The Negro Movement: Where Shall It Go Now? - A Discussion
We print below a condensed transcript of a discussion held in May 1964 between a number of leading figures in the Civil Rights Movement and several editors of DISSENT. Among the participants:...
...A couple weeks ago, two French intellectuals from the Esprit group were here and they asked me to accompany them on a visit to Harlem...
...EMANUEL GELTMAN: I think Rustin and Hill are right so far as the long haul is concerned, but before you get there, you must face some problems right now...
...This kind of thing must be done, and here the comparison with the Jewish world makes some sense because the internal richness of its own community was one of the great sustaining factors of the immigrant Jewish world where there was poverty, alienation, unemployment and all the rest...
...How does this alliance stand now...
...A new consciousness about the New York school situation may arise, but it can make no difference as long as Negroes continue to make up a larger and larger proportion of central cities, while white people continue to move to the suburbs...
...The possibility for successful action is dependent on these big questions...
...The Negro workers moved out of a sense of Negro dignity, and they stimulated Mike's book, they stimulated Johnson's program, which was in part stimulated by Mike's book, etcetera...
...HILL: It seems to me that we're in for a very rough period...
...ers who are kicked out, to re-form their organizations on a narrow but highly-skilled, fairly well-paid base, to accept a smaller role in this so• ciety but to keep their structure intact on that base, then you can say that instead of an alliance there will probably be a war between white and black at the bottom of American society...
...The fight for integration did not come from those Negroes who felt that they had some cultural heritage to preserve...
...We print below a condensed transcript of a discussion held in May 1964 between a number of leading figures in the Civil Rights Movement and several editors of DISSENT...
...It is really our function as socialist intellectuals to portray the total picture...
...In New York City you have the following situation: a white middle class which favors integration in Birmingham but faced with changes at home has really hardened...
...Nobody's breaking through to the normal employment pattern—not just Negroes, but whites and Negroes, which again points up how radical the American problem is...
...GELTMAN: Isn't that also true of the sit-in in which you took part...
...Anytime you call upon two thousand people to do something, it could not possibly be secretive and therefore they stepped into the government's hands...
...But before we get to the trade union problems, we must come to grips with PAT...
...First of all, it means to accept defeat...
...When we talk about self-mobilization, I think perhaps what we have in mind is the struggle against the spiritual and psychological demoralization that one finds in Negro communities...
...Still, we can say all kinds of other things which to the average Negro sound like, "This is for real...
...The postwar period saw the rise of new middle-class elements, typified by the white suburbs...
...and Jack Rader, active in the Queens, N.Y...
...it will be a long and hard fight...
...Given a society which is fundamentally cut off from that minority, large parts of which are hostile to it, and large parts of which are cosily affluent, we have a new prospect, namely, a minority becoming more and more desperate, but without the possibility of a major upsurge such as previous social movements have had...
...It would have been possible for Galamison to have structured his demands, before the first school boycott, in a way that would have brought the white community along with it and not have terrified them...
...Rustin should answer it...
...Not that in principle I'm against people being alienate . In social change there is always alienation...
...In its very thrust, this movement poses questions that get at the basic problems of society...
...I made it, and I didn't go on any protest...
...On the question of Negro strategy for now, I think we have not to be so pessimistic...
...I suspect one of the feelings such people, the "desperadoes" in the Negro movement, have is that they may never have allies in America, but they do have allies in Cuba, China and in such places...
...Is there anything to this description...
...The government of India from its very inception, largely because of Gandhi's spiritual approach to revolution, made a tremendous reconstruction effort in India...
...HOwE: What you're saying, Mike, is very interesting...
...RusTIN: When I talked about an alliance, I did not mention the labor movement as such...
...HOROWITZ: That is what the sit-ins are about, right...
...What Norman is talking about could, by way of his torical analogy, be something akin to what took place among the coal miners in the 1920's when they waged a bitter struggle in isolation from the labor movement as a whole...
...We want equality...
...RUSTIN: I agree with what is implied in the question...
...But let us start where we're talking about our lives, where our lives can in fact move...
...What we come to is that a whole new approach to social priorities is needed...
...On the other hand, as far as I know, neither the ILGWU, the main trade union in New York City, nor the NMU sent anyone to the conference on integrated, quality education which was organized by David Livingston and Reverend Donald Harrington...
...If there were a democratic left in this country, the Negro movement would be in it along with labor, liberals and intellectuals and people from the churches...
