Not All Black

...Pipe and Foundry, Republic Steel, Union Carbide...

...The rising un employment and part-time work, as well as the inequitable trend in in come distribution and the persistent pockets of poverty, have contrib uted, in turn, to a vicious cycle that dampens down needed increases in demand...

...In the South, what has prevented even a pro forma elimination of racial barriers on the Northern pattern has been the existence of the white "power structure...

...The intensity of the Negro protest has emphasized the fact that ultimately the challenge is being posed to the status quo, even if the civil rights groups have not asserted it in those terms...

...More recently, Prof...

...For the white power structure is not limited to the South...

...As if their burdens were not overwhelming enough, the leaders of the civil rights movement have had to face a central pessimism at the heart of the Negro revolution...

...The challenge of the civil rights revolution is thus actually all-encompassing, and the obligation to extend it rests not on Negroes alone...

...Somewhat more visionary suggestions have come from those not so closely allied with the administration...

...Unfortunately, neither the AFL-CIO economic program nor the recommendations of liberal economists on the edge of the New Frontier seem on the verge of adoption, though they are hardly powerful enough to break the cycle of maldistribution...

...The civil rights movement has, by implication, called into question the purpose of the vast outpouring of goods, and has questioned whether it is enough to keep the boom going as an end in itself...

...Given the cronyism characteristic of the American city structure—a factor even more pronounced in the typical Southern city—this interlocking group forms a massive concentration of power...

...Such overwhelming symbols of affluence have emphasized to the underprivileged the ambiguity of the Negro protest...

...Steel was being requested to become involved in a socially tense situation, oblivious of the fact, apparently, that corporations were now endowed by academic commentators with social consciences which should have pricked him to just such a duty...

...I'm going to be working in a laundry all my life and there's no way to git out of it...

...What the laundry worker's comment would seem to indicate is that despite the courage, the militance, and the capacity of the civil rights demon strators to capture the spirit of protest, the movement may end in disappointment...

...The number of millionaires rose from 27,000 in 1953 to 100,000 in 1961, according to Lampman...

...This cycle must be broken...

...The movement has dramatized not only the social discrepancies that lie at the center of the American power structure, but the economic inequality at its base...

...What gives point to the civil rights leaders' criticism of the power structure is that it makes clear the basic inequality in the distribution of wealth, which would be unimpaired even if the whole range of suggestions for the amelioration of distress were put into effect...

...Galbraith has suggested a crash program to educate the children in 100 of the most depressed areas of the country, thus apparently lending support to a thesis advanced early in the century by the Russian-Polish revolutionary Waclaw Machajski who, we are told by Max Nomad, asserted that in modern society education was capital...

...Wiping out poverty in the country has resisted all attempts to talk it away...

...The share of all personally held wealth of the na tion's richest one per cent of fam ilies rose steadily from 24 per cent in 1953 to 26 per cent in 1956 to 28 per cent in 1961, according to Robert J. Lampman's study of wealth-holding in the United States...

...A number of Negro leaders have put their fingers on the heart of the problem...

...It is a tribute to the gallantry of Southern Negro demonstrators that they have challenged head-on the economic and legal strength vested in the white power structure...

...But the latter, like the recommendations, remains unattended to...

...Negroes are a minority too among the 30 to 40 million in the United States whose lives are submerged in poverty...

...There is, then, no dearth of suggestions as to how some of the wealth pouring out of the American economy may be used for the alleviation of distress...

...The reason, paradoxically, is that the movement may achieve a few immediate goals while nothing really changes for the Negro mass aside from an improvement in the atmosphere in which the struggle continues...

...These unbalanced trends in income have helped to throw the economy out of balance...

...Steel might have used its dominant role in the Birmingham economy to effect some changes in the city's segregated pattern, Roger Blough, chairman of the board, replied that he was surprised to find that U.S...

...A. A. Berle has remarked casually that, whenever "we" wanted to, it would be a simple matter to divert $35 billion from Gross National Product to raise the income of the underprivileged...

...The New York Times, describing Negro-white relations in the city, quoted a Negro worker as saying: All this hollerin' don't mean nothing to me...

...It is one of the typical ironies of the New Frontier that its most emphatic contribution to economic change to date would have been howled down as Republican class legislation if submitted during the Eisenhower administration...

...While Negro spokesmen such as A. Philip Randolph have linked the Negro protest to the need for dealing with the worst aspects of poverty, it would be too much to expect that the lead for such a comprehensive program would come from the civil rights groups...

...Steel, the St...

...At the same time, the share of wealth of the richest families has been climbing...

...To the indictment that U.S...

...In the context of the established Southern community, this phrase blankets the dominant business groups, city officials, local judges, police and newspapers...

...The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee has pointed out that the ten major industries in Birmingham, scene of some of the most vicious anti-Negro outbursts, are fundamentally controlled by such Northern corporations as U.S...

...Because the Negro protest is bound up so closely to the question of poverty, it confronts an economic power structure whose strength has hardly eroded during the period of the boom...

...The silence and inaction of these corporations according to SNCC, contributed to the Birmingham attacks on civil rights groups...

...It is the obvious responsibility of black and white leaders in the labor, radical and liberal community to offer the challenge to an economic and social structure which sustains such impoverishment in the face of an unprecedented boom...

...At this point the Negro revolution —if it must act alone—faces its most formidable obstacle...

...The Southern way of life is not so remote from the American mainstream as is generally believed...

...The AFL-CIO Executive Council offers the following analysis: The income share of the wealthi est 20 per cent of American families rose between 1955 and 1960—par ticularly after account is taken of capital gains and expense-account living...

...Regis Paper Co., U.S...

...Like his fellow whites at the bottom of the economic pyramid, the American Negro has it driven into his consciousness by the great leveler, television, that the American way of life expects him to change his brand of cigarettes regularly, drink more beer, purchase instant color cameras, take off for Bermuda by jet, and enjoy an ultra-modern kitchen...

...Even the earlier prescription of Prof...

...The one innovation has been the recommendation for an Appalachian regional development plan...

...Galbraith to put the unemployed on a permanent dole—humane as the motive may be—has an aura of desperation, as if in the end the best that can be wheedled out of the economic power group is another form of charity, supplied out of government, not cor porate, funds...

...The white "power structure," to the extent that it describes the identity of interests that binds major business concerns and governmental agencies, is not so much a racial designation as a statement of economic fact...

...And the very rich—with holdings of 3 million or more—increased 500 per cent, from 2,000 to about 10,000...

...All them Negroes who are doing it hope to git something for themselves...

...All this stuff don't help people like me...

...If the Galbraith formula is vulnerable to the criticism that creating a sector of non-affluent pariahs would provoke a new set of volatile social problems, it is radical by comparison to the suggestions that have emanated from the New Frontier advisers...

...For the rest, there has been only the vaunted war on poverty and total commitment to the tax cut law, which could only be gotten through Congress after being augmented by half a dozen new loopholes for businessmen who found the across-the-board tax remissions insufficiently generous...