Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR INTEGRATION Professor Miller's letter in the January 5 issue, on Carl Auerbach's "How Congress Can Speed School Integration" (NL December 22, 1958), is quite remarkable in approach and...
...Human rights today appear best protected in societies that favor private capitalism, and most threatened in those pledged to governmental capitalism...
...Miller uses his legal mind to approach this problem of equality in an overly-technical, non-humanistic, and therefore tediously irrelevant, immaterial and incompetent fashion...
...Ferguson separate-but-equal doctrine which paved the way for the twentieth century brand of second-class citizenship imposed on the Negro (as if separate-but-equal were anything but inherently a doctrine whose terms were mutually exclusive...
...Because he knows "of no counterpart in history where similar demands were made . . . with an expectation of compliance, as are being made today on the Southern white...
...and it is not true that the Southerner is, being given a short time to accommodate himself to a vast new social adjustment...
...Tapeka decision in 1954...
...Coffin's attitude in this is called "liberal" by many...
...This is the type of reasoning that is designed to hide the fact that the problem is old rather than new, and has been crying out for solution for generations rather than just since the 1984 Supreme Court decision on school integration, if this is a successful tactic, then the counsels of moderation, gradualism, etc., will find greater acceptance because the truth will have been obfuscated...
...This approach is a rather transparent mask for the basic lack of understanding of the problem which Miller displays in his other remarks (i.e., those on the substantive matter rather than the legal issues) and in the tenor of these remarks...
...Miller's inordinately "tolerant" remarks and their tenor, which imply condoning the acts of the violators of moral and juridical law, can only be characterized as intemperate whining...
...Coffin appears to be that the interests of employer and employe in the American capitalist system are so fundamentally opposed, that what benefits one harms the other...
...A generation later, the Supreme Court was able, without shame, to spew forth the Plessy vs...
...How moderate can one get...
...Some years later, when the young champion of liberty sought to further perfect its institutional guarantees of freedom, equality, etc., at the Constitutional Convention, the framers of the Federal Constitution (that supposedly sacred document in the history of man's fight for liberty) felt not the slightest shame, in the course of arriving at a compromise solution to the problem of state representation, in viewing the Negro, still a slave, as worth only three-fifths of a while man...
...Since the safeguarding of human rights should be the prime aim of a true liberal, is it possible that the liberalism of the 1930's has become the reactionary forces of today...
...And now we are being told that we are extremists if we want the derision enforced, and we are counselled as to the merits of moderation and delay...
...As yet, the only alternative to the private capitalist that has appeared in modern industrial society is the governmental capitalist...
...The basic assumption of Mr...
...Someone once said that a legal mind is one that ran think of something that is inextricably attached...
...Yet followed to its logical conclusion, the combination of belief and moral zed can only lead to punitive attacks on a vital force in capitalist society, the private capitalist...
...It is part of the environment now developing in the South which gives encouragement to the temple and school hombers in Miller's Own Atlanta and other towns...
...What can a Negro mother tell her child who must sit in a segregated, and invariably inferior, school, or who returns from integrated school after being greeted by violence and abuse instigated by local officials...
...The problem of Negro equality has been with us for as long as this nation has been in existence, and a solution to it has been consistently avoided throughout our history by the invocation of the specious rationale of moderation, compromise and realism...
...It look until the 1954 decision for this doctrine to be denounced and deemed insufficient and self-defeating by the current Supreme Court...
...It is the segregationist, the alleged moderate and the apologist who are to be judged "extremist...
...The problem did not emerge as a result of the Brown vs...
...Therefore, any activity which is of benefit to the employer, and claims also to benefit the employe, is an obvious cynical fraud, meriting the opprobrious characterization of "trickle-down theory" (90 per cent employer, 10 per cent employe...
...After all, at least a minor aim of the War was involved with the equality question...
...After the War Between the States, when the problem of slavery was no longer around in a formal sense, one could have reasonably expected to see some progress made toward the integration of the Negro into society as a citizen with equal rights and opportunities...
...This is what her mother and her mother's mother were told in their time when they too felt the anguish, humiliation, degradation and abuse that were concomitant of second-class citizenship...
...Coupled with his parochial approach to the problem, this is a disgrace to both the legal and academic professions to which he belongs...
...When the leaders of the American Revolution were drafting their Declaration of Independence, they decided to omit a clause which had earlier been included in it, to the effect that slavery in the colonics would be abolished with the attainment of independence...
...DEAR EDITOR INTEGRATION Professor Miller's letter in the January 5 issue, on Carl Auerbach's "How Congress Can Speed School Integration" (NL December 22, 1958), is quite remarkable in approach and tenor, its approach is the currently fashionable one which avers that the morality of integration and its social and political desirability are somehow divorced from the law, that the instrumentality of the law should not be invoked in achieving socio-political aims...
...More important, what can we say to this Negro mother— have faith, be moderate, wait...
...They did this on the realistic grounds that the inclusion of the clause would alienate the Southern colonies and thus endanger the entire movement toward independence—rather a sorry beginning for a revolution ostensibly based on the principles of the Enlightenment...
...Brooklyn SIDNEY HELFANT TRIS COFFIN Tris Coffin states (NL, December 29, 1958) "there will be a terrific shelling at the trickle-down' economy theory by which Ike's business pals tried to create a welfare state for favored industry...
...He calls for "sympathetic understanding.'' He further says he believes "that the . . . problem will be resolved, after a period of difficult transition...
...Avoca, N. Y. HAROLD KOBETZ...
...This problem is not five years old, but almost two centuries old...
...He calls for understanding the plight of the white Southerner and decries the holier-than-thou attitude of some Northerners...
Vol. 42 • February 1959 • No. 5
