Roads to Freedom
Zinn, Howard
Roads to Freedom Freedom—When? by James Farmer. Random House. 197 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Howard Zinn T^he special style of James Farmer's leadership in the civil rights movement is already...
...exhibits these qualities...
...In late 1964, Farmer visited some of the new African states, and his swift-paced chapter describing this trip is one of his best...
...Farmer reveals in this section of the book a vital quality of democratic leadership: the recognition that it is the people at the center of trouble who have the right to decide their own tactics...
...How nonviolent can we be...
...When Farmer thinks it a good idea for Hubert Humphrey to tour Africa "to reestablish the emotional ties of Africans with America," he forgets how swiftly a man's progressivism dissipates when he gets close to the center of national power, and also underestimates the Africans' ability to size up both Humphrey and America...
...This is not a history of the movement, nor a memoir of Farmer's own experiences as the leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE...
...there is the willingness to plunge into the field, even to jail, and then to emerge intact and orderly, patiently analyzing the action...
...Reviewed by Howard Zinn T^he special style of James Farmer's leadership in the civil rights movement is already known: There is passion, sober and controlled...
...Farmer sees a new stage has been reached, where the web of legal restrictions is being lifted only to find the mass of Negroes (and many whites) mired in poverty...
...He is forthright in his criticism of American policy in Africa, and his description of the Congo's Tshombe is classic: "Tshombe reminded me most of some presidents I have known of Southern Negro colleges—tough, skillful, with the balance of a gyroscope...
...To attack this, much more than demonstrations will be needed...
...I would take issue with a few points...
...And yet, demonstrations must continue, as ways of focusing popular energies against the joints of the structure of power...
...The sky will not fall if we make a few mistakes...
...Humphrey's brutal approach to the war in Vietnam should end that notion...
...sophisticated, prolonged, deep-reaching social surgery is required to redistribute wealth in the United States...
...He does not hesitate to buck the high priests of the civil rights movement, as, for instance, in CORE's rejection of the proposed pre-election moratorium on demonstrations in 1964, or in his support of the Freedom Democratic Party's refusal to accept the Johnson-Humphrey "deal" at the Democratic Convention that year...
...the traditional mechanisms of party politics and voting are useful for the declaration of moderate middle-class predilections, but not for expressing those emotions felt at the lower levels of the social order and now expiated in violence, alienation, fantasy...
...It is (after an exciting opening narrative of police viciousness in Plaquemine, Louisiana in the summer of 1963) a terse, direct, lucid discussion of some of the crucial problems troubling the movement...
...Those who talk of "coalition politics" as a replacement for demonstrative tactics are naive...
...These criticisms aside, James Farmer, an admirable man, has written a sensible and courageous guide for the civil rights movement today...
...Do we bear some special responsibility to Africa...
...How fully-integrated a society can we have...
...He also manages to capture, with skill and candor, the complicated feeling a Negro has when he asserts his pride in his blackness, his culture, his past—while rejecting racism...
...This might be a good place to point out that Farmer's own hesitation to have CORE speak out on Vietnam is not consistent either with his general preference for principle over diplomacy or with his faith in rank-and-file decisions...
...Farmer espouses non-violence without raising it to an absolute...
...We stand astride fierce and ambiguous energies, some noble, some not, and will seek to channel them, but we will not renounce them...
...We hold impatience a virtue, and will not be quickly satisfied...
...there is a cool, thoughtful militance...
...To me, the book's great merit is in Farmer's ability to make his way unerringly through each of these complex issues to a position which is strong, even radical, and yet free from simplistic demagoguery...
...What lies beyond civil rights in the struggle against privilege...
...Like them, I thought, Tshombe knows how to keep black folk in their place...
...It is rather as if he were sitting in a living room, answering the kinds of questions people ask today: Have demonstrations outlived their usefulness...
...generally speaking, I have let our lovely amateurs have their heads...
...His book Freedom—When...
...A good example of this is his discussion of ". . . but when will the demonstrations end...
...Is there a place in the movement for both black nationalists and white liberals...
Vol. 30 • May 1966 • No. 5
