SPAN: May 1964

"MAY

1964

FIFTY NAYE PAISE

FOREWORD T

HE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY in America a hundred years ago

marked the beginning of a new chapter in the. history of democracy. The final pages of this vital chapter are now being written as the Negro Americans, inheritors of the freedom conferred on them by Abraham Lincoln, proceed to take their rightful place as first class citizens of their country.

The civil rights issue, surcharged with racial, regional and emotional overtones, is apt to appear somewhat confusing to outsiders, particularly in the glare of publicity given to isolated incidents of racial bias. This issue of SPAN, marking the tenth anniversary of the historic U.S. Supreme Court decision banning segregation in public schools, has a number of articles aiming at an objective, factual presentation of the problem. We hope it will assist readers in getting a true perspective on civil rights and race relations in the United States. It will be seen that while progress has been made in several directions, changing of attitudes is necessarily a slow process and much yet remains to be done.

Discussing this problem in another context recently, U.S. Ambassador Chester Bowles drew attention to the successful adoption of the Gandhian technique of non-violent struggle by Negro Americans, of which the great March on WashingtonJast August is a notable example. The wisdom of the enlightened Negro leadership in keeping their struggle peaceful and disciplined has been amply demonstrated by. the unprecedented progress in racial integration achieved in the United States in 1963.

During the year employment opportunities for Negroes increased ) rapidly, they attended university-level classes with whites in every one of the fifty States and, in general, long-standing racial barriers Captain Edward J. Dwight, Jr., centre, is the first member of his race to be selected for possible participation in future U.S. manned space flights.

Other distinguished Negroes are shown on pages 27-30 of this special issue. Photo on left by Don Cravens, Time.

were disappearing in many spheres of public life.

The continuance of this enlightened leadership, the determination of the Administration under President Johnson to accelerate the pace in every area of civil rights and, above all, the new national consciousness of the race issue, are all assurances that, in the words of Ralph Bunche, the Negro Americans' "struggle for equality is being won and will soon be won."

-THE

EDITORS

A white marble cross marks the grave 0/ all. unknown. serviceman at the American cemetery near Manila, Philippines.

SPAN

OF EVENTS MERICANS THROUGHOUT THEworld

will observe May 30 as Memorial A Day, a national day to pay homage to the, men and women who gave their lives in the nation's military service. Special services will be held at all the national cemeteries in the United States, and at some twentyfive cemeteries outside the U.S. The one near Manila, Philippines, for example, contains the graves of 17,182 servicemen and women who died in the Pacific area during World War II.

The names of 36,279 others whose bodies were never recovered are inscribed in an impressive memorial.

Other American cemeteries in France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, England, Tunisia and Luxembourg are final resting places for A,mericans who died inWorld Wars 1 and II. And a small cemetery in Mexico contains the bodies of750 Americans who were killed during the war with Mexico in 1845.

But the largest and most famous is Arlington National Cemetery on the Virginia bank of the Potomac River, directly across from Washington, D.C. The services at Arlington this year will have special significance: John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, is buried here.

The cemetery is a vast tract of rolling fields and tree-shaded lawns.

Here, amidst majestic oaks and elms and in the serene peace and beauty of the green hillsides, sleep many of the nation's most illustrious dead.

The Tomb of the Unknowns in the cemetery, an impressive, simple monument carved from a single block of white Colorado marble, symbolizes America's recognition of indebtedness to her war dead. The'tomb honours the memory of an unidentified American soldier who fell, in France in World War I. His body was brought to U.S. and interred on Armistice Day (now Veterans Day), November 11, 1921. On May 30, 1958, in ceremonies led by President Eisenhower, two more unknown servicemen, one of whom died in World War II and one in the Korean conflict, were laid to rest in crypts beside the first.