...If there are rats you help people get rid of them, and the same with roaches and triple-sessions...
...Without this over-all political program, the Negro and the labor forces are antagonistic and will remain so...
...Therefore you start with that point...
...RUSTIN: I think it is, in a sense, a logical deduction...
...It seems to me that this threatens the possibility of a labor-Negro alliance...
...HOROWITZ: But there are things which are intrinsic to people in motion...
...HowE: In other words, PAT and certain kinds of "extremism" in the Negro movement are both evidence of the absence of a vital major participation by the liberal-labor white world...
...You have to tackle the slum as a problem in education, and in health...
...Granted, too, that the analogy with the Jews has its obvious weakness...
...I want Negroes to get out of the ghetto, not to be helped within it...
...It's interestingHOWE: Let me interrupt you, Rochelle...
...In a sense the Negro alone has been facing the entire American question and that's what a lot of the problem stems from...
...The form of self-help imposed upon the Negro, his past and present, is the civil rights movement itself...
...And they also know, and I know, that the labor movement, affected by automation, is itself unable to provide jobs for the people already enrolled in the unions, that the only way labor can handle this thing is if it allies with the Negro in a bigger struggle in which it can then afford to be an ally because its problems are simultaneously being met...
...Two years ago I was saying that you have to have a sympathetic attitude toward the Negro extremist because he suffers a great deal of frustration...
...It's posed before the entire population of New York City...
...TOM KAHN: The Negro movement arose at a "wrong" time, when there are no supporting mass movements in the society...
...You must make a totally new approach, and it is only then that people can be brought into a broader movement...
...c) the pattern of repeated demonstrations, often without precise objectives, leads to exhaustion, demoralization, loss of interest when there are no visible results...
...One of the responsibilities of the Negro leadership is to work within its own world, morally, socially, educationally, psychologically, for purposes of sustaining morale, of inculcating values and vision...
...Consequently it seems to me that there must be forming a sentiment which is roughly equivalent, to make an historical analogy, to that of certain kinds of revolutionists in Russia in the rate nineteenth century who turned to terrorism, not because they believed in terrorism in principle, but because they believed there were no longer any positive social forces which could act...
...RUSTIN: It's important to point out that one of the problems is that in the civil rights movement we have no literature, no history, no former revolutionary movement that has ever taken place in the context you have just described...
...But I think the trade-union movement, out of its self-interest more than concern for the Negro, will be forced to start doing some things that will move it into a position of alliance with the Negroes...
...I think it's almost easier for us to deal with the broader social problems raised by Bayard than to provide answers to local ones...
...I would only point out on the other side that eventually that struggle did pay off...
...Galamison can say, "Tie up the schools...
...They came to the March on Washington...
...It has an accumulative effect...
...I don't know what else there is except getting the Negroes to carry that program in their demonstrations and saying to them, "Continue to demonstrate...
...Let's get a simple program now around which we can organize...
...I think the civil rights movement is just about ready to move in that direction...
...HARRINGTON: There is practically no analogy between the Negro poor and any other poor there have ever been in the United States...
...They form symmetrical phenomena...
...HOWE: Of course, the sit-ins are one way of realizing the objective at a time when you have to have a prolonged struggle, but it seems to me that there's a great need for internal education...
...2) You have stressed, and we all here surely agree with you, that the Negro movement needs tremendously to gain and hold allies in the labor movement...
...I'll call everyone to my office and tell them to stay there until this problem is settled," we would have left...
...Regardless of people's politics, regardless of what church they belong to, or union, thousands and millions of people are contributing to the civil rights organizations, are getting into the streets...
...I certainly do not look for any alliance which would include the AFL-CIO per se...
...At the same time, the Committee pointed out that about twenty-eight per cent of the whites at the same age are dropouts...
...So that the major problem before us is how to relieve the Negro of this isolation...
...there is no happy an• swer if you posit it that way...
...that is to say, I think now, today, around questions like total employment, limited planning, work training within planning, and a public-works program...
...Yet that's the level that willynilly we're compelled to deal with now...
...Could they say, "We'll give you this, we'll give you that...
...It seems to me there's a terrible discrepancy between the general, programmatic, ideological level on which we all really agree and the immediate practical reality...
...HOROWITZ: There is a way in which a stereotype produces a certain kind of person, and you have to think about the stereotype of the Jew and of the Negro and the kind of pressure that the Negro community has been subjected to...
