THE PEOPLE'S FORUM
THE PEOPLE'S FORUM Single-Purpose Crusading Dear Sirs: Lillian Smith's estimate of the late Walter White, as it appeared in her review-essay of his How Par the Promised Land? in the February...
...The challenge Is big...
...the higher values presuppose the lower values and are meaningless without them...
...It Is Just that, for the moment, they can contribute to the Grand Campaign only by cleaning up their own sector...
...Allen S. Olmsted, 2nd Media...
...He cannot in loyalty to his client condemn the action, yet he need not accept moral responsibility for it either...
...and that our de* votion to freedom of speech was our humble acknowledgement that we could be wrong about anything...
...But we have experienced the polite attention and courteous acquiescence of the Negro-under-the-hammer as we discuss what we are pleased to call the "larger issues...
...Mayer agrees with all this, in spite of the slip of his typewriter hand...
...But I do think he used dlverslonist tactics in his reply to my piece about Mr...
...White as a person...
...It is asking a great deal of leaders but leaders must give a great deal...
...Wilklns" letter is one with which I agree in large part...
...Now I happen to admire Roy Wilkins very much...
...White was, in a certain way, inref-lectually Immature, that is, when compared with a person like Dr...
...It must go on with its break-through operations...
...Every individual must decide for himself according to his own abilities how much time he will spend on any particular subject and how he will utilize it...
...I pointed out certain failings, certain philosophical deadends of Mr...
...At just about that time a Quaker group was filing a brief in the Supreme Court in defense of a Communist's right of free speech, and soon learned how the Communists misrepresented this action...
...Kempton, Lasch, and Mayer together were alone worth the price of the year's subscription...
...14, 1953...
...our actions must be grounded on knowledge in order to have any useful effect...
...and it is certainly true that many persons and many groups had a hand in it But much remains to be done...
...the justification of freedom of speech is that only in the process of the conflict of opinion do we make any advance in our knowledge—our reliable knowledge—concerning public affairs...
...A liberal is often asked to sign a manifesto stating a proposition in which he believes...
...Yet the hierarchy involved is like that of a pyramid...
...29, 1955...
...He was a pragmarist, not a dreamer, completely dedicated to ti* eradication of racial injustice...
...There may be some white people who considered him as such, but I know of no responsible Negro leader who did...
...KPFA didn't find it necessary to make a "formal rebuttal," or to have A. J. Muste on hand to "make a monkey" out of the Communist...
...No minister preaches against her exploitation...
...Communists, if permitted to exercise the right of free speech, will always be made monkeys of by their enti-Communist opponents...
...The day after the attack these people not only walked out on their comrades, but turned savagely against them...
...The Young Socialist League, an independent democratic socialist youth organization, which espouses the building of a socialist society in opposition to both the social systems and war camps of capitalism and totalitarian Stalinism, is not on the Attorney General's list of so-called "subversive" organizations, although its members have nonetheless been subject to witch-hunting attack...
...Mayer opines that "it was the first time In almost a decade that a real, live Communist . . . appeared on a non-Communist . . . platform in America...
...What does this failing consist of in terms of Miss Smith's evaluation...
...The men and women who have been denied ordinary courtesy day after day on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, or Jackson, Mississippi, are not yet concerned, except in a very special, personal way, with an open life for all people...
...Other People's Bananas' Dear Sirs: Milton Mayer is experiencing convulsions of conscience because, during the last ten years, he has not cooperated with the Communists...
...Her "Negroes in Gray Flannel Suits" represented a refreshing contrast to the automatic eulogies that flow from liberals misled into believing that it is somehow disloyal or harmful to criticize—creatively—organizations and leaders dedicated to noble causes...
...If there were any other way to know that our present beliefs are true—or to know which of them are true—the principle of freedom of speech would lose a great part of its justification...
...Lillian Smith Clayton, Ga...
...The station has entertained pacifists, vegetarians, Buddhists, and single-taxers...
