The Struggle for Justice

...and memories of Prohibition futilities prompt the apprehension that any number of Federal marshals will not coerce compliance to Federal law in local communities in which "respectable" leaders of the community insist on defiance...

...Indeed, the Northern Negroes have the right to vote, they suffer from relatively occasional discrimination in public accommodations, and they are not the victims of legal school segregation but of de facto school segregation caused by segregated housing...

...Here the old Jeffersonian principle of "states rights" comes to their aid...

...that even the enactment into law of the civil rights bill will not solve all our problems...

...The worker was economically weak without the right to bargain collectively because his resources did not compare with the resources of industrial concerns...

...but it is not a potent economic force...

...These plans are too slow for the Negroes and too radical for the whites...

...3. The grant of economic power inherent in the right to organize and bargain collectively...

...The political power inherent in the franchise was a powerful instrument in the hands of the industrial workers...

...A large motor company would hardly be forced by a Negro boycott to increase the proportion of its Negro workers...

...It indicates that our nation as a whole, as well as the Negro minority, is confronted with a major moral and political crisis —a crisis greater than any we have confronted since the Civil War...

...but they are more effective in expressing a general resentment against injustice than in clarifying concrete resentments and specifying particular injustices...

...The source of the despair is to be found in the fact that none of the provisions of the civil rights bill seriously affects the status of unemployed Negroes in Northern ghettos...

...THINKING ALOUD The Struggle for Justice By Reinhold Niebuhr Slowly, by the gradual comprehension of many indices of the public temper, both Negro and white, some of us are beginning to realize that the struggle for justice for our Negro citizens is a long and hard one...

...The lack of moral substance in our institutions of culture—exception for institutions of art, the theater and the concert hall—is one of the most disquieting features of the present revolution...

...The struggle for justice is obviously in a different category from the abortive effort to regulate the drinking habits of men, but the analogy still holds in that local custom seems more powerful than national law in instances where a conflict exists between the two...

...it is the dilemma of validating the humanity of man despite the strong tribal impulses in his nature...

...This, in turn, is due partly to racial prejudice and partly to the low incomes of the Negro minority...

...The reason for this despair is obvious, but I, for one, was slow to gauge its import...

...It may still be used to encourage the employment of Negroes in commercial and industrial establishments...

...They argue on this point as if race prejudice had nothing to do with the case, although it is obvious that they are concerned with preserving the customs of inequality inherited from slavery...

...Its only economic weapon consists in the consumer boycott, used effectively by Martin Luther King in the first stage of the Negro Revolution in Birmingham...

...Of course, attitudes in the border states and in the more enlightened Southern states will undoubtedly change, if only gradually, and defiance will give way to compliance...

...One has the uneasy feeling that local custom is more powerful than national law...

...The third reason for pessimism about the course of the Negro Revolution in the struggle for equal rights is prompted by an analogy with the Industrial Revolution—which gave equal rights to the industrial workers of Western democracies, achieved the tolerable justice that all modern industrial nations under democratic governments now enjoy, and provided the West with relative immunity from the Communist virus of rebellion against "bourgeois democracy...

...In this country race prejudice was, moreover, compounded with a very stubborn class prejudice —the evil inheritance of the institution of slavery...

...The economic problem of the Negro, indicated in the high proportion of Negroes among the unemployed, is aggravated by rapid technical advances in industry...

...It was extended in Britain in the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867...

...They seek to exercise moral suasion...

...The second index of continuing trouble in the struggle for equal justice to Negroes is the increased resistance of Southern whites to any and all forms of integration, and their declared intention of resisting integration by inaction and evasion...

...The Negro's defective education becomes particularly apparent when an "automated" industry can use only the most highly trained youth for its machines...

...but in the face of such obdurate complexities there is no simple formula of equal justice...

...The instruments of justice in the Industrial Revolution were three: 1. The moral suasion which engaged the residual capacity for justice in many members of the bourgeoisie, and thus reduced the weakness of the working class...

...School boycotts and street demonstrations are hardly in the category of economic power...

...We are in for not only a long hard summer but for decades of social revolution...

...The dilemma is actually wider than our national life...

...The first important index is the despair and hopelessness of the Northern Negro youth, manifested in subway and other violence...

...The Negro minority has no economic power in the realm of production...

...Collective bargaining brought to workers an equilibrium of power with management which finally created the two modern quasi-sovereignties of management and union...

...Moral suasion cannot therefore function as a potent instrument...

...It was constitutionally granted in the U.S.A., at least in Federal elections...

...2. The political power inherent in the franchise which gave the workers the possibility of determining government policy for the protection of their rights and securities...

...A consideration of all the hazards which the Negro minority faces in its struggle for equal justice, and particularly of its lack of the economic power which proved so potent in the past, should not discourage the Negro minority and its white allies too greatly, for historical analogies are notoriously inexact...

...It will be a long hot summer, and it will be a crisis-filled decade and century before the nation has solved—or even taken the most rigorous steps toward the solution of—this "American dilemma...

...The "welfare state" of modern democratic practice is the culmination of the exercise of power inherent in the franchise...

...They do not exercise power for specific objectives...

...The extension of the franchise to the disfranchised Negro minority is also the most hopeful index of ultimate triumph in the present revolution, though the extension must be accomplished by the exertion of Federal power against recalcitrant states which for a century have denied the Negro the right to vote...

...They already have all the rights which the bill seeks to secure for the Negroes of the South...

...Most of our cultural institutions were tainted with this prejudice, particularly religious institutions...

...But the comparison is sobering...

...It is the analogy of the third instrument of justice —the exercise of economic power—that arouses apprehensions because the Negro minority lacks any economic power comparable to the right of collective bargaining achieved in the Industrial Revolution...

...If we measure the analogous instruments of justice in the present Negro Revolution, the result is not too reassuring...

...This fact is underscored by the opposition of white and Negro parents to the plans lately advanced by both the State Education Commissioner and the New York City School Board...

...These impulses are usually not expressed with the fury with which Nazism expressed them, yet even so they are cruel...

...At least two of the three instruments of justice are weaker in the Negro Revolution than they were in the Industrial Revolution...

...The integration of public schools, calculated to circumvent segregated housing, is proving to be a slow and difficult business...

...The whites of the South are most stubbornly opposed to integration in the schools and in public accommodations...

...The instrument of moral suasion upon the majority is compromised by the fact that race prejudices are more stubborn than the class prejudices with which the industrial revolution contended...

...But what about the "hard core," say in Mississippi or Alabama...

...Clearly the Negro revolution is on the march in the North...