IN HONOURING THESEthree nameless heroes, the nation pays tribute to the more than half million Americans who in three wars in this century laid down their lives for their country and the cause of freedom. The placing of wreaths' on the Tomb of the Unknowns by U.S. Presidents and by visiting dignitaries has become a national and international custom.

Only two weeks before he was slain by an assassin's bullet last November, President Kennedy went to Arlington to lay a wreath on Veterans Day. Earlier, on a warm March day last year, while enjoying the view of Washington from the Arlington cemetery the late' President murmured a wish; "I could stay here forever."

Within eight months this wish was tragically fulfilled. On November 25, 1963, while representatives of foreign

nations took their places at the graveside in one of ,the greatest arrays of world dignitaries ever assembled, John F. Kennedy was buried here with the pomp and reverence earned by his work for world betterment and peace.

His final resting place lies high on the grassy slope of a knoll overlooking Washington. The little hill looks down across the Potomac towards Lincoln and Jefferson memorials and the soaring shaft of the .Washington Monument.

Behind the Lincoln Memorial gleam the spires and domes of the city where Mr. Kennedy served in Congress and where later, as President, he stood at the nation's helm through three crisis-filled years.

There, in Arlington's hallowed ground, an "eternal flame," lighted by his widow at the burial services, flickers at the head of the grave. The flame, is to burn in perpetuity as a symbol of President Kennedy's spirit and leadership. It will become an integral part of a permanent monument being planned for the site.

MR. KENNEDYWASthe second U.S. President to be buried in the Arlington cemetery. The first was William Howard Taft (1857-1930), who served as Chief Executive from 1909 to 1913 and later as Chief Justice of the United States. President Taft's grave is near Memorial Gate, the main entrance to the cemetery. Not far away lies Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935), one of America's greatest jurists.

More than 121,000 of the nation's honoured dead are interred in Arlington's 420 acres. Among them are heroes of other nations also. Here, for instance, lies buried Ignace Jan Paderewski, the famous Polish statesman and musician. Another great patriot whose body lay in the Arlington cemetery until the liberation of his "native islands was President Manuel Quezon of the Philippines.

An epitaph on the simple tomb of two Washington brothers, both killed in 1951 in the Korean War, exemplifies the spirit of the known and unknown' Americans who sleep in Arlington. The epitaph reads: "To their conscience they were true and had the genius to be men." It is the same philosophy by which President Kennedy lived and which he expressed in these words: "A man does what he must-in spite Of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressure-and that is the basis of all human morality." •

W. H. WEATHERSBY Publisher DEAN BROWN Editor V. S. NANDA Managing Editor

L. BHATTACHARYA Senior Staff Editor B. Roy CHOUDHURY Senior Artist NAND K. KATYAL Design Artist AVINASH PASRICHA Photo Editor AWTAR S. MARWAHA Production Manager NIRMAL K. SHARMA Copy Manager A. K. MITRA Circulation Manager Published at UNITED STATESINFORMATION SERVICE, Bahawalpur House, Sikandra Road, New Delhi-I, by The American Embassy, New Delhi.

Segregation is no problem to these eight pairs of twins at Hartsdale, N. Y. school.

Problem is for teachers to identify them.

THE PASSIVE IS ACTIVE ENOUGH

by Saunders Redding

7

EQUALITY COMES TO THE SCHOOLS

15

THE NEGRO AND THE LAW

by Arthur E. Sutherland

18

HE PREACHES LOVE

by V. S. Nanda

21

THE GANDHI MEMORIAL LECTURE 23

by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A PORTFOLIO AMERICANS

OF DISTINGUISHED

27

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF CIVIL RIGHTS

36

A CAREER OF CHALLENGE

38

AND HOPE

by Richard Montague DESIGNED TO DAZZLE Photographs by Gordon Parks

43

Prin'ted by ISAAC N. ISAAC at Vakil & Sons Private Ltd., Narandas Building, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay-I.

FRONT COVER: Dr. Ralph Bunche, one of America's most distinguished Negroes, is United Nations Under Secretary for Special Political Affairs and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for efforts in achieving a Palestine settlement.