...If I am to call myself a liberal and fancy that I have an open mind, I am bound to listen to opinions with which I disagree: I owe this duty to myself but do I owe it to the other fellow...
...Nehru, could not understand why in the fight for freedom from the British he felt that he had to start fighting Untouchability...
...Gene Marine San Francisco, Calif...
...Robert Schley Portland, Ore...
...Moon's letter distorts completely both meaning and intention of my review...
...She was given, she swears, $70.35...
...on a democratic platform in America...
...We have, also, still much work to do up North, especially in Exurbia...
...and that it will strive to meet these with all the wisdom it can muster, both from its own people within, and from friendly critics from without...
...Although I concede the duty—to myself—of reading and listening, I also claim the right not to read The Progressive, The Reporter, The New Republic, or The Nation—and that without so much as opening my pressure mail offering me their perennial bargains...
...What is the point of it...
...White was a "practical" politician instead of a Christian statesman...
...I, too, am deeply concerned with the black sharecropper and laborer in the South and with the poor white, also...
...Johnson: "The book nowhere suggests it, but the fact Is that much of the credit for the feat [progress of the Negro] belongs to the author...
...Abner Berry, an associate editor of the Daily Worker, spoke on Jan...
...No one knew better than Gandhi that to win a fight you have to make it world-size...
...For this time and for some time to come no organization that fails to make this problem No...
...I had the privilege of being a regular commentator on KPFA for over two years, and during that time several Communists—real, live Communists, complete with horns and hooves—were granted freedom of speech over the KPFA microphone...
...In other words, Mr...
...The YSL was founded two years ago from a merger of the Young Peoples Socialist League (YPSL) and Socialist Youth League (SYL...
...in the February Progressive, will have to be her own, but I would like to comment on her critical appraisal of the single-purpose crusading of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People...
...When a half dozen fakirs have "read your mind" and you have figured out pretty well what the trick is, have you any obligation toward the seventh mind reader who approaches you to listen to him also...
...So he relates the history of the disease and what has been done to date to wipe it out He concentrates on his chosen disease and does not attempt to write a materia medics or to tell the complete story of man's battle against a great host of other Ills...
...nor would liberal publications like The Progressive have any important function...
...But throughout the years, the Association and its late executive secretary, as well as other board and staff personnel, have adhered to the original purpose of the organization, namely, the leveling of all the artificial barriers which separate one American from another on the irrelevant basis of race...
...and throughout the darkest days of Mc-Carthyism, KPFA's microphone has always been open to anyone who thought he had something to say...
...Man in a Hurry Dear Sirs: I was a school-mate of Walter White at Atlanta University in our undergraduate days and knew him well from those days to his death...
...We have often spoken on the same platform...
...Civilized men progressively have placed greater emphasis upon the more abstract human values and have tended to minimize, at least theoretically, those values that relate to the specific and the concrete...
...But, also, he wanted other Negroes, according to their individual talents and merit, to be free to clothe themselves to the appropriate garb for their callings...
...White knew that their methods were Christian...
...I feel sure Mr...
...Intelligent person...
...As I say, I can hardly disagree with Mr...
...This is fa-miliar practice for a lawyer...
...entry into the war had been supported, and in some cases partly manned, by Communists...
...and, after repaying loans at eight per cent interest, was entitled to some $1,300 as her share of twenty-one bales of cotton...
...Max Martin National Secretary Young Socialist League 114 West Hth St...
...They belong, In a very real sense, to their people...
...Mayer to thitf extent: When I find it appropriate to defeat...
...This is normal, not exceptional, procedure with them...
...He listens, but he always returns to his problem vis-a-vis the white man...
...1955...
...Much of the pressure against the NAACP today is due to the pering going on between northern Exurbanltes and Southern industrial promoters and politicians...
...She cannot vote...
...For how can one fight for the freedom of ideas (except obliquely) until he is free physically...
...Admittedly, her essay h not a review of Mr...
