Public Affairs; Professor H. Pfautl

If you look at the published reactions on the part of most government officials at all levels and of editorial comment by much of our nation's press to the epidemic of mass violence that has recently afflicted our cities, I think that they only convince one that America is much today like a neurotic patient. A victim of a biting inner conflicts to which he is unwilling or even more frighteningly unable to face up. As a result the chances of lasting relief are slim and daily gross slimmer. The orientation, for example, to what I would call the politics of riots, that is the constant tendencies to praise the police, to blame the rioters and outside agitators, to make gratuitous judgments that in the long run the disorders will hurt the Negro cause as if there were some kind of self-conscious choice among alternative strategies and tactics. That is that Negroes decided that they would

riot and therefore this was the thing to do. To pose questions concerning the symptoms, that is the proximate causes, the economic costs, the tactics for the control of riots, rather than the disease from which our communities suffer, that is a prejudice and discrimination. And finally, of course, to make the traditional call for extensive and time-consuming studies, I think these reveal all too clearly the depths of what I would call our national neurosis. And as I gave Jenny a little quote here, the most shocking thing to me about the epidemic of collective outbursts in the part of Negro Americans is not their prevalence, or even the scale of physical violence and property destruction, but that white Americans are genuinely surprised that such things could happen in their communities and their mindless cries for law and order as a solution. I think it's self-evident that the long-hot summer

of 67, and I would add, the coming long-hot summer of 68, had been in the making for 200 years. I think it's quite clear that these riots, collective disorders, are not really riots in the usual sense of the term, but what I would call expressive insurrections, fed by the fires of aggregated frustrations, fueled by the colossal indifference of the majority of affluent, dominant whites, and lighted off by the growing vacuum of civic leadership and commitment to democratic values on the local community level. The shattering of the domestic tranquility, which is the bedrock of any viable social life, attests not to the sickness of Negro Americans, so much as it reveals the sickness of American communities. These violent outbursts are neither plots nor programs, but expressive of one basic fact that no community can survive or can be a community if literally thousands of its people,

of its members, and sometimes proportions ranging as high as over 50 percent are outside the community. In many ways, we simply deluded ourselves. How can you have a community when there are, say, over a million Negroes in the same community who are literally outside of it? Well, you don't have a community under those conditions. And I think it's no longer a question of speaking for the Negroes, as whites have traditionally done in the past, but simply of speaking the truth to white Americans. Miradal's so-called an American dilemma, I think, has become the American dilemma. That is that our Negro problem is the most pressing problem this nation faces. With few exceptions, the reaction of the country's leadership to date only underscores the validity of the subtitle of Miradal's 25-year-old study. And the subtitle interestingly enough was, as follows, the Negro problem and modern democracy. In fact, frightened mayors, politicized city councils, and defensive police commissioners,

all of whom understandably suffer from a trained incapacity to deal with the kind of crisis we face, hold the future of our democratic polity in their hands. Because lacking statesmen like leadership on the local community level, panicky populations may all too easily succumb to the notion that the public safety requires increasingly repressive measures, and may settle for control as their ultimate value. That is, we will be so concerned about rocking the boat, and we will be so frightened concerning the repercussions from collective disorders that we will simply be willing to have the police take care of it. And at that point, I think our democratic polity disappears. Well, what are some of the truths and where do they lead us? And I don't think you have to have any prolonged or extensive studies to get a valid understanding of the factors behind these expressive disturbances, the so-called Negro

revolution. I think one of the most awe-inspiring aspects of our current situation is the seemingly limitless capacity of most white Americans for selective inattention and self-deception in regard to the American dilemma. And this is especially shocking in the face of a communications revolution and knowledge explosion that have vividly revealed every decaying nook and corner of the ghetto, that have put the name and face of Ellison's invisible man on the front page of every mass periodical and daily newspaper. And this isn't to mention, of course, all the studies, surveys that are done by universities, by government agencies on all level, all of which I think is quite clear, have further publicized the scale of the problem and the sorry facts of the Negro Americans predicament. In fact, since 1920, the Negro population in this country has doubled. It now stands at approximately 20 million,

and it's predicted approximately to double again by 1990. In fact, by 1970, half of our 50 largest cities, that is, cities over 100,000, will have Negro populations of 25 percent or more. 14 of these communities will have Negro populations of 40 percent or more. And the five largest American cities will have Negro populations of more than 700,000 people. And that's a number which will be surpassed by the total population, Negro and white, of only 17 American cities. And what I'm trying to suggest here is just the enormous scale of the problem. It's something that no one can sweep under the rug. It's something we're just going to have to deal with. It won't go away. Now, to the sheer demographic scale of the problem must be added, the social trends and changes that have taken place since World War II. And these have resulted not merely in bringing about significant changes in the composition of the Negro population, but they have underwritten, I'm convinced, a very

