NEGROES IN GRAY FLANNEL SUITS

...As one looks at this complete ignoring of all the anti-segregation forces in the South one is compelled to believe that Mr...

...We value as much as Mr...

...Did he kill it...

...No wonder he was restive around those who kept talking about the problem of the individual versus mass-conformity, the profound right, indeed the necessity, to protect men's differences since mankind's progress comes out of the great deviations—not of color, which is no real difference at all, but of ideas...

...The lesser omissions are perhaps a direct result of this emptiness...

...He took it for granted that it was the road to the Promised Land, of course...

...Why did he fail to give credit to others...

...If only he had not let his young dream die...

...No mention of him in this book...

...This open society requires that barriers in minds and imaginations and hearts be leveled as well as barriers in the external world...

...This concern with the inner man, with the quality of human beings, and with the complexities of the human mind puzzled and frightened Mr...

...He had something that set him far above many others: courage...

...For when the crossroads are reached, we shall all be there together...

...In the 1930's (by this time there were thousands of them) these women progressed to projects which opposed discrimination in the courts, at the polls, and in industry...

...It is well worth reading...

...Or did the false values of American culture with which he identified himself so ardently do the job for him...

...White completely ignored their efforts in his book...

...IV I don't know why this saddens me, but it does...

...White mentions this brilliant lawyer five times, but from the brief sentences a reader will gain no idea that the most important program the NAACP ever initiated was Charlie Houston's dream—a dream his efforts created but death kept him from seeing to maturity...

...Nor (with the exception of Judge Waites Waring) does he even seem aware of the work of the white Southerners who have devoted years of their lives to changing the beliefs of their people and alleviating the anxiety which is at the root of the problem...

...The urgent question in Mr...

...I cannot pin this down in less than a long study of Walter White's life and hesitate to mention it here...

...His omissions, often unintentional, are quite important...

...The surface tone of the book is hopeful and rather disarming— and yet to the informed reader it may prove depressing...

...One is far less significant than the other, but let's deal with it first: Mr...

...He was fighting a battle for the Negro group's civil rights...

...Perhaps, because long ago when I first met Walter White I thought he had fine potentialities as a person and a leader...

...He wanted "sensible things": he wanted for the Negro group the right to be "normal Americans," he wanted for them freedom to conform, and especially did he want for them a big role in the great American success story...

...nor is the Committee on Racial Equality, which has done a special kind of mind-changing in city after city by using Gandhian techniques of quiet persuasion and non-violent acts of protest...

...White note even one of the many young white Southern ministers who have lost their pulpits because they have dared preach against the spiritual evils of segregation...

...Do its leaders have the vision to make the choice at the crossroads that lie just ahead...

...Can it stay alive unless it begins soon to work for human excellence as well as for human rights...

...White did not want the South to change its mind itself but wanted to force it to accept integration without having an internal change take place in its people's beliefs...

...I think of men like Dr...

...Did the pressures of racial discrimination kill it...

...II Nor are the white Southern churchwomen given any credit for stiffening public opinion against lynching, although since the 1920's they have fought hard that form of ritualistic murder...

...The large one which a sensitive reader will feel at once is his failure to show any awareness of how change actually comes about in the human spirit and of the meaning of ordeal in the growth of mankind...

...He held on to hi* physical courage throughout his life and to his capacity for hard, persistent work...

...One of them is that great humanist, Charles Houston, whose baby was the now famous plan of taking case after case through lower courts to the U.S...

...THE FIRST sixty-four pages of Walter White's final book, completed shortly before his death last March, will be of much interest to those who wish to learn about the strategies used by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in its triumphant battle against school segregation...

...We think the act of withdrawal injures the segregator as much as it does the segregated...

...White's mind was, "How soon can we get every Negro into a gray flannel suit and traveling down the middle of the road shoulder to shoulder with all the other gray flannel suits...

...Any writer, poet, artist (colored or white) who poked around in that package and spilled out the human beings in it, showing them with their virtues and faults, their aches and pains, their dreams and their nightmares, their meanness and their sweetness, spoiled the nice clean package—that's all...

...The second and far more important reason was this: a few of us were working for something much bigger than "the Negro problem"— and Mr...

...Any organization that sold "the Negro group" wrapped up in a slightly different package hurt his firm's sales and was a competitor...

...White to look at the big picture reveals the dimensions of both his intellect and values as his actual words in print never did...

...He believed enough in a dream to risk his life for it, not once but many times...

...then they did it by going into town after town where a lynching was brewing and compelling the reluctant town fathers to stop it before it began...

...Nor is there mention of Richard Wright, whose Native Son and Black Boy shook the heart and imagination of the entire country...

...she is also on the national committee of the NAACP, has spoken for it numerous times in the South, and helped raise thousands of dollars for its legal work...

...Nor does he take account of the influence of the two or three white women writers of the South, known throughout the world, who long ago took their stand both as writers and humanists for an open society for all people...