...As a matter of fact, the NAACP has long been concerned with problems of human justice which extend far beyond the color line...
...Walter White gave frequent expression to this concern...
...White did not attempt to cover the complete area of race relations...
...Mayer's knowledge does not go as far as he thinks...
...I had only one reason for doing this: I want the NAACP to live, and to live It must grow, and to grow it most shake off certain small identifications, certain trivial enmities which I honestly think Mr...
...but let the words they ask others to listen to be, like the words of their own mouths, acceptable to their own beliefs and consciences...
...Lending such aid as it can from time to time in the overall struggle, it will be forced to expend its energies and talents principally in behalf of its own people...
...The article may have left a confused impression regarding the socialist youth organizations involved in the Harvey case...
...and while their leaders have some freedom in altering courses and shaping principles and action programs, that freedom does not approach the latitude available to the unattached ponderer...
...It is to indicate merely that he specialized In the field which to him was el paramount importance...
...The day before the attack many groups opposed to U.S...
...The NAACP should remember that human relations are not their cause only but everyone's cause...
...White was in a hurry, and he saw that the Promised Land could be reached much more quickly by changing laws...
...This listing is now being contested by the Independent Socialist League (whose youth group the SYL was) in its own fight to be removed from the list...
...I own to the persuasion that If anti-Communists could In all cases make mon- keys out of Communists—or if, in other words...
...they are not merchants of soap boxes but consumers thereof, If they think a particular message is worth listening to, let them listen...
...True it is that the back of resistance has been broken...
...He knew that about two thousand years ago Christ told Nico-demus that the way to the "Promised Land" was for him and other individuals to be "born again," but Mr...
...I have before me an affidavit from a woman in a Mississippi county who made a crop "on halves" in 1955, not 1915...
...The Messrs...
...W. E. B. DuBois, but so is Miss Smith when compared with an intellectual giant...
...Mr...
...Freedom of speech, like freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, has its justification in the fact that the body of available knowledge increases only when every possible variation of belief, including Communist belief, has been fully considered and digested...
...Almost every liberal has seen some organization infiltrated and subverted by Communists...
...Some of his associates, among them Mr...
...They have a lot they agree about...
...It should be pointed out, though, that the FOR meeting in Philadelphia, at which a Communist spoke, wasn't the rebirth of free speech in America by a long shot...
...The final purpose of all the "thought control" measures—the destruction of the freedom of speech of those who disagree with us radically, the Communist witch-hunt, the disloyalty agitation which is a thinly disguised effort to stamp out all non-conformity, the investigations of "un-American" activities...
...But to label it "the rebirth of free speech in America" is hardly fair to the courageous and determined staff of KPFA, who never let it die in the first place...
...I feel that your readers at home and abroad, deeply concerned as we are over the abrogations of free speech noted by Mr...
...He is under no obligation to listen to any particular speaker or point of view, far less to give that point of view a platform...
...The tens of thousands of domestic servants, underpaid and at the social and economic mercy of white-thinking, white-acting employers, must think in black-white terms, not world-wide terms...
...To this end Walter White dedicated his work and his life...
...This, I agree, is a legitimate criticism, but it must be remembered that Mr...
...Miss Smith has outgrown her gray flannel suit and wishes to clothe herself now in the spiritual fabric of Intellectual and moral maturity...
...Asa H. Gordon Livingstone College Salisbury, N. C. Pyramid of Values Dear Sirs: Miss Lillian Smith's February issue criticism of Walter White and NAACP goals is high-minded but unjust...
...Indeed, it has just begun...
...On a recent panel, for instance, I appeared with, among others, a man who was a sure-enough real, live Communist—a writer for the Daily People's World, San Francisco's Communist newspaper—but on the program, he was simply announced by name, and allowed to express his opinions without having them prejudiced in advance by the application of an unpopular label...
...Controversy is the life of the mind, and any policy that tends to stifle it promotes that intellectual stagnation John Stuart MlU speaks of as the "real ultimate danger of democracy...