important social psychological development that is the basis of this contemporary Negro Revolt. And this is simply the rise of what I would call a new conception of self that is the indicated above all by the psychological rejection of all the traditional forms of accommodation, such as residential segregation, school segregation, and the so-called etiquette of caste. Now, these are the things that in the past have in a way, seemingly at least, reduced conflict, simply because we've been separate. But they have let us know where, and Negroes today no longer accept being separate. I don't know whether you're aware of it or not, but the fact is, is that in less than a generation, in less than 30 years, the Negro American population has been transformed from a regional, that is, the majority of Negroes used to live in the south, a rural, that is, they used to live in rural areas, and an agricultural population, that is, most Negroes in this country were

engaged in agriculture, to an essentially national, urban, and industrial population. More over formal anti-discriminatory and desegregation policies and practices initiated by government and private agencies at all levels, culminating, as you know, in the Supreme Court decision of 54, and the Civil Rights Acts of more recent vintage, having a fact provided Negro Americans with a new mirror for self-conception. And regardless of how little these policies have been put into operation, they have given both legal and moral sanction to Negro aspirations by publicly redefining the traditional postulate of American race relations. Today, both legally and morally, to be separate is to be inherently unequal. And the traditional formula of American race relations has been dramatically reversed. Twenty-five years ago, Miradal said that it's the white man who acts and the Negro who reacts. Well, that's been completely reversed. Today, it is the Negro who acts and the white man who reacts. A new leadership has developed

that is no longer accommodating and be holding for its status to the dominant whites, and no longer confined to the traditional protest within the status quo. This new leadership is willing and able to go beyond the established legal and conventional community norms and institutional channels, which, of course, have seldom served Negro interests. And it aims at revolutionary status goals, rather than simply reformistic welfare goals. It is Negroes today are not simply interested in good housing. They're interested in living where they want to live, inconceivably integrated housing. The rise of the new protest groups, core, SNCC, SCLC, the varieties of black nationalism, I think, indicate the degree to which even the traditional forms of protest have failed. Now, the tragic paradox, of course, is that despite all that's gone on in the last thirty years, all of the time, all of the effort, all of the money, all of the seeming activity in regard to race relations, the social and

economic situation of the vast majority of Negro Americans has not significantly improved, and in some areas has actually deteriorated. No really significant gains have been made in either income or in employment. Today, there is more, rather than less, residential segregation. Schools at desegregation has proceeded at a snail's pace at best and has involved studied tokenism and adamant environment resistance at worst. And at this point in time, particularly for white Americans, I think it's important that we should not be misled by the development of a Negro middle class. Now, it's true that a significant number, although very small proportion of Negro Americans, have achieved success in the traditional American terms of education, occupation, lifestyle. But this does not and cannot at this point in time solve the basic fault of the social structure of our nation

and its local communities. It's my hypothesis that the myth of opportunity, the possibility, for example, of mobility from the log cabin to the White House. Now, this can be validated, and be meaningful, for most of quite Americans, if a few, in fact, make it. It can be validated by the factual success of an identifiable few. But this does not hold true for the vast masses of working-class Negroes in the ghetto. That is, they simply do not identify with a Ralph bunch. They simply do not identify with the successes of Negro middle class people. Although Franklin Frazier was correct in his bitter critique, perhaps some of you have heard of the concept of the Black bourgeoisie, the Negro middle class, as a society of status without substance. That is, Frazier was concerned to suggest that this was kind of a game that

it had no real basis in achievement. I think he failed to generalize the meaning of his notion. It's not just that the Negro middle class, as the Black bourgeoisie, is unreal, that the concept of a Negro-class structure is unreal. In fact, the status of the middle class Negro in America is not validated by either the white or the Negro communities. In the Negro community, the element of mutual respect, however grudging that is the basis of any viable kind of stratification system, status system, is conspicuous by its absence. More class Negroes are not only jealous, but suspicious of the motives of their middle class fellows. And lower class Negroes, on the other hand, know, or at least sense, that despite their success, middle class Negro still do not really have it made. The inner and narrowly social boundaries of the color line remain unbreached. The successful middle

