NEGROES FAVOURING VIOLENCE

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31097, 28 June 1966, Page 17

NEGROES FAVOURING VIOLENCE

(From FRANK OLIVER. Special Correspondent N.Z.P A J WASHINGTON, June 27. In the last few weeks there has come about an important and even drastic change in the Negro civil rights movement and it is disturbing authorities in many places. Non-violence is giving way to violence. Dr. Martin Luther King, with his turn-the-other-cheek philosophy is losing ground. Many Negroes are no longer interested in integration. They talk of power, political power, and the need to acquire it as first essentials.

Dr. King, a disciple of Gandhi, preaches love your enemies and the virtues of moral persuasion. Many Negroes today will have nothing to do with these precepts. Many are now enrolled in an organisation called ‘‘Deacons for Defence” and their aim is to give as good as they get when violence starts.

There are again predictions

of “a long hot summer” In race relations, of more and yet more, violence, and that frightening phrase “race war” appears more and more in print. Articulate Negroes are saying on public platforms and in the press that they are for self-defence and for reciprocal violence. One Negro writer, in a national circulation magazine, writes that the right of selfdefence is the most basic of human rights, more important than the right to eat a hamburger sitting down, more important than getting a black haircut in a white barbershop, “indeed it is more important than the right to vote.”

Among Negro leaders, advocates of an eye for an eye are increasing in number and making many converts. The advocates of non-violence are losing ground. Dr. King calls on his followers to love the racists who abuse them. “Kick me and I will still love you,” he tells the white racists. This philosophy appears to be gaining no converts and losing some of the adherents it had. Says one believer in an eye for an eye, there is no dignity in allowing a man to spit on one with impunity. “It degrades me and brutalises him,” he says and adds

that when Dr. King calls on Negroes to love their abusers he loses millions of Negro supporters. Another Negro leader says i Dr. King shows a basic misunderstanding of what the Negro on the farm and on the streets is really asking for. Dr. King rejects the call from many Negroes for “black power.” Other leaders believe in it whole-heartedly. One says, “We need black people standing on their own two feet and all the shouts of •freedom now’ are meaningless and empty phrases until we accomplish this.”' He added that the white man will not respect the Negro until the black man stands “toe to toe and eyeball to eyeball with him.” Negro leaders in greater numbers are saying the black man cannot rely on the white man to see that he gets his due, the Negro must fight for himself and what is due to him. Dr. King tells his audiences that “black supremacy would be equally as evil as white supremacy” but he talks to and for diminishing numbers. The Negro march through Mississippi is a case in point Dr. King has been doing all that one persuasive human being can do to keep the march a non-violent one. He

believes that if attacked the marchers should leave it to white authority to take action and corrective measures. But violence continues to erupt as Negroes strike back at whites who taunt and attack them. Non-violence, says one northern newspaper, is fast losing favour as a civil rights tool. A grim-faced Negro told a New York correspondent in Mississippi this week: “Don’t let anyone tell you I’m nonviolent. If I'd been James Meredith and that white man cut loose on me with a shotgun I’d have been shooting back, and I have something to shoot with too.” He said he tucks a .38 revolver in his belt and packs a loaded carbine beside him whenever he takes a trip. Meredith himself says, after being shot, that was the last time he would walk down a Mississippi road without protection. It is clear he is not talking about police protection. Dr. King says: “If blood is shed let it be our blood.” But other Negro leaders say that it has always been Negro blood that has been shed and that moral persuasion alone never yet brought about a revolution and it is a revolution that the Negro wants. “It is time for Americans, black and white, to stop hoodwinking themselves. Non-

violence is a tactic but it must never be a way of life for the black American,” says another.

The one thing most friends and all enemies of the AfroAmericans have agreed on, he adds, is that Negroes are ordained by nature and by God to be non-violent and so a new myth is abroad in the land about the Negroes. Those who preach non-vio-lence, say Negro leaders, should preach it to the whites who practice violence against the Negroes. The means of greater and greater violence exist and many Negroes seem to be working up towards it and racist whites in the South are reported to be working up into a similar state of mind. A New York woman negro, well educated, who married and went to the South has said that she was, when she first arrived, shocked to see so many guns in the homes of Negroes. Of course, there are even more in white homes. In many states it is as easy to buy a gun and ammunition as it is a fountain pen or a radio. They can be bought by mail and in many states no permit to own and no licence to carry are needed. The South has been described as an armed camp and it does not appear to be an overstatement.