The articulators of the Negro revolt (Part 1 of 2)

This racial crisis comes at the time of the technological crisis so that our institutions will have to change to accommodate this. When we see our leaders calling for justice on our part and nobody listening then the people themselves will say these leaders are not effective they're not getting us what we want they can even protect us from a policeman who has to shoot a 15 year old kids three times to stop him. To maintain law and order. What kind of leaders are these. Let's turn to leaders who will get us what we want even if it means throwing a few more bricks. Maybe buying a rifle or so this is the choice with which we are faced. I know there's going to be piles of dead. You're going to posit dead people black and white all over this country I mean very soon because those police cannot get away with that thing they were doing before where the hundred negroes injured three police. No that won't happen because a lot of those kids are going to start to shoot back you know and do what they can that way no that's going to happen. That has to happen because the average white American will not realize what this country has become.

This is Collin Edwards. Those are some of the voices of the negro revolt. It is undoubtedly true that white people in general are blissfully unaware of the depth of Negro anguish and anger despite the riots in New York Rochester New Jersey and Kansas City. What is worse in negro eyes is that most white Americans seem to accept a situation which includes private and official terrorize ation of the negro in the south and more subtle but still hurtful discrimination in the north as something for which there is no early solution possible by the means available to the American system of society and for which they individually can take any responsibility. The cauldron of despair beneath the crust of the affluent society is sizzling. But negroes feel that whites do not care and do not want to listen. We will hear something of the negro protest from a number of its most eloquent spokesman

negro writers as they address meetings engage in discussions and are interviewed. Horace Katyn is a University of California sociologist. He won fame with his co authorship of the massive social logical study of the negro condition in the north black metropolis. I think we can communicate fairly well on certain levels but only just to the level of emotions that the newsgroup would have deep seeded feelings of hatred and indignation. Revolting not only against the position of negroes but many other things in the society. Then I think communication cuts right all. When they hear we have 20 million black people. Who are angry who are revolting against some of our institutions. Then that strikes of a tremendous

fear and communication shuts off. A young negro poet playwright novelist Leroy Jones is often called the awful terrible of Negro writing. And if he seems to be speaking for shock effect it is because he believes America needs it. But more importantly that what he says is essentially true. You know that something is changing but not specifically what you know. In other words they're not getting the message they're not understanding it. Well the way they get the message is in the streets of Harlem and Rochester. You know Jersey City that's where the only way they can get it but they don't get the right message Mayor Wagner. What is his reaction. Well you know it's not see in terms of the right message because if they got the right message as he indicated the first thing they would have to do is kill themselves. You see I would be the first thing they would have to be if they got the right message. See what I do for instance as an artist as a I play Dutchman which is OK finally as they say

social statement because it's got a black man in it and he refers to himself as a black man and to the woman as a white woman so that makes it a social statement. All right. So that's gone by the boards they didn't get get into that at all. But there is no danger of them misinterpreting. Let's say broken windows in a subway or garbage cans dropped on top of a policeman's head they might say that that happens for other reasons other than it does but they can't miss understand the effect. And that's what I'm talking about and where they can misunderstands to Katyn Mr. Bond Holmes and Mr. Jones. But they can't misunderstand somebody who bumps him on the head. They can't misunderstand that hurt. You know if the negro finds difficulty getting through to the whites so too does a white person in communicating with a Negro. Even when it is an attempt to find common ground free of any racial perspective the prickly suspicion and distrust borne of the experience of discrimination

is evident in this piece of repartee between Leroy Jones and a white woman in his audience at a conference. But do you know what the there's word there. What tribe is that eBook is we both word for white man and there isn't also an Indian word for white man American Indian and they mean almost the same thing. He who laws I mean the same thing and then doesn't. What I'm saying is we are in a position to demand a cleaner vision of anywhere else somebody constructs. Absolutely but not to say that we're going to be as corrupt as you are know it when the highest Negro gets in. Are you sure there won't. What pious Negro where when you want you want and you will and we will have it. What do you mean rock you have what. There will be power invested in some negro. Oh you mean in this society. No absolutely not no. Are you any society may I say. And when it when and if

