A Chance for Greatness
MEYER, KARL E.
THE PRESIDENT AND THE NEGRO A Chance for Greatness By Karl E. Meyer Washington IN a speech that was widely quoted in the capital last week, Secretary of State Rusk spoke o£ the "deep...
...The Kennedys are learning...
...No quality has been more absent from national politics, and in Washington one can feel the tingling of a long-sleeping limb...
...Yet without being preachy, the President must surely use the pulpit of his office for a series of addresses modeled in the tradition of Lincoln (and not, for a change, of Churchill...
...The President's brother was shocked by the depth of passion...
...Karl E. Meyer is a member of the editorial board of the Washington Post and Washington correspondent for the British New Statesman, where this article also appears...
...Indeed, the United States has fallen into a Soviet trap by letting ideological competition focus on gadgetry—and the Negro has given his country a chance to get out of the trap...
...technology is not what differentiates America from the Soviet Union...
...He must be able to articulate the Negro cause in a way that makes change seem not only necessary but also wholly just...
...We approve without reserve of this policy by President Kennedy...
...A response to this appeal could be more decisive in foreign affairs than any grisly weapon the Pentagon could concoct...
...Magazines are thrusting deeper...
...It was Franklin Roosevelt's compassionate actions here at home that built his great reputation abroad...
...We know that in the United States a fight is being organized by the Government of President Kennedy...
...Not since the economic collapse of the 1930s has any domestic crisis so shaken the country...
...The word passion can be used in a double sense...
...THE PRESIDENT AND THE NEGRO A Chance for Greatness By Karl E. Meyer Washington IN a speech that was widely quoted in the capital last week, Secretary of State Rusk spoke o£ the "deep injury" that racial injustice was inflicting on America's world standing...
...What we are speaks much louder than what we say...
...An example was a report the other day on a sit-in demonstration in a Mississippi department store in which Negroes were dragged from a lunch counter and were stamped upon or had catsup squirted on their heads...
...There is now no lack of urgency...
...Asked in Ethiopia about the Birmingham riots, Premier Touré replied: "We cannot say that the American people are racists—racism exists everywhere, even in Guinea...
...Thus far, he has dealt circumspectly with the race question, stressing the need for law and order and for community responsibility...
...This is a passion play with a hundred million witnesses—for once, one is grateful for television...
...Yet as one reflects on the meaning of today's Negro revolt, it is possible to argue quite the reverse proposition, fn the process of freeing himself, the American Negro may shake his own society out of the complacent torpor—indeed, the sleeping sickness—that is the pervasive national malady...
...The President is moving with a tide that may take him in directions hitherto uncongenial to his temper...
...No longer the invisible man, the Negro has chased Cuba and Laos off the front page and forced his countrymen to confront an evil within remedial range...
...President Kennedy has come to a Finland Station in which the momentum of events can be influenced by his own leadership...
...He doesn't know pain...
...Our voice is muted," he said, "our friends are embarrassed, and our enemies gleeful because we have not really put our hands fully and effectively to this problem at every level of our national life...
...It has been the standing complaint that a lack of urgency in national opinion has tied the President's hands...
...If Kennedy succeeds, his Presidency may prove more memorable than anyone dared to hope...
...It opens a field for the compassionate action of a Roosevelt...
...Hence one can argue that the Negro revolt in America is as much a national opportunity as a handicap...
...No American astronaut could elicit the same tribute...
...A confirming statement comes from an unexpected source, Premier Sékou Touré, an African nationalist who is nobody's puppet...
...It is difficult, too, to over-state the effect of television...
...Civil rights measures which a few months ago were considered unobtainable are now given chance of passage in Congress...
...He didn't get the point," Baldwin said afterward...
...In the final analysis," President Kennedy wisely observed before his election, "our foreign policy, our relations with other countries, will be most affected by what we do here in the United States...
...We talk about ourselves these days," Walter Lippmann wrote a few years ago, "as if we were a completed society, one which has achieved its purposes and has no further great business to transact...
...A fortnight ago, Attorney General Robert Kennedy had his now-famous encounter in a New York apartment with a group of Negroes rounded up by James Baldwin...
...Because of this, Rusk continued, American diplomats must conduct foreign policy as if they were in a foot race with one leg in a cast...
...One has the impression that a country sated with material wealth is ready for an appeal to the radical ideals of equality charted in the Declaration of Independence and sustained in a Civil War...
...The question that the racial revolt, North and South, poses is whether the majority of Americans can rededicate themselves to some purpose more ennobling than supremacy in supermarkets, superhighways and superbombs...
...He was naive...
...The coaxial cable has made the country a single community and virtually every evening the news programs carry film footage that makes comment superfluous...
...not long ago, the New Yorker published James Baldwin's cry of despair—an essay on being black that has become the manifesto of a minority—and last month Life creditably ran a report by a Negro journalist on the Black Muslims that was free from the usual cliches...
...But A change of laws can only work if there is a change of heart, and here President Kennedy meets the more exacting test...
...This is the kind of problem that does not yield simply to adroit managerialism—and yet the White House has grounds for gratification...
...The Administration is belatedly presenting proposals that would broaden Federal authority in dealing with demonstrations against segregation in stores, theaters, hotels and restaurants...
...Great business now beckons to President Kennedy, and Dean Rusk may yet bless the cast on his leg...
...There are signs that a miracle of this magnitude might occur...
...He just doesn't know...
...This would finally ease the unfair burden placed on the courts, which, by virtue of political paralysis, have been forced to preside over a piecemeal social revolution and take the full brunt of the segregationist attack...
...One path ahead, clearly, is legislative...
...If he can reawaken the dormant radical tradition in American life, the Negro could give a greater lift to national prestige than any conceivable feat in outer space...
Vol. 46 • June 1963 • No. 12