class Negro is still, for most white Americans, a Negro, and outside the status system of their community. To be sure, Negro Americans seek power. The entire thrust of recent historical and social science research in the Negro in America has been in the direction of the revelation that the ultimate basis of racial minority status lies in the historical uses of power. This is the basic connotation of this contemporary battle cry with which we're all familiar, black power. Well, to me, black power simply means that racial minority status is a function of politics and history and not of biology, and thus subject to change. The analog of black power is white power. And whatever differences exist between black and white power, they are essentially as far as I can see stylistic and the differences only of relatively recent vintage. But power, however important in structuring social relations,

is primarily eventful in nature. That is, it happens and you can see it at critical junctures. But for the most part, while there are power differences in society, employer and employee, boss and working force, under normal conditions, power differences are accommodated as authority, that is legitimate power. And its forceful qualities are overlaid with the trappings of prestige in which we celebrate the power differences and therefore agree with it. Power is but the proximity, and therefore I suggest, of the Negro revolution. In the long run, the goal is the goal of all human beings, and that is status. And I don't refer here to status in the narrow sense of prestige. But in the broader sense of having a place and a function in the going community, of being a member of the community. To be a member of the community in the most fundamental sense of the term is to have one's own concept

of self validated by those around one, those who are important to one, not destroyed. To be a member of a community is to be able, for example, to cash one's educational and income and occupational gains in for status. In the fact of the matter is, however, the Negro Americans have been in but not of our communities. And the recent disturbances in our cities throughout the country, I think, are a vivid illustration of the stark fact that a significant and growing number of Negro Americans, especially the younger generation, are not so much alienated. Because in order to be alienated, you have to be, you have been a part of something once. I think that this is more an indication that an increasing number of what I would call dissociated. They're not a part of it at all and never have been. It's also important that we recognize that the various efforts on the part of the federal government to deal with the American dilemma, the poverty program, the school desegregation guidelines, the various commissions concerned with equal opportunity in employment are aimed

at what some people have called class interests as opposed to status interests and are concerned with class politics rather than status politics. And by class politics, I mean simply here, it's like income, occupation, education. Now, the interesting things about these matters is that you can mobilize them and you can distribute them. You can hand them out. You can give people more education. You can give people more income. You can give them better jobs. And usually, in this kind of an area where people want to change things, they develop forward looking programs, which are quite rational in character. They're future oriented. They make sense and therefore, we're looking. They look forward to a time when the adoption of some program to distribute more jobs or more income will materially help the situation. The interesting thing, and the frightening thing is, is that with the exception of some of the peripheral activities of the Commission on Civil Rights, the interest involved in what

I would call status politics, status interests have been completely neglected. Now, here, of course, there are no clear-cut solutions. And there's little or nothing that a government can do to distribute status. Political movements, spawned by status concerns and anxieties typically exhibit irrational motifs. Now, of course, these interests and status can't be mobilized and allocated. But this is only to say that the way you get status, you have to carve it out on a day-to-day basis in the local community. Now, the federal government has crucial functions to perform in the articulation of public policy and the provision of material resources. There's no doubt that we need massive subsidies in the area of housing, in the area of education and income. But it isn't just that government has made too feeble an effort, as Monahan and others in their affection for the level of abstraction represented by the great society would have it. And we shouldn't be led astray by the illusion that these federal programs

present of serving the status interests, the basic interests of Negro Americans. For what they involve, I think, is only what I would call the odd-hoek organization of status outside the community. It's much like finding a niche for a mental patient by giving him a job in the asylum when you give Negro's jobs in poverty programs. And like of this, it's really creating a kind of an organization and a job outside the going community. And insofar, therefore, as private and particularly the informal sectors of local communities are not involved in such a manner as to make, not simply an economic place, but a social place for Negro Americans inside the going community, these federal programs, which are aimed at the class interest, I think, risk functioning as modes of incitement. And they lead to a revolution not of rising expectations, but of rising frustrations. And the fruits

of a revolution of rising frustrations are visibly going to be more violent and difficult to control. In a word, the real and all of the locusts of the American dilemma is not the great society, but the local community. If you stop to think about it, here is where exists the heritage of prejudice and discrimination. Here, prejudice and discrimination have their concrete and massive debilitating impact on the lives of individuals. Here have been the barriers to being members of the community, to full participation. And here, the local community is the locusts of the battle, the locusts of the barricades. And if one stops to think about it, here is really the locusts of self and status. That is, we do our living and have our being in local communities, not in the great society. Of course, it is not the community, but white Americans, especially their leaders, who in failing their Negro

fellow citizens have failed themselves in their democratic society. On the one hand, the callous indifference of middle-class whites is revealed by their headlong physical flight to the suburb, which is made possible their privatized escape from involvement in the problems of the city that is the source of their affluence. That is, there's nothing wrong with people moving to the suburb physically. But when they move there physically, they simply take their interests and their energies and their commitments and their concerns and leave behind them the problems of the city. And they pride themselves on how rumored, or Westchester County, or South Orange New Jersey have no delinquency problems, have no riots, have good schools, and so forth, and so on. Between 1950 and 60, for example, the white population of New York City decreased by almost half a million. And the story was the same in Chicago, which experienced a loss of 400,000 white people. This exodus continues in 1966, 25,000 white students disappeared from the roles of the public schools of New