and I think it's when and not if power is invested in the wrong hands won't we then come back to this human thing that power corrupts. Well you. Is that what you hope you know what this is. It's in the nature of man to want things this isn't only the characteristic of the white man. More of the American and I and the thing is that power corrupts and won't and and when power goes into other hands I won't there be corruption then too. Well you know see that's always the thing. You know this is the world man is you know basically evil blah blah blah. Don't try to make it so that you have a disease so that anybody else comes along has to suffer with that same disease you know and all. For instance all the Chinese will be good men and that there wasn't any. Why did the Chinese revolt against Janko was a revolt against the West and the Muslims in America. He wasn't an

American. Yeah he was. Why. Yeah let's not make it. Well he was the Heils Chinaman. I mean it's the same thing. Heroically Mr Jones a middle class young negro who attended a mostly white high school Rutgers University in New Jersey and Howard the negro University in Washington D.C. has not experienced the severe deprivation that is a lot of the ghetto negro. All the savage treatment that southern Negroes have to bear at the hands of segregationist and Southern policeman. On the other hand has a very personal reason for distrusting white people. My own father was a slave. I've heard everyone several people mention somebodies grandfather several times and talked about their grandfathers. Well my dad was a slave and it is really when one thinks back is it's incredible. It's like June

Jimmy ball says white people like to pretend like it all didn't happen. The less we didn't have a period to save. Well then for me it happened you know I mean I don't even have to have a history book. They had told me he was assigned to be solde like I remember my childhood I was 10 and all of Negro been living and his genitals cut off his living body. Good doubt then that there's a scar on my soul that some increment of hate and fear remain although I have gone through not losses. And that I am emotionally committed to the

democratic idea. Still there is a whole of decent deep suspicion and white people who come to us so eagerly and just open their arms and back because suddenly the light has come to them to find someone that is now willing to return love for a new job newly awakened love Namor are so shallow and need to find they can't communicate. There are few white people that can communicate anything to illegals are new in India think about it. Or are in the position I won hands on the part of the nickel a rage sense that a rage of injustice and the other hand what I've term a terrific guilt comes in the white man says this couldn't have happened. We've got a democratic country. I deny it just like I was speaking to someone about

the crematoriums in Germany. Well people would say the question we didn't know they were burning six million joules they didn't want to know. As Dick Wright has said. That. They had that kind of sort of civilization because to know what would mean that they would have to pass judgment on it. They would have to pass judgment on themselves. And so they just simply do not want to know these facts. And the Negro is when he tries to talk and he meets this unwillingness to recognize truth isn't ready just you must know what I experienced what the poor are. Many negro writers like James Baldwin and Leroy Jones have upset white liberals sympathetic to the negro cause with statements denouncing white liberals all mass as hypocrites. Here's Leroy Jones followed by Horace Keaton

liberal to me. My mind has never meant anything but that which is in control here. You know when you get past that on one side or the other you're getting what people refer to as some kind of radicals. Most even the radical white man is finally just I mean it would all be for instance who's supposed to be radical. It's just a liberal. Funny I mean if you speak of liberals you have to speak of the same people who have been waging war you know for the last 20 years. It is the finally the liberals in the sense of the people who control the country that are making the wars too. You know those are liberals in Vietnam. You know I mean those sent those people to Vietnam you know Russkies is a liberal or any other any white liberals who sincerity in dedication and commitment what you are accepted as being Joe it's you know

nothing. This is a prince in this part not Norman Thomas. No no I have no use for nor I thinks so. I always associate liberal with missionary. Well you know instead of them say they do this they want to guide you. Yeah. Which is the same. That's what we reject in toto we rejected from anywhere. No we were just Jesus Christ. He was white. Oh I don't I can't quite subscribe to that I don't reject Jesus Christ. Do you think all that you know that the whites must be the foot soldiers in the movement when just it was strange in this first aid has to compensate for the past but not because I'm here to cross you know. One suspects that some Negroes have fallen into the habit of their oppressors. Judging a man by the color of his skin. This can be a handicap in determining who are your real allies. For I have seen civil rights picket lines

