The North Is Next
PROGRESSIVE 'Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" The North Is Next "President Kennedy's decision to sponsor—and, hopefully, even to fight for—long overdue civil rights...
...The North's time is coming...
...This, he asserted, "is not a sectional issue...
...Its provisions in the field of school desegregation are not nearly so comprehensive as liberals had urged...
...In many of the great metropolitan centers unemployment among Negroes is two or three times that of the white population, Negro families are stuffed into intolerable ghettos for which they often pay exorbitant rents just to have a roof and cold water, and Negro children are packed into inferior schools that are nearly as segregated as those of the South...
...The news spectaculars Northerners read in their newspapers and see on television will bear closer-to-home datelines next month or the month after—Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Boston, Los Angeles, and Seattle—unless cities and states, and most important of all, citizens, look inward instead of always southward for the big story on race relations...
...The same deadly pattern prevails in most of the cities of the North...
...PROGRESSIVE 'Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" The North Is Next "President Kennedy's decision to sponsor—and, hopefully, even to fight for—long overdue civil rights legislation represents a heartening departure from past policy...
...Legislation, of course, will not of itself resolve the struggle or bring equality to the Negro...
...It was inevitable, given the dramatic power of developments in Dixie, that national attention would be focused, as it was during the past month or more, on the crisis in the South alone...
...In contrast to the cool summons to law and order that had characterized most of his previous utterances on race relations, Mr...
...We agree with the President that "law alone cannot make men see right" and that "it is time to act—in all our daily lives...
...Residential segregation is increasing rather than diminishing...
...Take Chicago, for example: f Unemployment among Negroes is three times the white rate, and is worse than it was in the bitter depths of the great depression...
...Kennedy appealed this time to the conscience of the country as he emphasized the moral nature of the crisis...
...Confronted with mounting crises that threatened to run out of control and explode in revolution, Mr...
...f Ninety per cent of Chicago's public school pupils attend all-white or all-Negro schools—a ratio not greatly different from that of many cities in the South...
...The facts in scores of cities confirm this melancholy judgment...
...Kennedy sent Congress a package of civil rights bills that would go part way toward providing Negroes with something resembling equality of opportunity on this 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation...
...It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution...
...Despite the shrieks of protest from Southern demagogues and Northern tories, the President's program was a moderate compromise, which did not measure up to the promise expressed in his landmark speech to the nation the night of the crisis at the University of Alabama...
...President Kennedy touched on this critical aspect of the overall problem in his address to the nation, but his words did not command the attention they deserved...
...The Chicago tragedy is not unique...
...The President's failure to include FEPC legislation as part of his own package strikes us as a tragic omission, for unemployment among Negroes, which is increasing rather than declining, lies at the very heart of the crisis in race relations...
...But another explosion— fed by the same fires of frustration—was in the making in the North, where the immensity of the unfinished task rivaled that of the South...
...His strategy in endorsing the FEPC bill now pending in Congress, instead of making it the core of his own program, strikes us as rather more politically clever than morally courageous...
...It does not include Fair Employment Practices (FEPC) legislation as part of the Administration's own package...
...In forceful language he had asserted that the time has come "for the nation to fulfill its commitment to the Negro after 100 years of delay...
...Difficulties over segregation and discrimination exist in every city, in every state of the Union, producing in many cities a rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety...
...2) empower the Attorney General to file suits in Federal courts on behalf of Negro students seeking admission to all-white schools...
...This is a problem," he warned, "which faces us all in every city of the North as well as the South...
...The President's decision to seek as wide a range of voluntary action through conferences with educators, labor leaders, lawyers, and clergymen was all to the good...
...But voluntary action does not obviate the need for strong legislation...
...The President's legislative program —for all its omissions—constituted a step in the right direction and clearly proposed to go farther and faster than the President planned until events forced his hand...
...Kennedy's half-a-loaf program was all the more disappointing because he had sounded, in his address to the nation, like a man aroused, a leader committed to bringing moral passion and political power to the struggle ahead...
...Rural Republicans and Milwaukee Democrats recently joined forces in the state legislature to kill a modest attempt to provide a modicum of relief to Negroes vainly hunting for decent housing...
...We are confronted primarily with a moral issue," he said...
...f About ninety-two per cent of Chicago's Negroes live in segregated ghettos, creating a pattern of segregation that equals those of Atlanta and Birmingham...
...More constructive and far-sighted was the President's proposal to seek alleviation of unemployment among Negroes by broadening the Federal Manpower Development and Training Program, expanding the pending youth employment bill, and passage of legislation to spur vocational education, among other steps...
...3) strengthen the Negro's right to vote, and 4) grant permanent legal status to the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunities...
...Legislatures are slow to act, law enforcement officials loath to execute such laws as there are, and the general populace bemused by what is happening in the South but indifferent to the crisis smoldering in its own back yard...
...It fails to expand adequately the power of the Attorney General to bring legal action against all forms of unlawful discrimination...
...The once progressive state of Wisconsin is not untypical...
...Law can go a long way toward making most men act right, and law can be decisive in building the legal foundations of integration and providing Negroes with the peaceful weapons they need to fight 'their way to the freedom they were promised a century ago...
...Its principal provisions would 1) "guarantee all citizens equal access to the services and facilities of hotels, restaurants, places of amusement, and retail establishments...
Vol. 27 • July 1963 • No. 7