York City. On the other hand, local community officials, and I would include here citizens who play significant roles in the informal power structure of a city, have more often than not conducted their business as usual in the manner almost of a white bourgeoisie. And I would say this quite emphatically. I don't think anything is going to happen usefully here in the area of race relation until white people stop doing business as usual. As long as business as usual is the biting and informing policy, nothing much is going to change. I think the leadership in our local communities has failed utterly to define the situation in such a manner as would enlist the competencies and energies of the other members of the community not only to understand the nature and urgency of our problem, but also to act productively in the service of its amelioration.

Now how come this failure of leadership in the local community? I think it's explained in part, but the fact that the mayors of many of our cities, as well as the citizens who serve on the policy-making boards of municipal agencies, comprise a social generation whose conceptions of Negroes were formed from 30 to 50 years ago. Until recently these have been under no real pressure to change, and unfortunately they may have been hardened by the riotous run of events. I'm not faulting the mayors in the sense that it's some kind of a plot, but I am saying that in all probability most mayors are of a social generation which is such that they have really no appreciation of the current situation, nor is it simply that the American city historically has been the cockpit of politics, and this is true that the worst kind of politics has always been on the local community level. Rather, in recent years this concept has been wedded to that of city management.

This newer tradition has been most obviously and dysfunctionally expressed in the operations of local urban renewal and redevelopment agencies. It may interest you to know that a study done of Newark, New Jersey in 1961, concluded that the redevelopment program, and I quote here, has achieved widespread purpose of innovation only at the cost of major democratic values. While honest and competent city management may yield lower tax rates, large scale physical renewal, economic development, and even on occasion the city beautiful, it just as surely precludes responsive democratic civic leadership. The result is rather a trained in capacity to deal with the type of civic crisis that the revolution in race relations presents. As late as 1962 for example, the mayor of one New England city could respond to a request for the establishment of a local human relations commission with the revealing

observation and I quote him, that he did not consider it the normal function of municipal government to initiate and promote advanced legislation in the social field. And he went on to say and I quote, in broad terms, the function of municipal administration is to conduct the housekeeping services, protect persons and property, and to enforce the established law. In other words, the picture here is that you administer a city. And I'm suggesting that if you're an administrator, you can't usefully respond to civic crises because you see everything in administrative terms. Much of this mayor's administration was devoted to the promotion of a massive urban renewal program, the virtues of which were touted nationally by both local and federal officials. Unfortunately, this urban renewal program also succeeded in forcing the relocation of approximately 80% of the local Negro population in an obvious climate of community prejudice and discrimination, in increasing the amount of residential segregation

and, of course, finally, in worsening significantly local race relations. His younger and recent successor has continued in this tradition, reelected for a second term, his inaugural address failed even to mention the plight of the city's Negroes, but played up physical improvement, fiscal responsibility, and the preservation of order by the police. During the past year, the new mayor distinguished himself by a bald but bootless attempt to obtain a model city's grant, without even the formality of a citizen subcommittee on minority group housing, as one of the minimal prerequisites for a federal workable program. By giving only grudging support and at critical junctures, even negative leadership to a plan to desegregate the public schools. And hardly a week before the city fell victim to the current epidemic of ghetto violence, when chided by the Negro director of the city human relations committee for the mayor's failure to discuss summer plans for the slum areas by retorting publicly

that he was under no obligation to consult with city agencies on such matters. Now, this sorry history of the failure of civic leadership, I think, can be repeated in scores of communities throughout the country. If the real focus of our problem, the American dilemma is in our local communities, then both the formal and informal civic leadership must be developed and engaged to make Negroes not only a part of the polity but of the state system as well. In the former case, given the trend of civic management, the most obvious and promising line of attack involves those local community institutions and agencies, the policies and operations of which most directly and typically abrasively bear on the daily nature and course of race relations. And what are these institutions? I'm sure you can think of them. The police, the schools, housing authorities, municipal services, city planning and redevelopment agencies. Indeed, precisely in these areas have tokenism or indifference been the typical responses