that were manned by more whites than negroes and I have seen negroes crossing the same picket lines Ossie Davis the noted negro actor who wrote the Broadway play Pearlie victorious has become a figure in the Negro protest movement in New York. He is a tower of moderation in his outlook but he too regards white liberals with suspicion. We defined we define certain activities. Of people say in the south as bigots by which we mean that they are blinded by a hatred of US based purely on the question of color. Now there are others in the south and in the north who are not bigots are not blinded by hatred and distrust but at the same time. Excuse me they are either hypocrites or what is worse they are innocents and do not know the facts of their own life or the facts of the of their exploitation which since by which the system keeps us in an inferior position and from which they themselves

profit now it is. I know many men myself personally quite liberals who are men of good conscience who can give to the endeavor to be much more than I can afford to and yet they make this money by ownership of slum dwellers in Harlem and other places and it doesn't occur to them that they are keeping the people they are supposed to be helping in an inferior position for economic reasons. And when you try and explain this to the white liberal he gets very defensive and he can't understand then what you are talking about you attacking the system you attacking Law and Order you attacking private property and things like this and you know what do you really want here you don't really want what what I want for you. Therefore we tend to look upon the whites with some degree of suspicion. How far are you willing to go brother to really right this wrong which has us both in chains. What we really fear is that as long as the possibility of reforming the system in which we live is a real one the liberal will walk hand in hand with us. But should we get to the door and find out that

we cannot get through the door without. Resorting to to to to to force or to violence are what is necessary but the weapon by which men achieve their goals. We don't feel that a liberal can go with us that fall that he will go only so far and what his own interest will dictate that he draws back. If he really is my friend if he really is concerned about me he must help me go all the way into the center of the American house. Even if I had to break down if you do is to get in. I have a feeling that the liberal respects the pressure the rights are probably too much to do that. How am I to know that the white liberals will not follow the advice of Faulkner William Faulkner from from Mississippi. The Pulitzer Prize winner a man who represents the best in the liberal Southern tradition who said if it came down to blows and bullets in the in the streets he would be in the streets with his white fellows hunting down negros. Now he said this I'm sure out of the honest feelings of his

hot now. So we as a people who must survive here have to learn not only to accept the open proper stations of good faith. We know that people will say what they mean and they mean it at the time. But what will happen when the hour of the nitty gritty comes as we express it in our community. When the pressure is really down when one must give up blood to prove one's point then what happens. That that's a fear in all of our hearts. The two noted white civil rights workers who were deemed at least to a certain extent as opposed to a limited extent they were not numbers they represent workers in Mississippi the way civil rights workers yes they they have done two things they have paid the last full measure of what they felt was a necessary commitment to the cause of civil rights and they have dragged with them not only their parents but their friends in the total white community to another step further toward realizing what the country is faced

with. But let's look at a fact that had the three young men been negro we would have accepted it and you know everybody would have said Oh how awful would have wanted to rally's raise a lot of funds and we'd have sent it to Mississippi and got on about our business because as I understand it Negroes in Mississippi get to get themselves killed at the rate of about one a week. They just disappear know what it concerns themselves. But there was a difference here. Two young white men were involved. And so that everybody in the north certainly suddenly became concerned in a kind of personal way despite the large number of white students engaged in the civil rights effort in the south suffering harus meant jailings beatings. And in two cases death Leroy Jones does not see any whites as allies for the negroes in his own home area of New York. There you go. I might turn. I might but say the poor negro Where was his ally there on the street with him. The only man he sees white there is a cop. And who finally becomes just a target.

