A CENTURY OF STRUGGLE

...Only when people themselves begin to act are rights on paper given life blood," Dr...

...I was shocked by your "black ghettos, which rival some of the worst slums in the world...

...And so we have in this special issue commemorating "A Century of Struggle...

...Let us remember that practically all of this progress has taken place in the short period of the last twenty years...

...But the mediocre record of the Eighty-seventh Congress dramatizes once again how weak is the premise of those in the Administration who believe that Dixiecrat members of Congress can be lured to support other social and economic reforms if the White House is relatively passive in the struggle against racism...

...The task, as this editorial and just about every article in this issue suggest, is barely begun...

...Read Lenin as he says, 'lying, deceit, and violence are justifiable means to bring about the end of a classless society.' This is where nonviolence breaks with Communism and any other method which contends that the end justifies the means...

...The worldwide revolution of rising expectations beats against our shores, with our twenty million second-class Negro citizens, just as it pounds against other fortresses of special privilege around the globe...

...In the courts, in bus terminals, in lunchrooms, and on countless picket lines across the country, Negro Americans, armed with song, prayer, and the law, have pressed ever more urgently against the barriers of racial discrimination...

...Kennedy, as the Chief Executive of this nation —and, incidentally, as a keen student of heroes in history—has a magnificent opportunity to respond to this time for greatness by taking command of the century-old struggle for genuine emancipation through the exercise of the great powers of his office...

...It would be a mistake, we hasten to add, to assume that the struggle to banish racial discrimination is a matter of purely domestic concern...

...Litigation has been somewhat more successful than legislation and executive leadership...

...Litigation and legislation remain two of the principal methods to achieve progress, but they have been greatly strengthened by the addition of a creative and powerful force—non-violent resistance to racial injustice...

...Legislation and court orders, he said, tend only to declare rights...

...And yet he might not have found his way to Gandhian non-violence if litigation and legislation and executive leadership had not failed him so repeatedly in his long and painful quest for equality under the law...

...Non-violent resistance also makes it possible for the individual to struggle to secure moral ends through moral means...

...Gunnar Myrdal, the celebrated Swedish scholar whose hard-hitting An American Dilemma, published nearly two decades ago, exercised a profound influence on significant sectors of American thought, including the United States Supreme Court...

...The stark fact persists that one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, forty-four years after the successful conclusion of the war to "make the world safe for democracy," seventeen years after the victory in the war to establish the Four Freedoms "everywhere in the world," and two years after the inauguration of an Administration pledged to the most far-reaching civil rights program in American history—after all these years and triumphs, the United States government, through its decisive impact on housing, employment, and education, remains the most powerful single force in the land perpetuating discrimination and segregation...

...Every American who has traveled abroad knows how relentlessly both friend and foe, white and colored, indict our continuing imprisonment of more than twenty million Negroes in a straitjacket of second-class citizenship...

...It has been, more than anything else, the proud and steadfast commitment of our Negro fellow citizens to the fulfillment of their rights that has brought about the extraordinary advances of these years...

...Let us remember, too, that most of the gains of the past two decades have been achieved by Negroes themselves, often with little or no help from and sometimes against the active resistance of their government...

...In his previously mentioned letter to this magazine, President Kennedy wrote, perhaps with a wry smile, that he was "sure . . . The Progressive will remind us that the task [the fulfillment of Negro rights] is not com-plete...

...Kennedy is a prisoner of the fragile coalition that constitutes the Democratic Party—a coalition whose dominating spokesmen are the Dixie-crat chairmen of the powerful committees in both houses of Congress...

...Albany, Georgia...

...they can never thoroughly deliver them...

...Recently, a visiting Asian journalist with considerable influence in his own country expressed deep appreciation of the work of our Peace Corps and our economic assistance to the hungry of half a hundred underprivileged nations...

...and at the same time it works on his conscience...

...As a consequence, it is estimated that at the present rate of integration, it would take another hundred years to achieve the mandate of the nation's highest tribunal...

...It was only in the recent housing order that he moved, belatedly, against one of the strongholds of segregation —and for this he deserves great credit...

...Non-violent resistance, he said, is effective in that "it has a way of disarming the opponent...

...The judiciary, notably the U.S...

...King emphasized...

...There is nothing more explosive on earth, we have been told, than an idea whose time has come—and it has come for us, here in what we like to think of as the land of the free, no less than for the rest of a world in revolution...

...it exposes his moral defenses...

...In our talks with peoples of other countries and other colors about race relations in the United States, we of The Progressive have sought to emphasize, even as we pleaded guilty to most counts in the general indictment, that after six decades of stagnation this country is moving forward, however modestly, toward a greater degree of integration than anyone would have thought possible a generation ago...

...and Cairo, Illinois...

...In all the vast arsenal of propaganda weapons fabricated by the Communists, none is so effective as the truth about race relations in the United States...

...Supreme Court, has shown a greater responsiveness to the Constitution, especially in requiring desegregation of public schools with "all deliberate speed...

...President Kennedy, in his letter to the Editor of The Progressive on Page 5 of this issue, acknowledges at least part of this fact of life when he writes that he hopes we "will give full credit to the Negro people themselves...

...We simply do not have that much time —or anywhere near it—for the hunger of the American Negro for first-class citizenship and the march of world events make decisive action imperative now...

...Those who are inclined to regard such a judgment as a compound of patriotism and wishful thinking might ponder the recent evaluation of Dr...

...it weakens his morale...

...Can't you spare something for your own underprivileged...

...We assert to the world our leadership of the forces seeking freedom and equality for all people, but our stature shrivels and our credentials are mocked as the newly-liberated colored millions of Asia and Africa devour and are dismayed by the news from Oxford, Mississippi...

...In a commencement address at Howard University last summer, Dr...

...The occasion is the one-hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Procla-mation, whose unredeemed promise, a century afterward, remains our most compelling challenge on the home front...

...To a considerable degree, of course, Mr...

...Measured against the performance of his predecessor, the President's record seems almost impressive...

...But begun it has, and Mr...

...But, he went on, "I have been to Harlem and to the black belt of Chicago, and I have traveled through your deep South...

...But neither Congress nor the President, whether Mr...

...Kennedy, has acted decisively to speed implementation of the Court's decision...

...Eisenhower or Mr...

...In no other area of American life does this profoundly ethical outlook prevail so deeply as in the Negro's struggle for equality...

...The "something" of which this Asian spoke, it turned out, was not a firmer footing on the relief rolls for the American Negro, but something resembling the individual dignity and equality of opportunity for which the United States is contending all over the rest of the world...

...The Kennedy Administration's record in the field of civil rights is not bad, but it is not nearly so good as it ought to be...

...Myrdal concluded: "There is still a long road to travel before America becomes the equalitarian country of its creed...

...The doctrine that the end justifies the means has been one of the greatest tragedies of Communism...

...But judged against his promises and the urgency of the challenge, the total yield strikes us as bitterly disappointing...

...The emphasis, it seems to us, has been to achieve token gains to serve as symbols of progress rather than to strike frontally at the institutionalized patterns of racial injustice...

...The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., recently summed up both the practical and moral power of this new instrument in the struggle for equality of opportunity...

...But in historical perspective the rapidity of progress is astonishing...