Pages 1, 2, 23-26, 47, 48 printed by offset at G. Claridge & Co., Bombay.

BACK COVER: Exercising Constitutional rights to "assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances," some 200,000 Nfgroes and whites gathered at Lincoln Memorial last August to urge passage of civil rights legislation.

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ONE OF THE CALENDAR

MOST SIGNIFICANT

OF THE UNITED

CASES EVER TO APPEAR

STATES SUPREME

ON MAY 17, 1954. IT HAD A PROFOUND

EFFECT

CIVIL RIGHTS AND GREATLY ACCELERATED

DECISION

FOR

COURT

ON THE

WAS DECIDED

ON THE ISSUE OF

THE PACE OF PROGRESS.

EQUALITY

u.s. SUPREMECOURT,stout guardian of the American Constitution, has delivered many THE historic judgments during the 175 years since it came into being. But few pronouncements of this august judicial body have led to such vital social consequences and repercussions as those which followed its 1954 verdict against racial segregation in public schools.

In keeping with its tradition of law as a living entity, the Supreme Court reversed¡ by this decision an earlier judgment of 1896 and ruled that the doctrine of "equal but separate" educational facilities was inconsistent with the provisions of the Constitution. Although the decision rdated specifically to public schools, it laid down an important principle which Negro Americans sought to apply to other spheres of public activity. Aroused to a new sense of self-respect and dignity through education and development over many decades, they were ready to take full advantage of the opportunities for judicial, administrative and moral redress inherent in the U.S. democratic system. And the controversy over civil rights, which had been simmering for some ninety years, became a live, national issue.

Soon after the 1954 judgment, a seemingly insignificant incident in Montgomery, Alabama, sparked a movement for integration of public transport and led to a year-long boycott by Negroes of the city's bus service. This well-organized, non-violent movement, conducted under the guidance of an able leader, attracted wide attention. The boycott ended with another judgment of the Supreme Court which held segregation in buses to be illegal. But the struggle for civil rights gathered momentum and was extended to other areas of activity and to hundreds of urban and industrial centres all over the country.

Inevitably the path of progress in civil rights, as in many other areas of development, is not smooth and easy. One obstacle arises, paradoxically, from the functioning of the American democratic system of government under which States enjoy a large measure of autonomy. Jealous of their

These Justices declared public school segregation unconstitutional, left to right: seated, Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Stanley Reed, William Douglas; standing, Tom Clark, Robert Jackson, Harold Burton, Sherman Minton.

prerogatives and influenced by their own views, State authorities are often reluctant to give effect to Federal decisions which they do not favour. This element of local autonomy has been an important factor in the handling of the race problem in some of the southern States. The incidents in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the universities of Mississippi and Alabama, which received world-wide publicity, are examples of the inevitable conflict between national policies and local prejudices.

During the past year, gains made by the Negro Americans in many areas of civil rights-notably education, employment and housing-have been considerable. Undoubtedly much yet remains to be done, but the national goal of abolition of racial discrimination in every form in the United States is ever getting nearer. In the attainment of this goal Negro leadership itself is playing an invaluable role. And it is supported not only by a progressive Administration determined to protect the rights of every citizen and assure him of equal treatment under the law, but also by a steadily increasing volume of enlightened public opinion.

MOHANDAS GANDHI: "The hardest heart and the grossest ignorance must disappear before the rising sun of suffering without anger and without malice."

LEO TOLSTOY: "Resistance by force to what each regards as evil ... is only one of the methods of settling the dispute....

There is another method-that

of not resisting

evil by force at all."

HENRY DAVID THOREAU: "Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them) or shall we endeavor to amend them) and obey them until we have succeeded)or shall we transgress them at once?"

THE

PASSIVE

IS ACTIVE

NE EVENING IN 1955, during the rush hour in Montgomery, Alabama, a Negro woman made a simple statement for a clear and personal reason. She said, "No. I'm sorry."