You know when you make a ghetto you enforce that ghetto thinking he doesn't have any allies he don't see any white man there except the man that owns those those stores that take his money and his policeman and exploiting any kind of exploitation comes from the white man. There are no allies. There is only themselves. When they see a white man for the first time clearly I'm probably the only as a target. All the speakers you heard so far except for one interjection are from the north. There seems to be a great diversity between their viewpoints on many aspects from that of the Southern negro and also between the attitudes of different generations of negroes in both areas the younger the negro and the further out of the South he lives the more angry impatient and militant he seems. On a bomb Tom the Grand Old Man of Negro letters came from Louisiana a party French dock and now teaches at Fisk University in Nashville Tennessee. In his youth he was a leading figure in the Negro Rene sauce the Harlem

School of writers and artists in the 20s and was also a militant exponent of Negro protest and radical views. Today he is a courtly much respected dignified scholar a novelist but he too is critical of white liberals that he does not damn them for the color of their skin. In the south the main thing that I would point to is that. A great many people who are alleged to be liberals I wouldn't call liberals at all. But you know feel this way. I think that pretty generally they do not feel that people like. Harding Carter are Virginia's dead and they are liberals although they've enjoyed their reputation among some northerners as being liberals. They're just conservative. Conservatives with a little bit more intelligence than the others. But the general the genuine white liberal like Lillian Smith or

RAF McGill can be of some help or at least let's take a look. Scratch that so we can work with. If the rest of America thinks that the negro objective is just civil rights you had better think again. At least insofar as the Northern Negro is concerned he wants his share in the good life as he sees it betrayed on television in magazines in commercial advertising and in the actual lives of many of his white countrymen. Now how does Katyn and Jones this is the consumer's economies as a society I want to consume it what have what I mean even if it is probably if we got overnight civil liberties for all the girls we still couldn't walk into say the park Sheraton palace shared and buy hamburger. And so I've got more civil liberties now than I can afford. If I'm in New York

I've got 10 times more civil liberties than Lackland for my comments and you got you making 5 million dollars a year. I want 10 percent of it 10 percent of people in this country are black they deserve 10 percent of that. You know that's simple. That's very simple. There's probably enough money in our governors say to straighten up Harlem if somebody wanted Harlem straightened up. If they didn't benefit by its existence. But those problems are so simple that if anyone had a really good heart and good faith there is enough money in this country that the entire world I mean everybody knows that. The thing is this. If a man builds a Ferrari for instance if a man say invents a fan or air conditioner shouldn't that air conditioner be for everybody the next day. If a man builds an airplane should everybody who wants an airplane have that airplane the next day. We're all here together.

Nobody knows how they got here were they going to go. We're all here together. You know on this earth. And yet somebody can invent something or have an idea which should benefit everyone who is interested in it. And yet it's kept that only certain people deserve certain things which is finally is 18th century which of Locke John Locke and the sort of ruling heads of this country still kowtow to some kind of good 18th century morality when they're in the 20th century. One of the only people who are going to work or be those people who have something that they want to do. Oh it's like people like that. I mean nobody else should have to worry. There's no reason for man to work anymore. And something he doesn't want to do. In his economic analysis Leroy Jones skipped spies some facts appreciated by other negroes. For instance Horace kitten the nigger were a Volt is coming at the same time. We have a revolt. More stupendous than an

industrial revolution in the form in the change of our technology. And it's not just the Negro but there be 40 60 80 100 million Americans now living that will never work. If automation is turned loose as rapidly as could be termed what we're facing now is a poverty can asked. A whole cast which will be negro and white predominantly white because there are more whites but disproportionately Negro of kesa people who will never work in their lives. And now if this comes this upthrust of the negro expecting freedom now which means goods and services but carries along with the white proletariat you have then a revolutionary situation very often in the

situations of the white political tends on the colored proletariat and the competition for the jobs available. Of course it seems to me this is a very pessimistic outlook but it's only when I can entertain you leave there have been in this poverty caste race war over the crumbs or an overwhelming ideology which at the moment looks like you'd be fascists incontinent and into it which you organized the black and white proletariat against the hands. I stick my neck way out but that's that's what I see in the immediate future. Even Johnson's poverty program which is a complete farce and just a reshuffling of organizations. Or else thinking of some patch up job or motivating you by

