Negro Protest Gathers Strength

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31121, 26 July 1966, Page 17

Negro Protest Gathers Strength

(N.Z. Pre„ Asin — Copyright) WASHINGTON, July 23. The Negro protest movement in America is following the normal pattern of most revolutions. It is not waning with the first signs of Negro progress, but getting bolder and more demanding. It is not sticking with the moderate leaders who helped achieve its legal aims, but tending more and more to follow the militants who are demanding larger and quicker economic and social gains. James Reston reported for the “New York Times.” Reston wrote: f This is not a unique Negro reaction, but a typical re-1 action of most American pro-'

test movements. The American industrial workers in the cities and the farmers on the land may have rebelled out of despair, but their rebellion increased with the first hope of success. The violence of the American labour protest movement was not as great at the beginning as in the middle, when the more militant leaders began io see the possibilities of violent opposition. This is the norm. Revolution feeds on itself. There are great dangers for the American Negroes and the nation as a whole in the notion that violence gets better results than patience, but there are probably greater dangers in assuming that the American Negro will now be patient just because the white folks think reason is making progress and is therefore preferable to violence. This is not the way human nature, white or black, behaves, and unfortunately it is not the way governments and communities behave. The

■ facts of life In Harlem in New • York, Watts in Los Angeles, ! and Hough in Cleveland were t well known to the governi ments of those cities. ! All officials there knew that the conditions in their slums • encouraged violence, but they 1 did not or could not react to • reason as well as they could , react to violence. !♦ is the same the world • over. Most of the time, just . grievances are removed only i after the aggrieved resort to the use of power. The will and the machinery I for peaceful settlement of diss putes and the adjustment of • just grievances are defective t and out of date, and the • American Negroes are merely • following the lessons of hisi tory. ■ They have learned, to use ; their own vivid phrase, that : “it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease," and they are i likely to demand more and • more grease, like everybody 1 else. President Johnson, who has : done more to produce legal

remedies for the American Negro than any other President of this century, tried to deal with the recent outbreaks of violence in Chicago, Cleveland and Brooklyn by reminding the Negroes that they cannot remove their grievances by violence because they are only 10 or 11 per cent of the total American population. But this is a conclusive argument only if the large majority of “white power” is used against the 10 per cent minority of “black power,” and this is obviously out of the question.

A violent confrontation of “white power” against “black power” in America is civil war. Violence can compel reason but cannot replace it It can force people to look at the facts, and the facts now, as in Disraeli’s time in England, are that we have today “two nations” —a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor, many of which are black and separate, with their

own values and torments, their own schools, largely segregated in the South by tradition and prejudice, and increasingly resegregated in the northern cities by prejudice and economics. The Federal government has Identified all these problems but the scope of the problems is larger than the scope of the remedies. The revolution is moving faster than Washington, and Washington is not in control of local police, local housing codes, local school boards, and local jobs—the latter being one of the main problems. For the moment, the outcry in the United States is merely against the violence of the cities, and not against the causes of the violence. This is quite different from other urban crises in the American past, when the moral indignation of the progressives was directed not against the protesters but against the conditions that produced the protests.