THE ART OF COMPROMISE

...While this principle is ludicrous and dangerous, it may be that the only known way of eliminating either disease is by a series of steps, each of which presupposes its predecessor...

...The failure of compromise to satisfy either the sense of need or the sense of justice creates for it a strong psychological handicap...

...Third, an anti-lynching act will tend to dampen the upsurge of violence now increasingly threatened in the South...

...It is one of the several measures which the South will need to use during its coming period of transition into the modern world...

...A philosophy is clearly needed to ARNOLD ROSE, associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, formerly taught at Bennington College and Washington University, St...

...But the best strategist is always willing to abandon his most carefully-laid plans if a more feasible or quicker route becomes apparent...

...The time is not far off when the greatest resistance to the abandonment of segregation will come from the minority groups that have so strongly fought it as warping and insulting, rather than from the majority groups that have so long enforced it for their selfish advantage...

...Strategy sometimes involves abandoning a lesser goal so that a greater one may be achieved...

...IV The President's civil rights program also includes an anti-poll tax measure and a measure to abolish segregation in public transportation and similar facilities...

...the entire South can afford one good public university for Negroes, whereas no single state could afford it...

...But that is as far as they will go...

...Compromise must always be regarded as a tool to use, not as a goal to drive for...

...The principle is the abolition of discrimination and of segregation in all their forms...

...If those opposed to civil rights for Negroes are successful in killing the FEP bill, they will feel less psychological need to exert full strength to kill the other bills...

...Thus, the compromise of a bar was an unstable one which the white students themselves soon removed...

...All strategy involves compromise...

...Yet the bill has implications which are profound: First, it will bring to the South standards of law enforcement which that lax region has never had the opportunity to witness...

...His "The Negro in America," widely acclaimed as a definitive work in the field, was a condensation of Gun' nar Myrdal's "An American Dilemma," in whose preparation Dr...

...The Negroes stand to gain a first-fate educational institution...

...It struck the white students by its ludicrousness, and made them see the insult implied by segregation which they ordinarily would not see if segregation were complete...

...it could not provide the job placement services that a mixed university would have...

...Thus, Negro leaders are wisely opposing the compromise even though they lose the immediate prospect of a well-equipped university which Negro youth so badly needs...

...Compromise is thus not one tool, but many...

...Compromise does not always lead to static equilibrium...

...it is a technique...

...It represents a compromise which civil rights should strive for, since its enactment would provide so much increased security to Negroes and future opportunity for social change...

...After those other bills are enacted, the proponents of civil rights can still work for an FEP bill without having appeared to have accepted a compromise...

...it could not provide the contacts between students that are especially important for future professional collaboration and recognition...

...The plan involved allowing Negroes into those classes at the University of Arkansas for which the state college for Negroes did not provide equivalents, but acceding to the customary demand for segregation by having the Negroes sit behind a bar or partially drawn curtain...

...Since the political and legal effort itself is so provocative of desirable results, compromise would certainly be a mistake...

...When this time comes, strong forces will develop from the minorities' side to make a compromise into a permanent settlement...

...Compromise has a danger in being too attractive to the minority groups themselves...

...In this situation, a Federal anti-lynching law will serve as a firm, steadying hand to help the patient through his temporary seizure...

...they seldom miss an opportunity to condemn race violence, and most of them are willing to help secure the vote for Negroes...

...Since change is considered desirable, while compromise that secures change is psychologically disturbing, the contenders obviously need a philosophy to resolve their mental conflict...

...The poll tax works to the detriment of poor whites as well as Negroes, and yet the bill for its abolition has for many years been opposed very strongly and with the broadest range of arguments...

...There are those who assume that slowness in social change is socially desirable...

...Another reason to acknowledge publicly the compromise is to point up the fact that social change can and does occur...

...The Art of Compromise By Arnold Rose TN THE current struggle for civil * rights for minority groups, temporary compromises are constantly effected which involve an improvement over the preceding situation but which fail to satisfy either the minority group or the principle of equal treatment...

...The Negroes' demands are for the full protection of the laws, and for the complete elimination of violence now practiced against them in the South...

...In that case, the gradual process through all the steps is, in the long run, the quickest way to achieve the goal...

...The South has for so long lived in a morass of irrational fears and false beliefs about race that the transitional period in which Negroes are acquiring equal rights and social integration might be attended by an increase of aggression on the part of the more psychopathic whites...

...Thus, liberal groups are not now strong enough to enact the full civil rights program before Congress...