to the legitimate demands of Negro Americans for representation of their interests in policy and practice. And lacking access to these crucial institutions, black power has spilled over into the streets. I think we can see this even in our city in terms of its recent history. In connection, you will recall with the desegregation plan, many of the white parents in South Providence decided that they didn't wish it and did have access to the mayor and to the school committee. On the other hand, when it came to the Negro parents and their preferences, they simply had no access to these institutionalized channels. So what did they do? They sat in. Well, the styles may have been different, but the issues were very real to both groups. It is a truism, for example, that one major factor in the kind of race relations a community has is in the operating policies of its police department. All too often, as recent events have clearly demonstrated, the record has been an extra critical one. That's a recently published study of the police department of a West Coast

city found that while the police enjoyed an enviable public support in the dominant white community, regardless of class position, Negroes were almost uniformly critical of the police. And the issue was not physical brutality, but abiding attitudes expressed in language, gesture, and approach. All this, I think, is less the fault of the police than another illustration of the lack of concern of the dominant white citizens of the community. It is the white citizens of the community who have mindlessly allowed their own prejudice attitudes to be reflected by the police in the daily performance of the latter's duties. It is the white, dominant citizens who must insist that public policy be significantly changed in this salient area, parenthetically, the current spectacle of police chiefs and policemen making policy pronouncements further suggests the dangerous vacuum that

is developed in civic leadership. Needless to say, the situation is much the same in the case of highly politicized school boards, nervous and bureaucratized school administrators and professionalized city planners. Lacking sensitive, imaginative, courageous, and responsible leadership, fundamentally political and human issues are often transformed into administrative problems, the solutions to which are sought within a narrow range of objective, physical, economic, and technical criteria of success. To be sure, it has become fashionable to give lip service to human values in the policy statements of these crucial agencies of community life, but their actual operations dilute no one, least of all Negro Americans. I don't think we need any complicated programs or lengthy studies. What we need are the pronouncements of and commitment to operating policies on the part of civic leaders that will guarantee the representation of the interests of Negro Americans and will serve to validate rather

than to destroy their self-conceptions as members of the community. Here I think modern social science theory and research actually has something useful and relevant to say to those who are concerned with the control of events, especially of intergroup hostility and conflict and especially institutional contexts. Most of our research, whether you know it or not, in race relations has traditionally focused on the subjective aspect of the problem. That is, most of the research has been psychological, it's been concerned with prejudice and it's been concerned with attitudes and concerned ultimately with changing people's minds. This has been regarded as the kind of determining factor that people discriminate because they have prejudices. And much less attention has been paid to what I would call the objective dimension of the problem, and that is discrimination, those actions, not how they feel or think. I suspect that two kinds of theories have

emerged here. One is what I would call a psychological view of our problem, which sees prejudice as an essentially, well, irrational phenomenon. That people are prejudiced because of their psychological structure or character, and that they discriminate in a kind of a compulsive fashion. This is what I would call a kind of a psychological approach to prejudice. There is also another view of prejudice that has developed, what I would call a cultural view, which sees prejudicial attitudes as essentially non-rational in nature. That is, rooted in the ordinary group ways of the society, learned in the context of a child's early experience in the family, the playgroup, and from authority figures such as teachers. Cermination here is seen also as a function of course of prejudice, but simply as a custom of the group, not as a function of the individual's character structure. Now, I'm not trying

to suggest here that either the psychological or cultural view of prejudice is incorrect. The interesting thing about them is they're not very useful. That is, if we believed that the reason people discriminated was because they had psychological compulsions, then the obvious answer would be to have everyone get a little therapy. This is practically impossible. We don't have enough psychiatrists to go around. If we also believed that the reason why people are prejudiced and act as they do is that because they learned it in the family, in the playgroup, in the neighborhood, then I don't think this has very many practical implications because families are not the kinds of human social groupings that you can manipulate and that you can get access to. The interesting thing is that modern research and race relation has increasingly focused not on how people think and feel, but on what they do, on discrimination, on acts. And this is led to a kind of sociological theory

of prejudice, which in effect denies that there's a one-to-one relation between how people think and feel and how they act. It emphasizes, rather, the self-conscious nature of human conduct and its determination not by how one feels, but its determination by whatever rules and understandings exist in the group in which you have your being. And I think that this is one of the characteristics of modern society that, except in the home, we do not act on the basis of how we feel. On the job, some of our fellow employees we may enjoy, others, we may be indifferent to, and others we may be quite negative about. But we, by and large, conduct ourselves in terms of a set of common understandings as to what is proper. Paranthetically, during my stay in the very deep south, while I'm overstating the case, I would say that one of the most obvious differences between southern