...KAHN: You find that the fight for integration is pushed by the middleclass, "assimilationist" Negroes and not by the nationalist-oriented Negroes...
...There has begun very serious consideration not merely for Negroes but for society as a whole, of various kinds of self-mobilization programs...
...My kid, what kind of education is he going to get...
...JACK RADER: In the school integration struggle in Queens, one of the things that strikes me about the reaction of the whites is that they act as if the question were one of special privilege for Negroes...
...If the labor movement is concerned now about full employment, it is concerned about public works...
...Am I wrong...
...Locally the situation is extremely tough and rather bad...
...If the American labor movement continues to take the John L. Lewis approach to automation, that is, to bid farewell to the work...
...Here I agree with Bayard, that in a context of full employment, or in the context of the type of proposal just suggested by Senator Clark's committee in Washington, of a five billion dollar additional annual social expenditure for construction, that even the building-trades unions, if they were enabled to double their available jobs and membership, wouldn't care if fifty per cent of that increased membership were Negro, as long as they paid their dues and didn't unduly upset the hierarchy...
...In a way, though he shows no inclination toward practicing individual terrorism or anything of that sort, he acts out of motives somewhat like those of the late 19th century Russian terrorists, who tried to substitute their intransigent will for the slowness and sluggishness of history...
...That means having a community that is ready for a sustained struggle...
...What, then, do you think the future prospects for, and tactics of, the equal rights movement should now be...
...The whole emphasis on self-help, on Negro solidarity and economic uplift, is accentuated in times of social discour agement...
...HOROWITZ: You have to work out a broad programmatic base to involve the white community...
...BAYARD RUSTIN: A number of the circumstances you pose in the questions are definitely there, but I think the important point is that the civil rights movement, because of its limited success, is now confronted with the problem that major Negro demands cannot be met within the context of the civil rights struggle...
...Tom Kahn, assistant to Rustin in the March on Washington and author of "Problems of the Negro Movement" in the Winter 1964 DISSENT...
...He has strong "nationalist" inclinations, vague though these may seem...
...A great deal of progress has been made which may ultimately be a lot more important than whether some particular person got into the sheet-metal workers union or not...
...I'm talking about trade-union people...
...GELTMAN: An illustration of the lack of conscious social aspirations was presented by the coal miners in West Virginia when they were earning $20 a day, and lived in the most miserable shacks, worse than many in the ghettos—because the union and the miners did not have the social aspiration that they should escape...
...So are a lot of liberals...
...A segment of the Negro leadership and perhaps among the rank-and-file seems almost to want the movement to have a tragic ending which would somehow illuminate the human condition in all of its frailty...
...Number two: There would not be any war against poverty had it been left to white workers...
...RUSTIN: Oh yes...
...Never have you heard about Jews being inhuman...
...The unions will give money and pass resolutions but they will not act...
...But now the Negroes have to deal not only with discrimination but also the problems of the whole society...
...If you have so many young people who cannot find jobs, who are not trained, you can employ them in helping themselves...
...It becomes clear that the struggle for equality will not be won very quickly...
...But it has to be spelled out so people can understand it...
...I don't think that one can ever think of the theory of social dislocation in the abstract...
...Or, to take another illustration: Some years ago, a few people—I remember Bruno Bettelheim, for example—raised the questions of the effects of a kind of de facto segregation within the schools, that is the homogeneous grouping of children...
...My point is this: Given the present situation, school dropouts in Negro communities and various kinds of social pathology, it is not sufficient to try to involve such young people in political and social struggles...
...Men like Ralph Helstein and Reuther are prepared to go even further...
...The other participants are DISSENT editors...
...And something else: I have the impression that there is arising a new kind of Negro militant, in almost all the active organizations...
...They say, "I was brought up in a ghetto"— an ethnic ghetto, or a slum...
...Now concluding: I think that the civil rights movement has two fundamental strategies to follow: First, stay in the streets, winning little victories, and sometimes none, but stay, for the very reason that you stimulate other segments of the society, limitedly, to move...
...The reason is that the normal employment pattern in the United States is partly being revolutionized out of existence by technology...
...HOWE: The question that must then be posed is: What meanwhile happens with the Negro movement, when it has to survive in relative isolation, under increasingly difficult conditions...
...Doesn't this raise, then, for the Negro movement and leaders the problem of trying to effect an internal self-mobilization in the Negro community, not merely for struggle on the outside but for social, cultural and morale purposes within its own ranks...