...Wbite'i last volume, Ho...
...and Joseph Starobin, formerly foreign correspondent for the Daily Worker, on Nov...
...Mayer nor minimize the importance of the Philadelphia meeting...
...If she could, she could never get a judgment from either a county Judge or a county jury...
...Throughout the volume he has given recognition to many individuals and organizations who have joined with the NAACP in the fight for human equality...
...If I prefer a seed catalog or a hand of bridge I infringe no right of theirs...
...he knew that freedom concerns all of a man and it concerns all men and one has to probe deep down and high up if one wants to achieve it...
...She cannot get a lawyer to bring suit...
...Mayer raises, but is apparently unaware that he has raised, an issue which has occurred to many of us: the extent to which freedom of speech implies an obligation to listen...
...Praise for Lillian Smith Dear Sirs: Thanks for giving us Lillian Smith's magnificent analysis of Walter White and the NAACP in the February issue...
...In the early part of her essay in your February issue Miss Smith says that Mr-White was often considered his race's "greatest leader...
...Must I subscribe to all of the magazines which assure me they are a "must" for liberals...
...Mr...
...Radio Station KPFA, in Berkeley, Calif., has an audience of thousands...
...White was guilty of...
...Rosamond E. Rice Madison, Wis...
...The latter was erroneously and without a hearing of any kind listed by the Justice Department...
...Miss Smith indicts him for "moral and intellectual immaturity...
...Mayer remember when Hitler attacked Russia...
...Alma Bradley Chicago, Ill...
...I have In all our work found him a shrewd...
...White's limitations as a leader...
...For some time I had as a fellow commentator L. Brent Bozell, the McCarthy apologist...
...he is often put in the position of defending the action of a client in which he would not himself indulge...
...The Philadelphia meeting had 375 in attendance...
...White failed to give due credit to certain Individuals and organizations, especially those of the South, who labored along with the NAACP toward the "Promised Land...
...I feel I probably understood him a little better than Lillian Smith seems to have understood him and his objectives in working toward "the Promised Land...
...He knows full well that neither the complete cure nor the preventive has yet been discovered by scientists...
...Purpose of Suppression Dear Sirs: My congratulations on the January issue...
...He believed in America, even recognizing its imperfections not only in the area of race relations but in other areas...
...Her tragedy is not news in the papers of her county...
...To recognize that he devoted his exceptional talents to this end is not to say that he was unaware of or Indifferent to other failings...
...It requires greatness of its leaders...
...Surely we do not make it a precondition of our attachment to freedom of speech that our side win all of the arguments...
...Must he sign every such dotted line which is put before him, or does he have a moral right to say: I believe in this, but I don't want to sign the same document signed by Herbert Brownell, Joseph McCarthy, Norman Thomas, or Earl Browderf I grast you there are occasions when a man must be willing to stand up and be counted, but must he cooperate with every such census?' I will go along with Mr...
...One might agree that Mr...
...It is a criticism of Mr...
...The history of the NAACP in the school fight, first for schools, then for equal schools, and now for integrated schools, certainly suggests that NAACP will continue to struggle for new vistas in educational opportunity and intellectual freedom...
...New York, N. Y...
...It might seem, even to the informed (as Miss Smith most certainly is) that the campaign for the emancipation of a single minority is near its end...
...Miss Smith argues that Mr...
...This is the time for the NAACP to look hard at Itself, at its past (triumphs and failures) In order to meet the challenge of the future...
...But the station has gone even further in its protection of free speech...
...Of his own great part in it, someone will write some other day...
...Cornelius L. Golightlv Milwaukee, Wis...
...Why bite off so much, they asked him...
...The student of history understands very little of what has happened in America and the world in the past ten years who does not understand that the purpose, and the effect, of the suppression of freedom of speech is to destroy the processes of public information—to foist upon the American people false information upon subjects concerning which their decision and action can affect their own prosperity and survival and the peace of the world—that, indeed, an important part of the international hatreds, tension, and menace actually existing is the result of choices already made by the American people on the basis of such false Information...