...White's major arguments as developed during the years of this struggle...

...Let us push it back now and look once more at the NAACP which his efforts helped build into a strong organization...

...we were, and still are, engaged in a never-ending war for an open society for all people everywhere...

...It was, to me...

...Because we believe this we are as concerned about the segregation of an idea, of a crippled or blind child, of a new dream, or an old or new poem, as we are about segregation of people who are different in color...

...Or to the point of no return...

...Now they have taken their stand for integrated public schools and for obedience to the Supreme Court's decision...

...They have to do with what I think may have been his inability to measure the size and depth of this great struggle to free the human spirit, and his reluctance to acknowledge the role others have played in it...

...he wanted to make big sales for his product and he wanted his firm (the NAACP) to get the credit for the sales...

...And, being a practical man, he probably thought such talk could do the Negro's cause no immediate good and would only keep needed dollars for "the work" away...

...Nor did Mr...

...But I think these omissions 1 have cited are the heart of the matter—not only because the changes that have come to our country in recent years could not possibly have been brought about by the fine efforts of the NAACP alone but because this refusal of Mr...

...He was selling to the American public a package called "the Negro group...

...One of them wrote the first editorial in the South against segregation...

...yet one feels compelled to call attention to this moral and intellectual immaturity in a man often considered his race's "greatest leader...

...And he believed...

...They did it first by openly declaring in public meeting in 1928 that they could look after their sacred virtue themselves and needed no lynching bees to help them...

...But Mr...

...Traveling where...

...Supreme Court in order to demolish the legal underpinning of segregation...

...III Is it quibbling to give so much space to this blindness and lack of generosity...

...White seem to value the work of the American Friends...

...And yet everybody who knows his way around is aware that the interracial work camps set up in the South during the 1940's were yeast that is still making loaves for young minds to feed on...

...is, largely, a retelling of the story of this organization's long, courageous struggle for the Negro group's civil rights, and a restatement of Mr...

...Can it work only for itself or will it, to survive, have to include all people's rights in its agenda...

...He worked hard on certain aspects of the preparation of the school cases for the NAACP's legal committee, but there is no mention of his labors in this book...

...No mention...

...It is not what Mr...

...The remainder of How Far the Promised Land...

...Will W. Alexander, a white Southerner who organized the first interracial council in 1919 and who spent the next thirty years battling racial discrimination and segregation on both regional and national levels...

...There are two reasons...

...And I don't think that dream when he was young was dressed in a gray flannel suit...

...then, about six years ago, they began as a group to fight color segregation in tax-supported institutions and public places...

...White ever did that idea we call "human dignity" but we know that the real barriers that cramp its growth are largely inside a man's own mind and soul and that...

...Nor South Today—a magazine published in Georgia for ten years (1936-46), which during those crucial times stirred minds and spirits, South and North, as, sometimes with brilliance, sometimes with sheer impudence, it undermined the psychological and philosophical foundations of varied forms of segregation and isolationism...

...To the Promised Land...

...White knew it and feared it...

...Can it endure unless it extends the dimensions of its cause to include those spiritual goals which can never be attained but must always be tried for...

...The style is informal, clear, spiced with amusing anecdotes at the expense of the white race, and nicely thickened with facts and figures...

...Nor Arthur Raper's books...

...It is a tragic question...

...These are questions not for them only, of course, but for this reviewer and every American to answer...

...dignity lives or dies because of what" it feeds on there...

...Another person ignored is that learned social scientist, Charles S. Johnson, whose scholarly and persistent work with white social scientists gave early impetus to the study of racial patterns and their effect on the culture of the United States...

...and he carried with him always a "good fellow" flavor that made him most likable...

...Nor did Mr...

...White said that disturbs me, but what he failed to say...

...Throughout the book he blandly ignored organizations that have worked as hard as has the NAACP on the problem of human rights but that approach it from a different angle or at a different level of action...

...I don't think so...

...White was a super salesman...

...It is true, I know, that a reviewer who is unable to get at the heart of the matter will sometimes turn loose the mind's little mice to nibble on a misspelled word here, a stale fact there that is left by an author's haste or oversight...

...The Urban League's fine social service programs which helped indirectly to prepare the climate of opinion for the Supreme Court's decision are not mentioned...

...He could feel no more sympathy with such talk than would a Communist or a middle-of-the-road Republican or a gradualist Democrat...

...At this moment, when the walls of race segregation are falling—for which every decent person is glad—at this triumphant moment when the Negro group (through valiant efforts of NAACP and the equally valiant efforts of uncounted others) has gained many of its civil rights, I would like to ask a few questions: Does the NAACP have a new leadership wise enough, disciplined and generous enough to survive success...

...White never asked himself these questions...

...He brushed off, with a few pleasant sentences, people (even within his own organization) to whom much credit is due...