...When Jack said that this public-works plan Bayard has been talking about would not allow the Negro to break through to the normal employment pattern, that's true...
...It has been obvious all along that there hasn't been a single movement, but rather a loose alliance of parallel and sometimes competing groups...
...Now, what the devil do these people want...
...In my mind, there have been many more successes of the civil rights movement prodding the society in the direction I want to see it go, than there have been successes in the civil rights movement per se...
...But if you're trying to win allies, you want to reduce that alienation to an irreducible minimum...
...That discussion didn't get anywhere, but obviously the question must come up again...
...It's a matter of broadening that...
...These boys are so economically dependent on the West that the only thing they will do is debate South Africa in the UN but they will never touch anything regarding the United States and its internal questions...
...The economic situation means certain things for the Negro and unless a massive change takes place, it looks very bad...
...movement for quality integrated education...
...So are church people...
...They know there is really no way to get jobs for Negroes unless something else happens...
...It is possible to march to City Hall, for instance, for quality, integrated education and to get white people involved in this...
...You will see the idea put forward in connection with jobs...
...We now have not only an objective of getting a few jobs here but of spelling out a political program...
...This is what always happens when a group attempts to achieve more than it has the power to...
...For Negroes, to conform to their stereotype is to be...
...There are many elements in labor, in the Negro community, and among liberals who can move on such a programmatic base...
...Yes, it's essential to work out the broad programmatic conception...
...Those who talk about the use of violence and so on, also have to face the fact that no minority is going to get away with guerrilla warfare in the United States...
...Therefore we must realize that we are dealing with a situation which is far different from any we have ever been through...
...Second, if the American labor movement does that, not only will there be a war between white and black at the bottom of society, but neither the American labor movement nor any force for social change will be able to answer any of the questions, the automation question, the school question, the hospital question, the whole shooting match...
...There is a whole aspect to the Negro movement that doesn't get into the papers, which consists of the sustaining educational and cultural work...
...But to conclude that the Negroes have to face all issues on their own is to accept all kinds of things which the movement cannot accept...
...A tactic which just harumscarum ties up everybody is wrong...
...Numbers of young people in the movement seem to regard the stall-in and similar tactics as logical extensions of your theory of social dislocation...
...There is the filth of the ghetto...
...But to go back to something that Jack Rader said, not so much in contradiction, but, I think, an extension...
...That, I think, is the problem —not Galamison, not PAT, not Malcolm X—none of the things mentioned as being crucial are really crucial unless this is made crucial first...
...I think that the report of the Clark subcommittee calling for five billion dollars extra expenditures annually, the growing consciousness in this society that something has to be done, is already leading, not yet at the bottom of society but at the top, to the possibility of some changes which could help the civil rights movement...
...Secondly, I think we have to think about what I call a political movement, not as a movement of the thirties or even the sixties, or anything else we've been through, but something new...
...Several times I got up to let women and children pass through...
...When I called the next day, he said, "Look, the boys are scared...
...He has, it would seem, little faith in the possibility of changing American society, and consequently he is determined to shock and assault it...
...Jews were an ingrown group themselves, with a very long history and culture, and this had an effect...
...RADER: Both Bayard and Mike propose massive public works...
...But on the major question I am one of those who has a very dim view of being able to patch up the ghetto...
...One, organizing the grass roots, getting down to some block organization in the ghetto...
...And I realized at that point that if I talked to them in terms of the sort of thing we talk about, self-mobilization, they would have felt the utter inadequacy of that kind of response...
...Therefore, presently, fifty-seven per cent of the Negroes in the United States cannot hope to break through to a normal employment pattern...
...Three: We go rid of McCarthyism on the American campus in 1960 because Negro students moved in the sit-ins...
...STANLEY PLASTRIK: Unfolding right before our eyes now is a beautiful illustration of what Bayard and others here have been talking about...
...And within the Negro community there seems also to be a very serious process of social disintegration, shown through many symptoms of pathology and demoralized behavior...
...This discussion points up that we're not talking about the Negro question, we're talking about the American question...
...I don't think there's much of a comparison...
...This can be very demoralizing...
...I'm not so interested now in seeing a selfhelp movement among Negroes, because I know the form it's going to take...
...Now suddenly it's come home, and it's hit him, and he's nervous...