...Socialist Youth May we offer belated congratulations to The Progressive for Milton Mayer's "The Case of Corporal Harvey's Grandfather" in your December issue...
...He lias devoted separate chapters to the role of the labor movement and the church in this fight...
...Certainly Miss Smith is free to make these criticisms and to place her own interpretations on what her subject did and failed to do...
...But the gray flannel suit as an intermediate goal is as necessary for the ultimate cloth of the spirit as Booker T. Washington's overalls were necessary for Walter White's gray flannel suit...
...Under the Mississippi system there is nothing, absolutely nothing, she can do except cry out— and that softly...
...And of course social and economic values are better than the values arising from the satisfaction of mere biological needs...
...There have been times when the Association has been reproached for not sticking exclusively to the civil rights issue...
...White gives high praise, and again rightly, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP), a truly American instrument dedicated to an American end...
...We have much work to do with Southern white college students, some of whom have been behaving so disgracefully...
...How many times do you have to be burned before you decide to keep away from fire...
...This policy was approved by a legislative investigating committee in 1953-54...
...Nor has he failed, as Miss Smith charges, to give generous credit to others...
...White believed that the methods of the Quakers, and others like them, including Miss Smith herself, were ineffective...
...It is the fragment of damaging truth in the Communist tirade that stings some men to fury...
...1 on the agenda, in the philosophy and in programs or action, can win and hold his allegiance and support...
...As he states in his final words: "What I have tried to do is analogous to the objective of a writer who tells the story of a long struggle against, say, tuberculosis or cancer...
...But what a surprise to see my favorite author, Milton Mayer, in so excellent an article, still find time to bend the knee to Baal—implying that the...
...Mayer should know better...
...Our people have their share of conformists, but there is more than a little evidence that we shall have, also, our share of fighters for freedom for all...
...Roy Wilkins Executive Secretary, NAACP New York, N. Y. In Defense of White Dear Sirs: I am frankly puzzled by Lillian Smith's comment on Walter White in your February issue...
...Miss Smith accuses Walter White of being American, which he was...
...Mayer, should know of the stand taken by the University in Senator McCarthy's own state of Wisconsin...
...Mr...
...The imperatives in the present situation of the Negro, admittedly greatly—even sensationally—improved over that of a short fifteen years ago, guarantee to all realists that the NAACP program lor some years to come must concern itself primarily with the plight of Negroes...
...Certainly he wlshrt to see those Negroes with the indicated skills and talents clothed la the "gray flannel suit...
...A cause, no matter how great, how good, shrinks to the size of its leaders...
...Boiled down to its essential* Miss Smith is grieved because Walter White failed, in her opinion, to give adequate credit to her own considerable contributions to improving race relations and to contributions by others and, secondly, because he was not a dreamer...
...The Negro must have a spokesman, a champion, who crusades for him until he is free in more than token numbers to concern himself with the plight of all men...
...I cannot do more than refer the reader to my original essay...
...This does not mean that the NAACP's projects must cover the earth: it means simply that the leaders' vision must cover the earth...
...I command only 24 hours a day...
...Organizations, too, like the FOR, have the right to peddle their own fruit without giving space in their stalls to other people's bananas...
...He points with pride to a platform provided by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and occupied by a Communist...
...It is not that these and millions of others do not realize, in vague or sharp fashion, that there is a larger battle that must be fought, that the things they suffer are part of a dark pattern that must be destroyed, that the color-line hurts are small, indeed, to the ravages of the spirit of man...
...White's...
...Henry Lee Moon Publicity Director NAACP New York, N. Y. Miss Smith Replies Dear Sirs: Mr...
...What she and her brothers and sisters need first of all is to be graduated to equal-ity-of-opportunity-to-become in America...
...She is alone, not simply because she is a poor and hapless peasant, kin to many other in Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America, but because she is black in a white society...
