of these books have been professed "liberals," frequently university-based social scientists, who bring to their authoritative diagnoses of "the Negro problem" a subtle and insidious racism of their own deserving a place beside that of the Carleton Putnams and the Ross Barnetts...

...The Pilgrims fled to Holland, and then to Plymouth, in search of religious freedom...

...Crisis," he found, "differed in the degree and timeliness of recognition by the business community of its interest in public stability...

...What chance had the Negroes who came in chains even as the Indians were being slaughtered and forced into submission...

...Unlike Grimes' book, Ten Years of Prelude is more concerned to report events than to draw interpretations from them, although the author's comments are invariably illuminating and to the point...

...Grimes notes: "It may be said that there exist two constituencies behind American politics—one, essentially cosmopolitan and urban-oriented, which seeks to push forward the policy of equality...

...Due credit, for example, has seldom been given the NAACP for its basic, altogether vital and ultimately heroic role in facilitating the new revolution...

...aid for newly independent African countries...

...It was not the racial problem in America that they wanted to discuss...

...If the United States cannot take vigorous action to help win freedom in Africa, we cannot expect to maintain the trust and friendship of the newly independent and soonto-be-independent peoples of Africa and Asia...

...And in terms of compliance, "the year 1960 should be taken as the point at which the South began to move.' Some observations of the author's provide ironic hindsights...

...And there are surprises, as well as new information, even for those who may feel they already know all the salient facts about this phase of the civil rights fight...

...In Equality in America, Professor Grimes of the political science faculty at Michigan State University gets to the heart of our racial history, although "race" is only one of the three related concerns of his slim, concise and quotable book, the others being "religion" and "the urban majority...

...There are times, in fact, when Booker seems to be writing about the American racial scene with the detachment of a European observer, one who sees the struggle only superficially and occasionally gets his facts awry...

...A third book, Black Man's America by Simeon Booker, does not match the first two in either quality or content...

...Having achieved it, they would have denied it to "heretics...

...However, his indictment is aimed at magazines, newspapers, television and radio stations all over the country...

...Muse feels that the nation's racial unrest "will end sometime because it is inevitable that in America justice and humanity will in time prevail...

...But the absence of passion is an important shortcoming in Black Man's America...

...A native Virginian, and a former state senator, he has been intimately involved with the larger events he describes, and he brings sympathy and understanding, as well as fairness and incisiveness, to his report...

...There is little revealed in Black Man's America that a dozen or so other writers have not already described in better prose and with a firmer grasp of both history and the deeper implications of the Negro revolt...

...Although primarily a straightforward, year-by-year, step-by-step account of desegregation efforts since 1954, Ten Years of Prelude nevertheless reads like a fresh and vivid story...

...Only the heat is absent...

...By and large there was just one source from which these could be obtained—the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund...

...As correspondent for Ebony and Jet, the two largest-circulation Negro publications in the world, he has covered race-angled stories from darkest Mississippi to newest Africa to the White House...

...The game, of course, is being played no less seriously right now, and with ominous implications...

...4.95...

...He is singularly well situated to paint an absorbing canvas of unique events, behind-the-scenes intrigue and political power play...

...Grimes observes: "The use of race theory to give legitimacy to the superior condition of whites and the subordinate condition of Negroes was a fundamental part of the slavery controversy...

...No instrumentality of government, but the NAACP, became in effect the activating agent...

...Their subject was indeed Africa, but its context was much broader than the question of increased aid...

...Booker writes of the White House conference that "the timing was poor, and the negative reaction which followed from forces trapped in Dixie civil rights struggles made the Big Six look foolish...

...Fresh from the historic American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa at Arden House, Harriman, New York, the six Negro leaders were received at the White House...

...The facts of the matter are essentially different from Booker's account...

...One of the most grievous errors of reportage by Booker, a former Neiman fellow, concerns what he terms the "Big Six" (Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young Jr., James Fanner, A. Philip Randolph, and Dorothy Height) conference with President Kennedy in December 1962...

...With racism established as a central national trait, white AngloSaxon Protestant, or Nordic, superiority emerged as an open racial argument toward the end of the last century, when European immigrants became even more numerous than Negroes...

...Equality, like freedom, involves a relationship," he writes...

...And: "Where violence and rioting occurred, we saw the hand of uncannily effective racial agitators, as in Clinton (Tenn...

...If every man seeks to be free, every freedomseeking man becomes in some way an obstacle in the path of someone else's freedom...

...That the South and its dominant majority emerge as less than valiant, and frequently as just plain criminal, is inevitable, but Muse is no holier-than-thou poseur surveying with disdain the debris in the South's front yard...

...BLACK MAN'S AMERICA By Simeon Booker Prentice-Hall...

...The recent one-sided tussle within the Republican party at San Francisco might have been a dramatization of a theme from Equality in America...

...And the moving of mountains, barring miracles, involves the use of violent explosives...

...With characteristic understatement, Muse says that the former President "strove to follow a course of disinvolvement in the controversy...

...No single meeting so undercut the influence of Negro leadership...

...Grimes makes a distinction between freedom and equality...

...The pattern was set...

...Muse's book also gives readers a view of the quality of President Eisenhower's moral leadership during the school desegregation crisis which is nothing short of devastating, and does so with a minimum of commentary...

...The book's subtitle is "The Story of Integration Since the Supreme Court's 1954 Decision," but the book itself is much more than that, for Muse has also provided an objective historical perspective necessary for evaluating the consequences of the desegregation ruling...