...HowE: Why can't one of the objectives of the self-mobilization within the community be to break down these stereotypes...
...It's much easier to be a Milton Galamison than a Bayard Rustin...
...3) There seems to be a genuine crisis of leadership in the Negro movement...
...But the Negro in the street has not seen one gain, and you have to be an intellectual to see the larger perspective...
...Meany has already called for public works...
...Yet, making all due allowance for the ways in which the Jews, even at their most exploited, were in a more favorable position than the Negroes, isn't there something to be learned from the way in which the Jewish world, especially the Jewish labor world, built up a highly complex and rich association of schools, societies, movements, etc., all of which helped sustain morale and provide vision even when objectives could not yet be realized...
...He has discovered that he is proud to be alienated from white society...
...and that contrasts with the Jewish community...
...Clark, for example, speaks in terms of quality education...
...This will provide the basis for all kinds of extremely reactionary political developments...
...For the first time a large section of the Jewish middle class, traditionally liberal, is also hardening, and is simply holding out in behalf of its own narrow interests...
...It's just impossible...
...Second, they can get injunctions against the leadership, isolating them when they should be organizing the masses...
...As long as his alienation persists and as long as we don't really build some kind of secondary cadre, then we will have to confront the emergence of the demagogic or "nationalist" leaders...
...Posed in these larger social terms of social priorities and the expenditures of the wealth and the energies of the country, I don't think you have anything on the horizon at this point which is concerned with this type of question...
...KAHN: There is some justification for the comparison with a nineteenth century Russian-terrorist type of psychology...
...RUSTIN: I have a little anecdote which bears you out...
...There's a danger of looking for a repetition of the forms of the Jewish or other immigrant experiences in terms of the Negro movement...
...The young Negro militants pay attention to them...
...4) Finally, I want to ask you about the internal condition of the Negro communities, especially up North...
...tests...
...But let me go on to just a couple of statistics I came upon recently which indicate how extraordinary the situation is...
...I am not concerned fundamentally with the level of argument which has to be made with PAT...
...KAHN: There has been a great deal of self-help in the Negro com munity, and I bet there's been more intensive effort at this among Ne groes than among Jews...
...HowE: And to interrupt you, Mike, public works may itself become a normal work pattern...
...And I seriously believe that the problem is not one of just working out some accommodation between the trade union movement and the civil rights movement...
...PAT and the people it represents "have" to be anti-Negro as long as we are in the objective situation of declining schools...
...Something wonderful happens to people when they are somehow determining their own destiny and beginning to control and change their own conditions...
...They must now begin to carry that message into the streets...
...It is faced with a situation where, like it or not, it inevitably is driven toward making serious judgments upon society...
...And this middle-class reaction has shown itself to be more resourceful than the whole liberal-labor movement in New York City...
...RUSTIN: I think the Negro leadership out of its own frustration is having to look in two directions...
...Now there is a certain romantic strain in the Negro movement that's almost willing to do that...
...Down the road they will see the logic of what you are saying...
...Therefore, it is bad to have so much activity without visible results, because the democratic ethic may suffer from the disillusionment...
...If that prospect is kept before us, and it's not a matter of hundreds of years, but in the decades ahead, I would maintain that the labor movement even in its present state represents a certain social ballast against such a development...
...And further, it was wrong, because it did not leave an adequate alternative...
...This is the kind of movement I see as a political movement, around such things as full employment, some planning, training within that planning, a public works program...
...It might succeed in admitting a given number into the building trades, but it will not succeed in allowing the Negroes to break through the normal pattern of employment in this country...
...According to the Secretary of Labor, you need a high school education to really function in this economy...
...They had expected to see, as you do in Paris, a small Algerian quarter...
...The last thing they will do is to take you or any other Negro out there to see this fair...
...HOROWITZ: People in the East River Core will tell you that they have two alternatives...
...HARRINGTON...
...Not only have major unions not participated in this effort to weld a rough sort of alliance, but the intellectuals have also been disgracefully absent...
...To an extent, that may still be true...
...RusTIN: Because we have gone so far but haven't come to the final step, we end up with the fact that we find ourselves without sufficient allies, and the Negroes are turning to tactics which are not commensurate with what they're trying to achieve...
...The conse• quence of such terrorism almost always is to exhaust the best cadres, and to lead to isolation and defeat...
...And further, we insist that America hear and act on this program for dealing with our real problem...