...Freedom in McCarthy's State Dear Sirs: Milton Mayer, in his January article, describes a public address made by a Communist in Philadelphia in October, 1955, and says, "As far as I know—and I know pretty far—it was the first time in almost a decade that a real live Communist . . . appeared...
...I myself have appeared, not only with Communists, but with spokesmen for the Socialist Workers' party, the Socialist Labor Party, and the Young Republicans...
...She also says that a long study of his life reveals him to be a person of "moral and intellectual immaturity...
...It is literally true that those who talk most about the superiority of the intellectual and spiritual values already possess the gross material values and have no intention of sacrificing them...
...Certainly I could never disagree with his central thesis—that almost all of us have been guilty of me-too-ism in the attacks on free speech, even when we were trying to defend it...
...For example, does Mr...
...I should suppose we would expect to lose some of the arguments...
...Organizations are situated differently from individual thinkers, philosophers, and crusaders...
...That they may become Negroes-ta-flannel suits, as envisaged by Miss Smith, is, of course, a possibility...
...The sharecroppers, small farmers, and farm laborers, their destiny and that of their loved ones under the almost absolute control of white-thinking landlords, are forced to react in color-line terms...
...Thus intellectual and moral values are considered better than civil and political values, just as the latter are considered better than social and economic values...
...Here at the University of Wisconsin three Communist speakers have appeared at the invitation of a student organization...
...It may be that he did not name the names that Miss Smith would have, but certainly Walter White was never unaware of the totality of the forces working to achieve the goal of a free America...
...I, too, think the work in race relations in this country is by no means finished...
...a Communist's right of free speech, I may dissociate myself from the opinions being uttered, but there is no need for casting-aspersions on those opinions...
...His good humor, his deep sense of justice, his never-falling courtesy, his clear understanding of the difference between "respectability and "dignity" are qualities I value...
...But Gandhi was wise...
...Beliefs we know are true constitute knowledge...
...we have both been attacked (together) by the Atlanta Constitution...
...Success can destroy an organization more easily than can failure...
...KPFA's Free Microphone Dear Sirs: Milton Mayer's "Guilt by Dissociation," in your January issue, is a most effective indictment of the McCarthyite within each of us...
...tiie spy scares—the final purpose of all these is to manage and control the action of the American people, not necessarily for the people's welfare or safety...
...Communist propaganda contained not a single mustard seed of truth to leaven its mass of falsehood—nobody would ever put himself to the trouble and expense of preventing Communists from exercising freedom of speech...
...Joseph Clark, foreign editor of the Daily Worker, on Oct...
...Miss Smith knows the South very well...
...Insofar as I can speak for the NAACP Board of Directors and numerous local leaders throughout the country I would say that the Association is not unaware of the changing scene and the new tasks and challenges...
...The University of Wisconsin places no restrictions on freedom of speech or assembly beyond those established by federal or state law...
...For the roots go deep and sometimes a man's whole attitude toward life has to be changed in order to change his feelings about his body image...
...In quibbling about credit Miss Smith Is at odds with such reviewers as Gerald W. Johnson in the New York Times Sunday Book Section and Alan Paton in the New York Herald Tribune Sunday Book Review...
...President Edwin B. Fred, in a recent letter to the American Legion, has affirmed the University's belief that "faith in freedom, not fear of freedom, is the American heritage...
...She has the admiration and affection of Negroes there and elsewhere who know of her brilliant exposition of their cause and the cause of freedom...
...Neither they as individuals, nor the organization to which they belong, are under any obligation to help broadcast Communist propaganda...
...So I say it is nonsense for Milton Mayer or A. J. Muste to flagellate themselves for not having provided the Communists with r platform earlier...
...the staff had enough confidence in its listeners to presume that as they listened, they could do their own monkey-making wherever it seemed to be necessary...
...Paton: "Mr...
...I did not criticize the policies of the NAACP...
Vol. 20 • March 1956 • No. 3