...It involves making allies with those whose aims are only partly the same as one's own...

...Sometimes a favorable compromise can be achieved best by not appearing to compromise, thereby achieving at least as much as could be achieved by openly working for the compromise and at the same time retaining the initiative which is sometimes lost in direct attack or obvious compromise...

...It will then be all the more imperative to clarify basic principles, and to see compromise as a technique in strategy...

...Some of these hold themselves to be liberals—"realistic liberals...

...All these—and the list is far from exhausted—mean compromise...

...Strategy involves making a show of strength even when this achieves nothing directly, because a show of strength may be necessary for weakening the morale of the opposing forces or strengthening the morale of one's own forces...

...but under other conditions and values it will not be true...

...III Segregation in a university inevitably involves discrimination, and acceptance of this compromise would cement the pattern of segregation and the principle of racial inferiority...

...The latter want greater equality and justice for the Negro, but they are convinced that all types of social change must take a long time...

...And today, while many tough-minded Southern businessmen are finding new sources of labor among Negroes, Gerald W. Johnson takes the opportunity to oppose Fair Employment Practices legislation on abstract philosophic grounds...

...By doing so, they are much less likely to incur as much opposition to the other measures, which are intrinsically equally significant...

...There are many minority persons who have a vested interest in segregation—who gain wealth or power by means of it...

...The matter of speed cannot be pre-judged...

...The first case of investigation, prosecution, and punishment for lynching will have extensive educational effects throughout the South...

...The effort to abolish segregation in public carriers is based on much the same considerations as the effort to abolish segregation in education...

...Efforts to secure a Federal anti-poll tax bill have already had great success in inducing several state legislatures to take the initiative and abolish their poll taxes themselves— with consequent great increases in the size of the electorate (mainly white...

...Thus, passage of a Federal anti-lynching bill does not seem like much of a concession for the conservative South to make, or like much of a gain for Negroes...

...Analogies are sometimes fallacious, but it is as ludicrous to say that a social disease like racism should be eliminated slowly as to say that a physical disease like tuberculosis should be eliminated slowly...

...The great majority of white Southerners are opposed to lynching, and—if a Gallup Poll can be relied on—are even in favor of Federal intervention to stamp it out...

...Not only would Negroes lose if they compromised on the abolition of the poll tax and of other devices to restrict the vote, but they can make allies with white democrats if they refuse to compromise...

...integrate compromise into the civil rights strategy while avoiding its harmful psychological effects...

...Scientific studies of social change show that it is sometimes rapid and sometimes slow...

...Civil rights groups think of the anti-poll tax measure not only as a device for reducing discrimination against Negroes, but also as a means of strengthening the very principle of democratic suffrage and of psychologically emancipating the South from its unhappy political past...

...It is intelligent strategy, therefore, to move as rapidly as one can but as slowly as one is obliged to...

...When, in 1942, Negro and white factory workers were demonstrating throughout the South that they could work side by side in shop and union, Ethridge announced: "There is no power in the world —not even in all the mechanized armies of the earth, Allied and Axis—which could now force the Southern white people to the abandonment of the principle of social segregation...

...On the other hand, Negroes would be accepting the principle of second-class citizenship and an institution that would inevitably be inferior to any regional university for whites...

...The "Southern liberals" are among those who elevate compromise to a principle...

...They correctly point out that their segregated life has developed worthwhile values, and by this means they attempt to avoid the insecurity of using full equality of opportunity and of entering their values into competition with others...

...While it may be useful to express pride upon achieving a compromise, it is all the more necessary to reaffirm the belief that the compromise is a means, and to state explicitly that the real goal has not been achieved...

...In regard to the Negro problem in the South, a long time is considered by them to be several hundred years...

...When one realizes that, until very recently, the Jim Crow coach cars for Negroes were dirty and uncomfortable, dining train facilities nonexistent, the practice of pushing through the bus inconvenient and provocative of insult and friction, the use of Pullman accommodations often denied, then it can be understood why Negroes so strongly favor abolition of segregation in transportation...

...One of the civil rights bills—the anti-lynching bill—itself represents a compromise which, when enacted, is likely to have effects far more extensive than those directly indicated by the bill...

...But because they have elevated gradualism to a principle and therefore attempt to defy the observable laws of social change, they must ultimately be opposed even more strongly than the conservative who operates on expediency and has few or no principles...

...for if they should "accidentally" kill a Negro they would be subject to punishment...