...The leader who is likely to emerge in every local situation is the demagogic type rather than the type who is going to articulate anything of what Bayard says in his speeches...
...Other civil rights leaders do not talk, at least publicly, the way Bayard does, not even the socialists, or the trade unionists like Randolph, or the educators like Kenneth Clark...
...d) it becomes more and more apparent that the demand for Negro rights is deeply related to problems of the economic structure, a point we socialists have been emphasizing but which doesn't allow of easy solutions...
...But massive public works, government engineered and lopped off the defense budget, is a substitute for economic integration...
...GELTMAN: No, I mean the specific objectives...
...Other workers have associated economic gains with social achievements...
...Whites were touched and some of them had to move also...
...RUSTIN: I think we've got to have a political movement, in the sense that the civil rights movement is now a political movement...
...And already the Negro struggle for quality education has forced the school board to do something which is of tremendous benefit to every child regardless of color, and that is dropping the so-called I.Q...
...HOWE: In all past major social and revolutionary movements there have been ups and downs, but the important difference here is that we're speaking about a minority movement, only ten per cent of the population...
...There is the Allen report...
...What shall the wealth of the country be used for and how shall work be directed...
...They also could become invisible as many of them did...
...They can either be in the streets or in the movement, and to be in the movement means to be a man...
...These people who have recently arrived at this middle-class status feel threatened in a personal and direct sense...
...No one could have said: "What can we give you to call off this project...
...b) the Negro campaigns in the South have in a number of crucial instances run into a stone wall of opposition, effectively maintaining the Jim Crow structure...
...But we can't be too pessimistic, because someday American society is going to have to face the American question, and when it does it can't help but ally itself with the Negroes...
...Until a few weeks ago the concept of the educational park was largely unknown...
...One must always, when developing tactics, think of the exact situation one is in, the reaction one is going to get, and certain tactical problems...
...The churches are moving around the civil rights bill as no church groups have ever moved in this country and they cannot stop at civil rights, but must go beyond to the question of full employment...
...GELTMAN: I find myself annoyed by the pessimism that frequently issues from the civil rights movement...
...HOWE: I'm talking about self-mobilization as part of the way in which leaders lead a movement...
...RUSTIN: Neither of these things could possibly have burst into the picture had it not been for the movement of the Negro...
...According to the House Labor Committee which investigated the functioning of the Manpower Development and Training Act, fiftyseven per cent of the Negroes twenty-four years of age in the United States were school dropouts...
...And Bayard's right about the churches...
...There is a certain type of leadership which does thrive on defeat, a lazy, opportunistic leadership...
...Where does your theory of social dislocation end and the stall-in tactics begin...
...Norman Hill, National Program Director of CORE...
...When Bayard speaks of the importance of integrating the civil rights movement with a revitalization of the trade union movement that for us is a familiar context and we, so to speak, know what to do about it...
...We have got to lift the school problem from integration to that of quality schools, which has to include, we say, integration secondarily...
...There is a movement for integrated schools in New York but no signs that major breakthroughs will be made...
...The civil rights movement has therefore been forced to dig deeper, just to hold its own as an established part of the Negro community...
...that is, the way in which the so-called Negro question is really the question of the entire future of American society...
...But I am much stronger in my opposition to those elements now, simply out of the realization that it is a tremendous disservice to the masses of Negroes to lead them to expect that their needs can be articulated by a voice in isolation...
...I think without setting up a political structure or a party we can carry this to the people and get the kind of enthusiasm that you now get around the civil rights bill, or that we got around the March on Washington...
...They not only don't have a program, they are opposed to a program...
...We want ten jobs now in the building trades...
...But in terms of concrete politics the immediate situation cannot be confronted only through that general program...
...That is, they were shrewd, businesslike, etcetera...
...HOWE: Question four...
...Negro fraternities, mutual aid societies, etcetera...
...They had absolutely no idea of what was there and when they saw the reality and extent of it, they were dumbfounded...
...HARRINGTON: I agree with what Bayard said...
...Necessary, but not sufficient...
...But above all, he is desperate—impatient with the tactics of gradualism, nonviolence, etcetera...
...and, on the other hand, seeing the limitations of this method alone and thereby increasingly following the Randolph notion of seeing the problem as an American social problem...
...He is fed up with white promises...
...I called a friend who works for the delega tion of a new African nation and asked him if he could get one of the African countries to let us come in early with their officials to look over their pavilion...
