'NOT SO WILD A DREAM'
PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free' 'Not So Wild a Dream' Southern segregationists have predicted for years that when its moment of truth came, the North...
...We're fighting for freedom for the people of Vietnam, and our parents don't have it back home.' " The prime worry of the Negro soldiers, said Young, is about the future...
...But now the "race problem" has crossed the Mason-Dixon line and is encamped in the neighborhoods of the North...
...It is "right and reasonable," he said, "to suggest that the level of effort— financial and political and personal— which is here required is fully comparable to the effort we are now making as a nation in Vietnam...
...The war on poverty, whose principal beneficiaries are supposed to be the disadvantaged Negroes, is languishing for lack of funds and White House interest...
...They want something to come home to...
...The 1966 Civil Rights Bill proposed by the Johnson Administration contains several long-needed reforms, including provisions designed to reduce discrimination in the selection of Federal and state juries, broaden Federal laws against racial violence and intimidation, and authorize Federal court injunctions against anticipated violence or intimidation...
...In his report on what he found, he said: "They told me, 'It doesn't make sense for us to be over here being killed and the folks back home debating our right to buy a home in any neighborhood...
...As in the case of other critical domestic issues, the White House was too preoccupied with the war in Vietnam to provide leadership on the home front...
...Something to come home to" will not be found in the current efforts, so little and so late, by Congress and the Administration...
...As Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, put it, the bill as passed by the House will leave the suburbs "virtually lily-white," while the "center city ghettos will become poorer, blacker, and more desperate than at present...
...President Johnson deserves credit for proposing the original prohibition of all discrimination in housing, but once he introduced the measure, he made little or no fight for its passage...
...No Northern Congressman dared be quite so crude when the House of Representatives debated—at the very moment of the Chicago violence—the section of the Civil Rights Bill that proposed to prohibit discrimination in housing, North and South...
...I am not intolerant about Negroes —as long as they stay in their own neighborhoods," said a Chicago woman interviewed by newsmen as she cheered the cursing, kicking, rock-throwing whites who sought to break up a peaceful Negro march bent on dramatizing the urgent need for open occupancy in housing...
...In fact, U.S...
...The President believes we are meeting an appropriate amount of the needs of the poor at this time," said Shriver without his usual buoyancy...
...Young spent ten days in Vietnam, largely talking with Negro troops...
...Commissioner of Education Harold Howe noted recently that the nation's schools are "almost as segregated today as they were in 1954...
...Civil rights leaders inside and outside the House were dismayed by the Administration's failure to exert affirmative pressure when it was most needed...
...We have marched all over the South, but never before have I seen so many people with hatred in their faces and violence in their hearts...
...King's $10 billion by a substantial amount, since the Administration acknowledges it is spending $1 billion a month on Vietnam, and informed newsmen estimate that the total will be shown—after the November elections—to be double that amount...
...President Johnson is commander-in-chief of both wars—the war in Vietnam and the war on poverty and bigotry at home...
...The struggle for civil rights received another severe setback in the House when a coalition of Northerners and Southerners voted to render ineffective Title VI of the omnibus bill...
...The situation at home is so urgent, Bundy warned, that expenditures of this magnitude must be made even at the risk of worsening inflation and the balance of payments...
...It will take a massive change of mood in Congress and the country—and massive expenditures of money—to harness and bend to creative purpose the understandably sullen social revolution of the Negroes now sweeping across the country...
...I think that is a present danger...
...Most commentators dismissed the King proposal as a bit of dreamy idealism by an impractical clergyman...
...They have shown great valor in fighting for other people's freedom...
...In a memorable address last month Bundy called on the nation to pour as much money and effort into the struggle against racial inequality as it now spends on the war in Vietnam...
...King recognized this reality when he appealed recently for a domestic "Marshall Plan" costing $10 billion in each of the next ten years to wipe out the slums, the poverty, and the unequal educational opportunities that make second-class citizens of our colored people...
...I have never seen such hate—not in Mississippi or Alabama—as I see in Chicago," said the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in mid-August...
...The result is to exclude sixty to seventy per cent of all housing from the ban on discrimination...
...But Tom Wicker, chief of the Washington bureau of The New York Times, borrowing, without credit, the title of Eric Sevareid's autobiography, found it "not so wild a dream...
