The Great Urgency'

...The argument is that this is not "preferential" treatment in relation to whites, but a moral obligation of the nation to equalize chances for Negroes, to compensate for centuries of inequality...

...In retelling the Albany story, which the nation has indeed stubbornly refused to comprehend, he presents the case against such national failures as the demand merely for an absence of widespread violence, rather than for protection of fundamental American rights...

...Out of this, Young argues his and the Urban League's program for a special effort, a domestic Marshall Plan, to help all Negroes in all these areas of deprivation...

...White Southerners are only human, he assures us, with normal physical and psychological needs and processes...

...Certainly this should be discussed in relation to the Zinn recommendation for a separate Federal police force to safeguard civil rights...

...Indeed, the history of the racial revolution in the South has been one of manipulating their priorities, forcing them to choose between segregation and things they want or need more...

...Zinn tells these truths with grace and sensitivity...

...And one wishes that both writers had acknowledged that with the inevitable deeper involvement of the Federal government that they recommend, will come the need for new safeguards against misuse of power...

...Zinn is a white history professor who has been part of the Negro community in the South...

...It is the layer of problems and cruelties beneath that of raw violence to which Whitney Young addresses himself: the nationwide need for reform in employment, education, housing, welfare, health services, and human dealings for Negroes...

...The day of playing by ear in intergroup relations is over, and "intelligent, scientific planning can and must replace hit-or-miss action," Young tells us, ignoring the point that hit-or-miss action grew in part out of the failure over many long years of social science to translate plans into reality...

...These are writers who know the problems from their respective disciplines and from living experience...

...In contending that racism, violence, hypocritical piety, xenophobia, falseness in the elevation of women, nationalism, conservatism, and extreme poverty amidst ostentatious wealth are American, not singularly Southern characteristics, Zinn endeavors to break through the mysticism and romance which, he says, make the South seem unchangeable on race...

...The rest of the nation, Zinn says in another section, shows its susceptibility to the Southern mystique, and involvement in its guilt, by the way it reacts to such a situation as the racial demonstrations of 1961 and 1962 in Albany, Georgia...

...The areas where this psychological nightmare is the daily reality is diminished in the South, however...

...Both have participated in the recent history of the nation's racial struggle, and both speak out of the new insights and the great urgency which have emerged from the past two years of that struggle...

...Reviewed by Pat Waiters Tn The Southern Mystique, Howard Zinn argues that the South is not mysteriously different from the rest of the nation but merely exaggerates intrinsic national faults, attention to which could help save the nation...

...This is an impressive compilation of pertinent facts and statistics on all phases of Negro deprivation...

...From such data, Young faces facts which cause many white liberals to flee and white moderates to relapse into racism —the disadvantage at which the actual condition of many lower class Negroes places them when confronted with theoretical equality of opportunity...

...In To Be Equal, Whitney Young describes exhaustively the specific national failings which bar Negroes from citizenship, North and South, and offers a formidable program of reforms...

...One wishes that Zinn had explored some of the flavor that is good in the Southern mystique, and worthy of retaining in an era of bland-ness...

...Negroes, despite still other myths, are also more like all other human beings than they are different from them...

...But it is surprising that one of his temperament does not discuss the dangers inherent in this methodology for changing the thoughts and beliefs of men...

...Unlike many, they deal with the real pathology of the causes, not merely the symptoms...

...Post-Freudian social psychology" is hailed by Zinn as the methodological answer to most evils of the Southern psyche...

...Young, a social worker, is executive director of the National Urban League and is a Negro...

...But these are books directed at the immediate emergency of a serious sickness...

...In each, there is a happy view of social science that is hard to reconcile...

...One wishes that Young had explored more fully the implications of his program for all of society—the whites who also have some moral claim to reclamation, and the need to end unemployment, the real threat to the heart of his program...

...On particular points, the Zinn and Young books raise doubts...

...This is easy to say, but the only way to know it emotionally is through sustained, day-in and year-out, normal association with Negroes, and tragically few Americans have this experience...

...A man from an unstable slum home, with inadequate education and no vocational training, with physical ailments and psychological scars, most particularly those of prejudice, is not going to become, overnight, by decree, as well qualified as a man from a more fortunate background...

...In treating the equally appalling national acquiescence in Southern racial violence itself, he communicates, as few have even attempted to do, the psychological nightmare of those, alone and unprotected, who fight for rights where the local society opposes them...

...There is much in them pertinent to healing...

...In response to human requirements they will change their racial behavior and attitudes...

...For each, he gives the sad statistics and describes what is being done, with whatever hopeful overtones there might be, and then outlines what a great deal more must be done, with recommendations for specific action by individuals, organizations, business, and government, particularly the Federal government...