...Many of them have come to me and said, "We thought we were doing exactly what you were proposing...
...There is a whole Booker T. Washington tradition, that's self help...
...But if you called it self-help, they would punch you...
...NORMAN HILL: A related problem is that the usual tactic of direct action which here and there has produced an integrated lunch counter does not seem to be answering the demands of larger numbers of Negrc people...
...Norman Hill and I were investigating the set-up at the World's Fair before we went out to have the sit-downs...
...Apart from their invisibility and so forth, their progress was largely tied on the economic front to the unions in New York, especially the ILGWU...
...But many of the activists seem, on the contrary, oriented toward short-run action to the exclusion of virtually everything else...
...Let's take him up on this, not damn him...
...Then you ask for a deeper program and you proceed in that way...
...HOROWITZ: What makes the problem so difficult is that there are reasons for both optimism and for pessimism...
...HOWE: Let me inject a "pessimistic" note here, just for the sake of stirring up the discussion...
...Below are the questions that were submitted by Irving Howe to Bayard Rustin and the other guests at the discussion: 1) Would you care to speculate about the next stages of the equal rights movement...
...I am for approaching the problem on this level as a means of doing a basic educational job with these people...
...HowE: Granted, the ghetto has a bad psychology of its own which can't be abolished without abolishing the ghetto itself...
...but in the struggle to destroy the ghetto...
...RUSTIN: No, it was not...
...Therefore they tried to substitute for a static history their own sacrifice and desire...
...RUSTIN: We're talking about our lives...
...Now I think we have to be very thankful that things have even gone as well as they have...
...And not only because the Negro movement exists in the absence of any democratic left, but also because no matter how you put what we've been saying in this room it sounds to the aver age Negro like "Wait...
...You can get this in one way and one way only, not by preaching and not by inculcation, because Negro mothers have always told them this...
...But the consequences of failure of the Negro movement would really be catastrophic...
...Once the police know about it, they will do what they did...
...HARRINGTON: Right...
...I know that the comparison between the present-day Negro community and the Jewish community of thirty or forty years ago can easily become a facile one, especially if it is used too easily as a way of criticizing the Negroes...
...Among the participants: Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington and perhaps the single outstanding leader to have appeared in the movement these past few years...
...The idea we've discussed around DISSENT, and which is now being discussed at the UAW, of the trade union movement organizing the working poor both as a means of expanding its membership and of reaching Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans and other minority workers, is one proposal...
...This made political discussion possible on the campus...
...You have a tremendous privatization of life in this country, and the Negro movement arises when there are no other movements to coalesce with...
...To me it is programmaticpolitical...
...There is a ghetto psychology, and this cannot be eliminated...
...What do you say to your friends and/or critics in the Negro movement who say: "All right, an alliance wtih the unions would be fine, but how we can have an alliance with organizations that have little interest in forming one, and whose membership is corrupted by prejudice...
...The March on Washington was general, it was humane, it was brotherly, but it didn't affect what happened in the white guy's job or neighborhood...
...PLASTRIK: I can understand the fundamental objections on this selfhelp issue...
...When they go to sit down in front of the building trades, or to climb a crane, they have to say, "We are doing this as a symbol of the fact that we want jobs...
...and the ghetto has its own logic...
...It is the broader social movement which educates them, while the civil rights movement keeps things stirred up...
...Demographic changes are crucial...
...Several facts seem to converge to produce a salemate or near-stalemate: a) the "era of good feeling" between Negroes and liberal whites, which reached a climax at the March on Washington, seems to have come to an end, at least for the moment...
...In effect, he decides to "go it alone," scornful of the white liberal and labor groups and of those Negro leaders who prefer to work with such groups...
...They will be forced into this, by the fact that they can't deliver what needs to be delivered by merely looking at the problem as a civil rights problem...
...On the positive side, there are changes in consciousness yet no changes in the basic situation...
...If you tackle slums you find they are not just problems in housing...
...HOWE: Tom, I mean by self-help the kind of thing that your group has been doing with those young kids—educating them, trying to give them some perspective, so it isn't just a matter of demonstrations but some understanding to build their morale...
...However, I am very much for mobilizing the community to deal with their immediate problems...
...it is our function to give it the broader context...
...And this is really a terrible illusion...
...IRVING HOWE: Let's see if I can focus what's been said so far: In principle we're all for a Negro alliance with the labor movement, but that idea is too general, and doesn't provide guidance for what has to be done tomorrow in Queens or the next day in Birmingham or the third day in Chester, Pennsylvania...
