Black Youth and the NAACP

...indeed, they are deeply convinced that white America is in any case out to commit genocide against its black minority...

...THIS PAST MAY the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP organized a series of discussions on the present phase of the civil rights struggle, which brought out in sharp focus the divergent philosophies in the Negro community...

...His appeal for integration is, of course, meaningless to this passionate youth...

...The two discussions I attended may serve as examples...

...Even more revealing was a discussion by five black students and two young LDF lawyers on the topic of `Black Students Seek Identity: Integration— Separatism...

...A tall order indeed, if not a somewhat pathetic delusion of grandeur...

...The first dealt with the roadblocks in the path of `Black Business Enterprise...

...The students, some of them from elite colleges, were unanimous in their fierce black nationalism and differed only in the degree of their hatred for white society...

...To some this is an end in itself...

...But "when the trucks come"—a recurring phrase—they want "to be found at General Motors or Union Carbide...

...Bayard Rustin came in for particular abuse and misquotation...

...They see their own role after college either as leaders of a separate and separatist black political entity (Leon Den -mark—Columbia), or as "intellectual Molotov cocktails" inside the white corporate structure...

...corporations against the wall" (Charles Hamilton— Harvard...

...Two substantial black businessmen, each self-made and heading a group of small and medium-sized enterprises, spoke for the American business myth...

...The students express the frustrations of black youth in the cities of the North...

...Their position sounded curiously irrelevant at a time when room for the individual entrepreneur is getting ever more limited and the real action has long shifted to the large corporation...

...They feel themselves to be personal victims of centuries of oppression and are burning with a fierce will to power, so as to realize their manhood, to run their separate black national entity, or, failing that, to bring down white America...

...Instead, they want to use it as a wedge to establish Centers for Black Studies to further feed their nationalism...

...a situation which demands that the blacks as a group, not only as individuals within white society, obtain a share of the real power—political, economic, cultural— in this country and thus make it finally truly an open society...

...It would invest in a large variety of ghetto enterprises and contract with large corporations to set up "turnkey" operations in Harlem, turning them over to independent black management...

...If, however, this generation of black youth really tries to act out its separatist rhetoric, then the result could be disastrous for both blacks and whites...

...Heywood Bums, Yale graduate and LDF attorney, came closest to an answer...

...but "when the trucks come," being black, he and Roy Wilkins, it was said, would share the black fate...

...Whether or not the plan will come into being, it certainly represents the thinking of a new generation that has grown up in the shadow of the government-corporate conglomerate structure, as against a belated sneaking-in through the back door of individual entrepreneurship...

...a black brain trust "putting the U.S...

...They stressed that the black businessman, in order to succeed, would have to aim at the mainstream of American business rather than confine himself to the ghetto economy...

...They felt there would be a good chance to develop capable Negro businessmen and managers, if only—by "compensatory action" —sufficient high-risk capital were furnished by the white business community...

...Against this intense passion feeding (and at times distorting) a high intelligence, the NAACP has little to offer...

...Now THAT the college gates have finally opened rather wide for black students, these spokesmen do not wish to see this opening used for acquiring a passport into the corporate society...

...For the second time in my life I had this frightening experience: to realize that, simply COMMENTS AND OPINIONS because of my race, nothing I might say could reach their minds (the first time was in Germany in the early thirties...

...Nor is the attempt at bypassing the capitalist economy through cooperatives—represented on the panel by a wonderful lady from rural Alabama—of more than marginal significance...

...The NAACP's main strength still lies in the South and was exemplified in the forceful personality of Charles Evers...

...For it could well lead to an authoritarian regime, backlash concentrated and structured, which might make the glib talk of genocide a self-fulfilling prophecy...

...others, more sophisticated, see it as a means to an end: a chance to exercise power in the university, as one of the weakest institutions of the Establishment (Charles Dun -can—Cheney State...

...Innis's project is based on political influence—a bill for its creation is to be introduced by the two Republican Senators from New York—and aims at creating economic power in Harlem, concentrated in the ghetto for maximum effect in terms of employment, investment, and a board of directors that certainly would not exclude Roy Innis...

...A start in this direction has already been made with, of all things, a Wallstreet brokerage firm...

...Evers had to fight his way through the very depths of oppression in Mississippi, while these students enjoy a relatively privileged existence, defended in their rights by the very NAACP they despise, provided with scholarships from Ivy League colleges and a choice of well-paying jobs ahead of them...

...In their intense nationalism, they fail to recognize that even in terms of their own aims it should be desirable to split the white camp rather than draw it together by their own indiscriminate hatred of all whites...

...If the present fury is necessary to obtain this result, then it can be considered the bitter price that has to be paid for long neglect...

...It also represents the thinking of a new generation that is looking for power as against an older generation satisfied with just a little more opportunity...

...The really new philosophy was presented by Roy Innis with his plan for a Harlem Community Corporation, to be amply funded with the help of government agencies and banks...

...He showed great awareness of the position of frustrated student youth who will have to come to terms with a new situation...

...At the same time, they are well aware of the risk of repression...