rural areas and the deep south, there are no cities. You know, people in Mississippi say that the largest city in Mississippi is Memphis, which gives you an idea of what's down there. But the point is this, is that in the south, it seemed to me that people always acted as if they were in their own homes, whether they were in a restaurant or on an airplane or in any context, they were just themselves. And this, of course, is the thing that children have to learn that what, that you must conduct yourself regardless of how you feel. And I'm suggesting here that in modern society, this is the determinant of our acts, not how we feel, not our character structures, our psychological structures, but the actual common understandings in particular group situations. And therefore, the suggestion is, is that perhaps the most giant strides in the control and changes of individual behavior in the

area of racial relations can be accomplished in institutional contexts, simply by making policy, particularly topside policy, clear, and vigorously pursuing it at all levels. This, of course, doesn't mean that private prejudices will immediately disappear or that individuals will not conduct themselves in a discriminatory fashion in other contexts. It does mean, however, that if there is courageous administrative leadership, individual attitudes do not constitute an insuperable barrier to instituting behavioral changes in people. The evidence suggests there's also something of a feedback process at work in the sense that changes in conduct and the correlative experiences that accompany them often have an impact on our prejudiced attitudes. That is, in agencies, department stores where you began to get after World War II, a merit hiring, merit placement, merit promotion. After these things got rolling, it became a kind of a chain reaction. Anti-needrow beliefs

about racial characteristics affecting the work situation, about the dire consequences of attempting fair employment turned out to be false, and these beliefs simply withered away because people saw every day that it wasn't like that. In both the short and long runs, therefore, I propose that the crucial municipal agencies I've mentioned should embark not only on administrative policies that are self-consciously non-discriminating, but even more important should constantly measure their goals and means against the vital interests of Negro Americans, which are today clearly the vital interests of all Americans. As a colleague of mine at Chicago, Ms. Duncan, recently observed, the long-range goal of public policy in every community must be the eradication of the ghetto. Because it involves restriction of movement, which is a basic threat to the viability of any living organism, what is intolerable about the ghetto is not merely that the housing is old, overcrowded, and vermin infested, although all of these things are true and could

be remedied if there was a will to do so. What is intolerable is that there is a ghetto at all accepted as it might arise from the process of people making unfettered choices as to where they will live. As long as it is known that everyone who is black must live only in certain quarters and must stay away from others, then everyone who lives there, whether or not he would choose to move, given the choice, must day by day and minute by minute experience the restriction and humiliation that this abridgment of freedom implies. Duncan goes so far as to suggest that this is really the core of the problem. How can you expect Negro men, fathers, to act responsibly if actually they live under conditions of restriction of movement? This may be actually the heart of the problem that is long as people are restricted for living where they wish to live, then you can't expect them to be men. Correlatively

every operating policy should not only be directed to this end, but also should self-consciously in no way assume or support the pattern of segregated living. In other words, I think that every community agency in what they do should self-consciously address themselves to this question. Are we doing something that will help get rid of it? That is the ghetto? Are we making sure that what we do in no way continues to support segregated living? Paranthetically, it also seems to me it would be extremely useful and practical to identify and co-opt as local agency consultants some of the new grassroots leadership that has been thrown up by the urban revolt. I refer here not to those who have visibility as the result of representing some constituency, however real or unreal, but to those who in the context of community strife have come out of nowhere so to speak and played productive roles. Beyond these steps which are oriented to the integration of Negro Americans and to the

polity of the community, white Americans, especially the middle class, must find it in themselves to bear some of the burden of social change, to give up doing business as usual. Above all, it is they who must validate the status of middle class Negroes, and this involves nothing less than at long last the assimilation of the Negro, divesting him completely of his minority status in a word to make him a part of the community of status. White Americans must also, in the difficult months and years, to come understand and sympathize. One of the prices of more contact across the racial line is the certainty that white Americans will increasingly mutually disappoint one another and talk past one another. But it would be tumerious to assume after 200 years of physical and social separation that they necessarily and always take the same things for granted. For example, it's not that Negro Americans have any stake in collective violence. On the other hand, it

is more than possible that law and order simply do not have the rich connotations, the rich meetings for Negroes that they do for the majority of white Americans. To the masses of ghettoized Negroes, law is more apt to mean harassment and personal humiliation, and order is essentially foreign to life outside the society. White Americans, again, should also understand that much of the contemporary Negro leadership is not an organization leadership, it's a movement leadership. Therefore, it's inherently tenuous, it's shifting, it involves few criteria of competence other than charisma, it involves no clearly identical and identifiable and constant constituencies, it involves no clear chains of command. That is, who speaks for the Negro? Or who leads the Negro? It isn't like the president of a bank, who, when he pronounces policy or the board pronounces policy, it's carried

