NEW WORLD A-COMING

...This is well-illustrated in The Angry Black South, a small volume written by six young Negro Southerners who were all involved in one way or another in the student movement for equal rights...

...It is purposeful, militant, angry...

...Negro Leadership in a Southern City by M. Elaine Burgess...

...M. Elaine Burgess' careful sociological study, Negro Leadership in a Southern City (called "Crescent City" and apparently Durham, North Carolina) also offers evidence of the changes now taking place in the attitude and behavior of American Negroes...

...Yet this process has not been abrupt, and the author concludes that Negro leadership in this rather unusual Southern city has been relatively stable on a variety of issues...

...Under his direction the Interracial Commission quickly became the outstanding organization in the South working for healthier race relations...

...4.50...

...He interprets the Negro revolt in America as "one of the non-white uprisings now sweep ing the world...

...Will's life and public service...

...This is not to say that Negro leaders are primarily responsible for the quickening pace of change in American race relations, important as their contributions to this progress have been, nor is it to deny the great value of the leadership provided by those men and women, Negro and white, who in earlier years fought step by step for the realization of goals that by today's standards appear extraordinarily limited...

...The book has the great merit of capturing the spirit of the man...

...It is, as Alexander Heard says in the Foreword, "a sophisticated kind of edited sketchbook from memory—the memories of a great many people, the most important of them being the subject himself...

...When one thinks of race relations in the modern South and hopes for a better day, he is likely to think of Will Winton Alexander, for more than thirty years the outstanding white champion of Negro rights in the region...

...The Negro Revolt will provoke a good deal of controversy...

...Yet there is no mistaking the new mood among American Negroes...

...University of Chicago Press...

...The author is especially critical of the NAACP which, he contends, lacks rapport with the Negro masses and has consistently failed to provide positive leadership in initiating or giving concrete support to various mass action movements and demonstrations...

...But one can scarcely deny the existence of a new mood of impatience and boldness among American Negroes or the importance of this revolt in the campaign for equal rights...

...The Negro Revolt, by Louis E. Lomax...

...159 pp...

...An Ozark farm boy who attended Vanderbilt University and served as a Methodist minister in Middle Tennessee during the years just prior to World War I, Will Alexander was instrumental in organizing the Commission on Interracial Cooperation early in 1919...

...This is a major theme of Louis E. Lomax's new book, The Negro Revolt...

...He was always the "propagandist by deed," and as Dykeman and Stokely say: "Many of the constructive ideas, the useful groups, the influential voices of reason in the South today are the harvest of an earlier seedtime in which Alexander was influential beyond any statistical accounting...

...The Angry Black South, edited by Glenford E. Mitchell and William H. Peace, III, Corinth Books...

...His main contribution is his treatment of these recent events and his interpretation of their larger meaning...

...The authors speak candidly and intelligently about various aspects of the Negro's struggle for equal rights in the South...

...Lomax is a good reporter, and he demonstrates a keen understanding of the dynamics of groups as diverse as the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Black Muslims...

...271 pp...

...Miss Burgess finds that a significant change has been taking place in the character of Crescent City's Negro leadership, especially since 1954...

...Seeds of Southern Change: The Life of Will Alexander, by Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely...

...rather it is a warm and sympathetic account of Dr...

...it is also a revolt of the Negro masses against their own leadership and goals, informed by a deepening doubt and disillusionment and a declining faith in legalism as a weapon of social change...

...But it is apparent that more and more American Negroes are unwilling to postpone the day when they can experience the reality as well as the promise of our democratic traditions...

...On the other hand, Lomax is more hopeful about the Urban League and the Congress of Racial Equality, which he calls "the boldest and most imaginative organization in the civil rights field...

...343 pp...

...University of North Carolina Press...

...Unprepossessing in appearance, modest, and genial, Will Alexander was a man of courage and devotion, a skillful tactician in the battle for social justice, and perhaps the finest example of Southern liberalism in his day...

...His interest in rural relief brought him into the New Deal, first as assistant administrator of the Resettlement Administration and subsequently as administrator of the Farm Security Administration...

...Indeed, the opportunities for greater progress in civil rights and the implementation of the nation's democratic ideals rest in no small measure upon the slowly-changing attitudes and the step-by-step accomplishments of those civil rights pioneers of yesteryear...

...He portrays it as being in the position of the oddly dressed man who said to a bystander, "Please tell me which way the parade went...

...The author, a sociologist at the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina, analyzes the institutions and social structure of the Negro subcommunity in this Piedmont city, identifies the Negro power leaders, and studies the process of policy-formulation and decisionmaking in a number of cases involving both the subcommunity and the community as a whole...

...Lomax probably underestimates the significance of the work done, by the established Negro leadership and by other civil rights champions in earlier years, and he may exaggerate the extent of their imperviousness to new ideas and techniques...

...I^ven a casual examination of re-cent writings on race relations in the United States should convince the skeptical observer of the struggle for civil rights that a new and more militant Negro leadership is turning the old Fabianism upside down...

...after all, I'm leading it...

...The book is not scholarly in the narrowly academic sense, though it is based on extensive research...

...Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely, whose perceptive books and articles have done so much to illuminate the present South, have now written a biography of this remarkable man...

...She also presents revealing evidence that lines of communication within the sub-community and between the subcommunity and the community at large have not been as attenuated as in many other cities below the Potomac...

...While they are less direct than Louis Lomax in their criticism of the older Negro leadership, their essays reflect the new spirit of dedication, optimism, and self-awareness among Southern Negroes...

...How effective this challenge will be is not clear, since much will depend upon the response of the Negro rank-and-file and the reaction of the older Negro organizations...

...5.95...

...This revolt, he says, is more than a rebellion against the white world...

...Although she does not concentrate on the desegregation problem, her findings emphasize, in contrast to one of Lomax's theses, the enormous importance of the school desegregation decision in all areas of the Negro's quest for equality, and she uses the decisions associated with the broad issue of desegregation as a window from which to view leadership and power in action...

...Lomax's views are perhaps more ambivalent than he realizes, but there is no doubt about his indictment of the older Negro leadership...

...Will also contributed substantially to the strengthening of Negro colleges in the South and to the work of the Rosenwald Fund...

...He worked on minority problems during both world wars and remained, until his death in 1956, vitally interested in many causes and organizations...

...It is increasingly impatient with the well-meaning but moderate programs of many white liberals, and it has challenged the established Negro leadership...

...The conservative and more moderate leaders have largely lost out to the liberals (but not to the radicals), and it is significant that white leaders in the city are now prepared to negotiate with these newer leaders, even though many whites find the attitudes of the old-time Negro leaders more to their liking...

...The more flexible class structure within the minority community and the changing character of its leadership suggest some of the happier auguries in the pattern of race relations in the urban South...

...231 pp...

...Thus the economic boycotts, the sit-ins, and the freedom rides represent a movement against both segregation and entrenched Negro leadership...

...The essays also give us some notion of how it feels to be a young Negro in America...

...1.25...

...Harper...

...Until it was superseded by the Southern Regional Council in 1944, the Commission waged relentless war against such evils as the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, and police brutality...

...Lomax, a talented young Negro writer, has taken a sharp look at Negro leaders and organizations in action, with particular attention to developments since the Montgomery bus boycott, which the author sees as the beginning of the Negro revolt...

...It also gets at the heart of the pain and poverty and frustration in the South during the last forty years...

...Although Lomax devotes the first part of his book to an effort to give the Negro revolt some historical perspective ("A Negro View of American History"), he is not, I think, notably successful in analyzing the historical forces that finally converged to produce the events of the Fifties and early Sixties...