this manpower act for jobs that don't exists or training them giving them skills which have already or are now being outmoded. So the guy is technologically first place. Many are not trainable. Having gone through the second and third generation of being I mean employed and but the skills it gives giving them are all Rob molded before they get through the Corps and do so. I don't see anything but a period of great chaos. I don't I have all outlined the two possibilities I see. But in that I think that if there is going to be America that it will be this upsurge of Negroes that will carry with it a great number of unemployed whites that will force a

change of our institutions. We have created in our country a technology which more and more makes work and workers unnecessary. We have created a new way and you value system in our society. We have created no social ways to deal with the fact that we can produce more and more goods with less and less workers that we will soon have a glut of production. Plus hair raising unemployment and that these factors would obtain if there were no if there was not a single Negro in America. This is the revolutionary situation which describes America today. But because the race question is that we can get all agitated about the race question and use the luxury of race hate and disturbance to evade looking at the saying the real revolutionary problem which faces us the there is now a phenomenon.

Violently disaffiliated black middle class the youngest of the child find for instance that most of the kids when I first came to Greenwich Village for instance there were you know a few negroes and you know most of them were homosexuals over there just because you could get in anybody's bed but now I find all over the east side for instance in a situation that is still a ghetto experience and it's so weird because we come out of say middle class homes and go to a ghetto go to a mixed ghetto and I find all the negro all my friends for instance in New York. The boys like A.B. SPELLMAN RINs of Thomas Paine or Bob Towne I find these people to be the most violently. Not only disaffiliated from that sense of being displayed from the middle class but say not in the sense of be terms of being assimilated but now wanting to actively see this society come to a halt or change.

And the loudest advocates now of let's say come police reconstruction by whatever means have been middle class. Negro I mean to say that if I the son of a postman as you said the middle class and a social worker and a son of a Republican Assemblyman if I can say that I want this to stop now I want a blow up of it has to do I think then you can begin to get the feeling of what the poor man must feel but cannot articulate the kind of complete and I mean Neil ism you know that was LeRoi Jones James Baldwin like Richard Wright another negro writers before him has stated that the American economic system is largely responsible for the subjugated condition of the Negro and that a change in that system will be necessary before the negro can be really free. Also Davis explains.

Jimmy is saying basically that in our society the Negro Problem You've got to solve the basic problem you must reorganize your society not because negroes are striving to get in. They are. But that's not the reason why you have to reorganize it. You must realize it because your society will not work any longer. Automation cannot work in a private property. Private profits aside this is what he's saying basically. He must invent a society which makes automation irrational mode of production. Now this may be a socialistic society. It seems to me certainly that the changes which makes the computer and automation a central factor in the productive capacity of the country will wind up being socialistic whether we will or no. But why can't we as intelligent men face this situation and make the changes that will help us solve our economic problems. The term socialism crops up frequently when one talks to Negroes about the changes they want to see in American society. But they seem to resent any effort at discussing the specifics of economic organization.

The negroes are after a certain pathetic your thing. Now if in giving them it may take on the appearance of what you term socialism OK. Yes but what niggles want are things he is doing during his little ass. Yeah that they they don't really are not preoccupied certainly with those definitions and with ideologies you know they want things in X they're really not north and has no ideological formulation up to now. But if you're going to change the society the whole structure of things to bring more equality and justice for everyone in the society. You you mistake my heart oh yeah I'm going to get. Up for us may change things in society but the upthrust doesn't come to change society. It comes to get things now in the giving of these things. It may force change on society. But there is no ideological