out the next day in every branch. There are no branches to the Negro movement. These people are sitting, let's say, on the top of an ocean, full of waves, and they have no control over what is going to happen next, and I think it's important that we understand this, and I think it would be tragic indeed if we fail to appreciate the fact that the men whose names we see in the papers, whether it's a rap brown or a stokely Carmichael or Martin Luther King or a Whitney Young, they simply do not have clear control over what goes on. To understand all, of course, is not to forgive all, but human dignity demands clarity in human predicaments. The American dilemma, the problem of Negro, white relations, is historical and social in both its causes and its effects. We are engaged in the enormous tasks, not the simple tasks, relatively speaking of the Marxists, who set out to make history.

What we are trying to do is, I would say, to beat history. That is, here we have had 200 years building up to this. And somehow or another, we've got to erase or minimize the impact of the momentum of 200 years. Therefore, the problem does not lend itself to simple, final or even technical solutions, except in the twisted mind of true believers. Rather, as a human social problem, we must contend with it. And as human beings with limited lifestyle spans, rather, it is perhaps our style of failure, which is more important than unreal investments in success. And what I mean to say here is, is that we shouldn't look forward to some immediate millennium in which, in every way, we are going to succeed. At the same time, it is awfully important as to how we do fail. I can't think of a more significant dimension of actions, particularly on the part of white middle-class people, than their style. And

to say style here, I mean simply two kinds of things. That if our style is correct, it means that we are not innocently and ignorantly assuming that every Negro we meet, any more than every other white person we meet if we're sophisticated, thinks as we do, has the same notions that we do. I think that it's a matter of human dignity, if we take account of the fact, that men who live differently think differently. And therefore, let's say consensus and understanding is not something to be assumed. It has to be, so to speak, hammered out in day-to-day contacts. And we'll involve all of the, shall I say, difficulties that all human relationships involved. More especially white Americans must develop what Christopher Lash has recently termed, and I quote, a sense of injustice and of the indignities and humiliations

which they have increasingly allowed themselves to accept as normal, inevitable, proper, and even moral. And I end the quotation there. That is, we've got to understand that perhaps we have been wrong, and that we have come to accept, let's say, dimensions of our activity in our lives as normal, inevitable, proper, and moral, which are not normal, which are not inevitable, which are improper and even immoral. In a word, the American dilemma like war is too important to be left to the generals. And only as we begin to act out our personal commitments to assure that our community institutions will be informed by, rather than give lip service to our democratic traditions, will our style of failure be such that we can live in communities with our neighbors and with ourselves. Thank you very much, Professor Faust, for your very stimulating thought. Professor's

indicated he would be a champion. I have no answer, but I'll be happy to talk. Yes, Professor Faust, I wonder, it's important that the Negro, social movement, that the Negro has a charismatic leader. Well, I'm not sure that I understand your question. I would say this, there's no doubt that this kind of leader. This is the kind of leader you're going to get at this stage of the game. And remember, that charismatic leadership is an awful, dangerous kind of leadership, because at a certain stage, but the real problem here is what happens with the passing of the charismatic leader. You can build a community of many, many ways, that is when I say community here, get people to act together. You can put a pistol to their heads, and this will work for a small number of people, a short time. You can do it by fraud. You can

con him into it, and that's a kind of a dangerous business. And you can have this charismatic leadership, or you can have some symbol, the cross in the crown, black power, whatever it is. But I don't think any of these bases of consent are either viable or productive. I'm not criticizing it. It is a fact. This is the kind of leadership you're going to get. Now, the Negro has a problem today, a part of his problem, is the lack of competent leadership in the Negro community. And this is just part of the heritage of discrimination and prejudice. And therefore, I think the important thing is, is that white people understand this, that they don't make impossible demands. I noted just in today's paper that one of the Rockefellers said, the Negro's ought to have more initiative. Well, this is the style I'm talking about. This is incitement. This is nonsense. It's like asking a little baby to love you.