...I am not speaking of people like Lillian Smith, Judge Waties Waring, or Howard Odum, whose attitudes regarding the Negro are no different from those of Northern liberals, but of that special genus "Southern liberal" exemplified by Mark Ethridge, Gerald Johnson, or Hodding Carter...

...Strategies can be worked out in advance to estimate the quickest routes to the goal...

...But it sometimes makes for bad strategy...

...An example of this is the University of Arkansas' plan to meet the Supreme Court's insistence that each state must provide equal educational facilities for Negroes and whites...

...Until the prejudiced discover that social change is not actually as terrifying and as devastating as they have for so long expected it to be, and until they discover that emancipation from the obsession to which they have been attached for about 130 years opens new opportunities and freedoms to them, they may react with the violence a psychotic usually manifests when his diseased adjustment is challenged...

...sometimes it brings into being a situation so inherently unstable that the forces opposing social change have no way of stemming its advance once the compromise is agreed to...

...There is nothing discovered by the science of sociology which supports this: under certain conditions, and with certain values, it may be true...

...A case in point is the current question about establishing regional colleges in the South...

...The doctrine of racism which underlies all prejudice against minorities in the United States, and the attitude that Negroes must never be allowed to enter the white man's world, would be upheld and indefinitely continued if Negroes were to accept the segregated regional university...

...Consequently they work on "first things first": they try to secure better job opportunities for Negroes...

...On the other hand, there are those who say that justice can never be partial and therefore that no compromise is acceptable...

...Such a philosophy has been growing up in an unplanned way, without being thought out and systematized...

...The Negro group, for example, employs the opprobrious terms "Uncle Tom" and "handkerchief heads" to refer to its compromisers, and the Japanese-Americans have sometimes extended the meaning of the Japanese word for "dog," which originally referred to an informer, to refer to all compromisers...

...Louis...

...II The first observation to be made about compromise, then, is that it is not a principle...

...It might take the name of gradualism, except for the fact that that name appeals more to conservatives and wishy-washy compromisers than it does to minority groups and others working for civil rights...

...Gradualism" has almost come to stand for defeat and dishonest manipulation...

...It is a cruel disillusionment bearing the germs of strife and perhaps tragedy, for any of their [Negro] leaders to tell them that they can expect it, or that they can exact it as the price of their participation in the war...

...Rose played a leading part...

...Many trains have been cleaned up, Pullman accommodations are now available, some dining facilities are provided on a segregated basis, but the friction and insult remain...

...Yet compromise is the usual way in which social change occurs when there are contending forces of roughly equal operating strength...

...It was also inconvenient to the white students...

...Both at Arkansas and at the University of Louisville, which copied the plan, the artificial bar lasted only a few months...

...When a compromise is made, acknowledgement of the achievement is useful, partly because it can be a way of giving a psychological reward both to the conservatives who concede and to members of the minority group who have gained a partial victory...

...This critical attitude usually has the effect of strengthening a minority group's morale...

...The new university—no matter how good the buildings and the equipment—would have certain permanent weaknesses: it could hire only Negro professors, who are not always the best qualified in all fields...

...The chief psychological danger of gradualism is that it becomes elevated to a principle...

...If compromise is the action taken, it is all the more psychologically necessary to have a verbal reaffirmation of the belief that ultimately there can be no compromise...

...But they must insist on the full program, and must use every possible effort to pass the bill least likely of success, the Fair Employment Practices Bill...

...The anti-lynching bill ostensibly is directed only at stamping out the three or four lynchings a year still occurring in the South...

...Second, it will encourage white men who now have no inhibitions against beating Negroes, to think twice before beating too hard...

...There are those who claim that social change is naturally slow, and therefore the reduction of discrimination and segregation must proceed slowly...

...There are many more others who have an unhealthy psychological attachment to the system which prevents the full expression of their abilities, because it is the only system they have ever known...

...Some of these also hold themselves to be liberals—"liberals of principle...

...Since "gradualism" is for them a principle, they will not only avoid disturbing any patterns of social segregation, but they will actively oppose even a spontaneous and popular instance of breaking down of the social barriers...

...These gentlemen have played important roles in the improvement of race relations in the South, and they will probably continue to aid in bringing this nation closer to the ideals for which it stands...

...One of the most difficult things strategy involves is the occasional sacrifice of leadership when the latter becomes an obstacle to achievement...

...While the efforts to get a Federal bill passed have not been successful, the mere struggle has put considerable pressure on the railroad and bus companies and on Southern public opinion generally...