...The result is hysteria and violence in Chicago—and elsewhere in the North —and retreat and compromise in Congress...
...Asked if the United States could win the war in Vietnam and lose it at home, Shriver replied: "Yes...
...The Johnson Administration, tragically, is not thinking in these bold and creative terms...
...Sargent Shriver, head of the anti-poverty program, is usually quick to defend its scope, but he seemed somberly restrained recently when questioned about the need for a greatly enlarged effort...
...This would exceed Dr...
...King was struck on the head by a rock and jeered and cursed by Northern middle-class whites as he led one of a number of demonstrations protesting the imprisonment of a million Chicago Negroes in wretched ghettos which symbolize their desperate and hopeless plight in the richest nation on earth...
...School integration, required by the U.S...
...The votes cast by these Congressmen—if the mischief is not corrected by the Senate—may sow new disorders in the cities because if Negroes cannot escape the ghetto for lack of open housing, as congestion grows worse the voices of violence among Negroes will be more and more heeded—¦ rather than a Martin Luther King and other voices of reason...
...The extent to which Negro GI's in Vietnam are looking over their shoulders at the news from home was emphasized last month by Whitney Young, Jr., the moderate executive director of the moderate Urban League...
...He has asserted repeatedly that we will spend "whatever is necessary" to secure the freedom and independence of South Vietnam— 10,000 miles from our shores...
...In effect, the amendments would perpetuate the most pressing aspect of housing discrimination—the inability of Negroes to break out of ghettos into middle-income urban and suburban housing...
...On the contrary, it is pulling back from its earlier modest commitments to banish racial injustice and poverty from the land...
...It would seem to be at least as important—and in our judgment many times more so —to provide the money and the means for more than twenty million American citizens to achieve their freedom and independence right here at home...
...For years a significant segment of the populace of the North has soothed its conscience by supporting legislation designed to strike at discrimination in the South...
...These sections are aimed largely at conditions in the South...
...Among the more interested readers of the news of Congressional retreat on civil rights legislation were the 60,000 Negroes we have sent to Vietnam to "preserve freedom" there...
...From the very beginning the White House made it clear it would be amenable to compromise...
...This section would have permitted the Attorney General to file school desegregation lawsuits without waiting for a written request to do so by citizens in the school district involved...
...Developments during the past month tend to confirm that melancholy prophecy...
...according to official records, 18.3 per cent of the Army's combat dead in Vietnam have been Negroes, although the Negro population in the United States is only eleven per cent of the total...
...PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free' 'Not So Wild a Dream' Southern segregationists have predicted for years that when its moment of truth came, the North would oppose racial equality as bitterly as the South has—only with more humbug and hypocrisy...
...And so did so practical and hard-boiled a non-dreamer as McGeorge Bundy, head of the Ford Foundation and former chief foreign policy aide to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson...
...Despite this testimony by the country's top educational official, 214 members of the House voted against a modest effort to strengthen the enforcement machinery while 201 voted for it...
...It took little courage and less soul-searching to adopt resolutions indicting Southern intolerence...
...But even this faltering step forward is in danger in the Senate where a coalition of Southern racists, Dirksen Republicans, and timid Northern Democrats seems poised to deny the Negroes this pitifully meager beginning—more than a century after the end of the Civil War...
...But too many Northern Congressmen, including some who regard themselves as liberals, embraced much the same position as the Chicago woman when they voted to weaken greatly the provision to bar housing segregation...
...Among Northern Representatives who retreated were some who sought to justify their action by pointing, publicly or privately, to the rioting carried on in some cities by a minority of Negroes, particularly unemployed youths...
...The heart of the bill, however, and the section directed at both the North and the South, is Title IV, which originally proposed to prohibit racial discrimination in the sale or rental of all housing...
...Too often under the present law, Negroes who have dared make the written request have encountered costly reprisals from the bigoted white community...
...Although President Johnson urged this long-needed reform on Congress, his leadership in the House wobbled and weaseled from the beginning...
...In the end it accepted, without a fight, amendments which permit continued discrimination in the sale or rental of individually-owned homes and apartment houses with four or fewer units...
...I feel we have accomplished very little thus far...
...Supreme Court's landmark decision in 1954, has moved with glacial deliberation in the twelve years that have followed...
Vol. 30 • September 1966 • No. 9