Well, this was going to be my next question. This is often criticism that you hear. He should be able to pull himself off by his bootstraps. But this is not really possible, you know? You have a group of people who have values that are entirely different, who have common mores and understandings, which are not part of it. Well, I'm not, you know, I'm not so sure about this. See, my feeling in this matter is, is that really, Negro's, in a way, are beginning to act like Americans. That is, at long last, because of certain social trends, they're acting like Americans in the traditional sense of the word that Americans take nothing off nobody. And we're shocked by this sudden revolution of self-conception and attitude and behavior. But if you put yourself in

their place, that's exactly how you would feel. Now, it's uncomfortable. And what I tried to suggest by noting the scale of the problem, it's not something that's going to go away, it's going to get worse before it's going to get better. And the question is, is we have enough sympathy and understanding to deal with it and not get impatient. And not, for example, the first time, there's an epidemic of violence, tell our police, well, you settle it. You take care of it. This will destroy us. This is the importance of the Negro problem. I think it's much less in a way important for what happens to the Negro. It's going to be what happens to white Americans. And they're like, well, as I say, in their concern for domestic tranquility and all the rest, to simply say, well, we'll control it. We'll let the police keep it down. And that's the real danger. It isn't the Negro. It's the whole tradition

of the democratic society that is threatened by this thing, unless white Americans have some appreciation, some understanding, some ability to put themselves in the place of the Negro. It's the most dangerous thing, I think, in this country. As far as I'm concerned, yet, Ma'am is relatively minor in terms of its potential for the destruction of what we aspire to as the democratic society. Yes, sir. How do we develop a feeling of confidence, not only in this we deserve of the color for white, but the color for themselves so that they can learn to trust one another, because this is part of the reason for their lack of unity to gather. And how do you do it? How do you go about this?

I'm not, or maybe you better, when you say they don't have any trust for one another, I'm not sure that I... Well, even when you have a problem as we have in our own community, and let's take the school situation, which has been very difficult, but when school has been sent, they split among themselves so that they should show that, well, this is true. We've got this here. Where do you start? You say to develop an understanding, and it's your hope and prayer that we'll have sympathy and understanding. It takes trust to have sympathy and understanding. Where do you start? First of all, among the whites. Secondly, among the color people, among themselves, for it. I don't blame them for that. Well, I would approach this from the other end, and I would say that there are many things in society, which people collectively have to do, although individually, they may not wish to do it. Now, how do you get people to do what they have to do? I mean, almost an eternal problem. And I think it is just at this point that the white political leadership

becomes important. That is, for the first time in the history of this country, we have to have statesmanship on the local community level. And this is what I was talking about. In local communities, all we've ever had is politics. Now, you've got to have statesmanship on the local community. That is, you've got to be willing to act as a leader, and when I say leader, you've got to be willing to define the situation for the people, and in this sense, educate them to the point where they realize what the real problem is, and why they have to do this. Take school integration. Well, I think we're pretty clear on this, that this segregated schooling, no matter how good it is, is like segregated housing. It's ultimately humiliated. And the recent Coleman report, which made a survey of all the secondary schools in this country, found out that, by and large, Negro started behind

and got further behind by the time they got out of high school. And in those situations which were integrated, they performed better. Well, it may be that most white Americans and I would agree, said the other night. If you asked them, they would rather not. But it may be that we just have to, you know, look who's coming for dinner. I would say that, supposedly, the report says that this is the proper way to do it, that integrate that they have made through the progress. And yet you found opposition to this among your color populations. You don't expect everybody to agree on this, but what worries me is that there is no leadership in the community, particularly the white community, which is defining the problem for people. It isn't that you just want to have school integration, but school integration has something to do, not with a few Negroes in Providence, but 40 million now, or rather 20 million now, 40 million in a few more years. We have to

give this a try, if only because without it, we're not going to have communities. And we're not, especially, going to have democratic communities. Now nobody that I know of is, literally, say in this community has ever defined it in these terms. I mean, it's just schools, segregation. They've never hooked it up with what the real danger is here. Most white Americans, particularly middle class Americans, pay no attention to the policies of the police department. I suspect nobody here has ever been concerned with what goes on. Well, we'd better get concerned, because if you leave it to the policeman, and I do not blame them, we're going to pay him more. We've got to recruit better people. Otherwise, we're in trouble. I don't want to be a profit of blue and doom, but that is the case. Well, in line with what Miss Sullivan was saying, I think what we're trying to do, even in

your discussion and the people that you just presented to us, we're basically trying to change attitudes and behavior. I'll settle for behavior, the heck with the attitudes. Well, I think they're one and the same, because one I feel goes along with the other. And in trying to change to me, attitudes and behavior is like trying to work with the people that might hire in the plan or the foreman, and that is you have to make it more meaningful to them. A person's behavior will not change, and you cannot get their attitude to change unless you show them that it has meaning. Well, it's very interesting. You know, before the war, you never saw Negroes clerking in large department stores in cities. And the general pitch of the people who ran these stores was one that, well, it would create an institutional habit. And that the customers didn't want it on the one hand, and the white employees didn't want it. But the interesting thing is, there's no problem at all.