motivation the motivation come from the other guys got things we don't have them. But as in as in science you know you learn from the experiments of others you learn from the from the social and economic structures in different countries. I therefore I'm wondering whether you know negroes are looking around the world and well you know I would say no. You still seem bent as if to make this appear that big rooms are looking towards some ideological solution. They're not bothered with ideology except that white is in their way. They're well and they're looking for things they don't even care much about Republicans and Democrats. You know what you want. Yes but one you love socialism is what a Democrat is why he says you're going to get all negro it's that you know so you can say well are the Negroes now evolving their own approach to something that could be called socialist or what forms as taking organizationally or even

theoretically. I don't think they're dealing with it very much. I wouldn't I don't think they are. I think they will address themselves I think they're just coming up to the negro. The civil rights movement as I find it is has been so engaged in civil rights that they haven't even begun to think about these larger issues. And I know when I talk to two groups and a new group group and I tell the back door they expect me to talk about civil rights and I don't launch out into automation and employment technological unemployment and what the nation is facing. It comes as a great surprise. I don't think that there's been a formulation that's rolled by I know as a matter of fact I think that a different group will probably have to come forward as spokesman before when that's done because those who are leading now are our leaders with the courage to go out on the

street and they are not. Theoreticians yeah that's that that's the whole thing. It doesn't have to be abstractly theorised because what you're pushing for will be finally socialistic. You know you don't have to make a program for it because the whole thrust of what you want finally has to be toward that you know just as a result. But what practical forms is this. You know you've got to have some organization you've got to have some program worked out and agreed on to put your back behind I have to have you don't think well of people who go out in the street didn't demonstrate. There simply isn't a program worked out. And what are you asking for these people who have never been asked what they think about anything that's suddenly come up with some kind of rational plan for the ordering of the society. I'm saying they're going to destroy this inside. When you begin to talk of these long world schemes and things like that the negro believes that you using all of this stuff to tell him in so many words.

Your problem is small is unimportant. You will take a small place in the whole thing so let's deal with the larger problem and just forget about you in this corner. The negroes in the position was it. I don't care what the overall structure is I don't care where we are going up or down. I don't care what happens in all over the world. Man Something must be done about me now. And if it blows up the whole universe I don't care. I cannot ask myself to wait one minute longer because. Some thema some scheme of government is going to come into effect someday which will give me some kind of freedom. Give me something right now you know and I don't mean your hand in friendship. You give a piece of bread in your hand give me a job in your hand give me money give me the tools to help myself and I will help myself. If you're going to have and it is a logical battle a struggle to erect a free society. Do it in conjunction with mine. Do it in support of mine. Don't ask me to give up my struggle to make no kind of world socialistic communistic

any other kind of estate. I don't care I just want a world and which I won't be bugged by rats and roaches in employment and dope and policeman beating me in the head all the time. That's what I want and that's what I insist on having whatever kind of world it is. How ever you explain it however you spell it and don't bring me all of these theories and just bring me some kind of tool to get me out of this hole. One cannot help getting the feeling that the negroes we have heard want to leave the formulation of the new society they're demanding to the white man which suggests an unconscious psychological dependence on him perhaps arising from the history of Negro subordination. However the negro does have reasons for feeling reticent in his discussions with white people. I'LL SEE Davis. There is a lack of communication that goes back through the center of our history since we came in this country as slaves and as deprived peoples as helpless

peoples. We learned early that in order to survive we couldn't expose our real feelings to Leo presses nor let him know what our plans were what we had on our own at all times. Therefore we had to adopt one attitude toward the white world and another totally other attitude was adopted for communication between ourselves. This dichotomous situation still obtains in this country today. No negro feels totally. Sure obvious exceptions in the total scheme. I don't I don't know of any nigger who really does. I don't think that America has really decided and it's mine what it really intends to do about the Negro people. Therefore if we open up too soon if we relax our gods too soon we might wind up like those innocents who were led to the slaughter house and broken wall and our quits in the other places. Now this I don't mean to say that the American scene is so fascist that.

In the immediate future neighbors will be herded into ovens. I merely mean to say that survival requires great prudence on the part of the people who do not have the power on their own to maintain their survival.