...Now we can't say it because we're too honest to pretend that that alone would achieve much...
...MICHAEL HARRINGTON: Well, I'll take off from that question and say that the Negro movement will simply lose...
...Now, add to these facts that support for the Negroes in the white community seems to be decreasing, and that the passage of the Civil Rights Bill will not greatly affect the life of the ordinary Negro living in a Northern city—and you have a genuine dilemma...
...PAT would not exist if other elements were in the movement, and if it did we wouldn't care, because then it would be of no consequence...
...The whole proposal with respect to self-mobilization is going to get attention precisely in the terms in which you originally spoke, that is, of coping with general problems of society, from poverty to narcotics addiction, and anything we can do in this connection with respect to the Negro problem obviously is relevant...
...Now, I was opposed to the World's Fair stall-ins for a number of reasons...
...Also the tactic was not good because it did not pinpoint the objectives that were to be achieved...
...I accept that...
...Yet my general impression is that the unions have not responded to this crisis with the urgency we would wish...
...The March on Washington raised a whole series of demands in a way that was able to pull in the white community on the programmatic level that we're discussing now...
...If the Mayor of New York City had said, "We will have round-the-clock discussions on the school integration problem...
...One, it is a tactic which can only be successful if it is secretive...
...While people may be bound by certain political allegiances and the like, these things can be broken as the need is seen...
...If we concentrate on that level, we are lost...
...Temporarily it results in publicity and an easy style of leadership...
...This means between a quarter and a third of all youth are unfit for present technology...
...Certainly, India where I have worked is not the same because even the untouchables do not have high visibility...
...Now the Board of Education has put it on its agenda...
...The frustration in the Negro community is not merely the result of difficulties in the struggle, but also of the fact that these demands are made in a context where the Negro alone is in motion...
...HOWE: Norman Hill says that the problem is the incongruity between the long-range political program that Bayard proposes and the difficulty of keeping the Negro movement going in a constructive way right now...
...There is tremendous irritation and misunderstanding...
...HOWE: There are people in or near the Negro movement who say that Bayard's program is certain to fail, that it must fail, that the very nature of American society is such that the idea of a Negro-labor alliance is doomed to failure, that it puts too much trust in the white community...
...KAHN: I have a question to put to Bayard...
...The self-help movement broke up on the shoals of the ghetto...
...Bayard, you ought to talk on this...
...HOWE: Could you say something about the question: What is the present mood of the more important sections of the Negro leadership in regard to this program...
...Therefore certain principles have to be applied if social dislocation is to be reasonable...
...I don't want to discuss the merits of it now, but obviously it transforms the whole discussion of education and integration...
...Even in terms of self-interest, the leadership cannot stick with the status quo...
...GELTMAN: We're touching on a much broader problem than may be apparent...
...RUSTIN: But what you're talking about is that you get these people to realize the nature of life, of the economic system, what dope really means and why it should be overcome, what prostitution really is and why it must be rooted out...
...While many Negroes would not so analyze it, they know in a visceral way that this is true...
...HOWE: But what I'm talking about is self-help toward the objectives of winning the revolution...
...Gandhi's death did not cut it short as Lincoln's did here...
...We talk about the ecumenical movement among the religious groups and the changes in consciousness that result...
...The liberal ideology spreads over the country but at the same time, underneath, certain regressive trends are going on that clash with it...
...Rochelle Horowitz, assistant to Rustin in the March on Washington...
...It seems to conjure up images of small business operations and small capital accumulation, which of course is a very important part of the Jewish background...
...Second, the civil rights movement now has an obligation to carry the questions which I discussed earlier under full employment, planning, training, and so forth...
...The answer to what we do meanwhile in the specific situations is—improvise, probably unsuccessfully, so long as so many of the massive determinants are loaded against us...
...They wanted to hear me say, as a representative of the left, something to the effect that this whole thing has to be smashed to smithereens...
...If you take automation and technological change into account, and if the rate of Negro displacement through automation continues, you get a picture of a class-color society...
...There is one point I want to throw in on the Jews and that is that what everyone forgets is that the Jews, in moving forward, had a very important and unique connection...
...After listening to a television broadcast where these PAT people were talking, I felt that I could not contain my impatience or even discuss with them...
Vol. 11 • July 1964 • No. 3