She could not have foreseen the consequences of her polite refusal-the quickening of spirit, the painful reappraisals of long held notions, the organic change in social action. Her imagination had no such scope, and she had no learning in revolutionary ideas. She knew nothing of passive resistance.

Henry Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy were not even names to her, and Gandhi's image had faded from her memory long ago.

The day Mrs. Rosa Parks was arrested because she refused to give up her seat in the section set apart for white passengers on a crowded bus had been a long day, and she was tired.

That was her only warrant and excuse for defying the traditional separation of whites and Negroes in Alabama's buses and streetcars. But her refusal, quiet and determined, was the beginning of a series of events that, proceeding stilI, continue to produce in America the effects that can only be described as astonishing. After her refusal came the bus boycott, the sitins at segregated lunch counters, the kneel-ins at churches, the wade-ins at segregated public swimming pools, and the "freedom rides" of Negroes and whites determined to enforce the outlawing by Federal courts of segregation in inter-state

O

ENOUGH

buses arrd terminals. Most recently, popular demonstrations have broadened the movement's objectives to include full equality in housing, education, employment and political representation. The admission of Negro students to State universities in Mississippi and Alabama, the last two States which officially resisted desegregation of schools, reflects the inexorable force of this movement.

What was new in all of this was the personal involvement of large numbers of Negroes in States of the Deep South and the effective, though peaceful, methods they evolved spontaneously to bring to public attention their protest against discriminatory treatment. In most States, of course, there was and is no racial discrimination in public transportation or public facilities. Other aspects of discrimination had been eliminated earlier by Federal action, e.g., the ending of segregation in the armed forces and in public housing, Many States had passed laws forbidding discriminatory employment practices. But these and other steps towards full equality had been taken mainly on the leadership level. The bus boycott in Montgomery was the first important example of a Negro community-with the help and approval of many whites-acting on its own and creating new leaders in the process.

Mrs. Parks made her spontaneous gesture of passive resis-

A moral

consensus

began

to form.

tance on a Friday. On Sunday the Negroes of Montgomery read the bluntly-worded leaflets distributed in their churches, which said: "Don't ride the buses .... If you work, take a cab, or share a ride, or walk.

"Come to a mass meeting, Monday at 7-00 p.m., at the Holt Street Baptist Church for further instruction."

On that day, Monday, no Negroes in Montgomer:y rode buses anywhere. They went in Negro-owned cabs, if they could afford to; or in private cars, if they had them. They went in wagons drawn by mules; they pedalled bicycles. But mostly they walked, and this often meant many kilometres, to work, to school, or just to town and back. And that night hundreds filled the Holt Street Church and thousands jammed the streets around it. Most of them heard for the first time a voice that has since been heard around the world.

T

Rosa Parks' refusal to vacate a seat for whites in segregated bus led to Negro boycott. ended in integration victory.

HE VOICE BELONGED to Martin Luther King, Jr., a young Negro clergyman who, though relatively new to Montgomery, had already been given the responsibility of heading an emergency group called the Montgomery Improvement Association.

Formed in a sullen, hasty hour, this association had little in common with other groups dedicated to the cause of Negro rights. It was ad hoc. and it was strictly local. It was an extemporaneous grouping of local Negro ministers with a sprinkling of plain citizens who had no experience in organized social action. Moreover, its chairman represented a new kind of Negro leader. Martin Luther King had no voice of thunder, and the lightning of hatred did not strike from his words. A crusader, yes; but a crusader without violence. What Dr. King said that night was to be the guiding principle of all that followed in the months and years to come-the organization of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which Dr. King now heads; the re-activation of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); the freedom rides and other forms of protest.

"Our actions must be guided by the deepest principles of our Christian faith," he said. "Love must be our regulating ideal .... 'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and pray for them that despitefully use you .... ' If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, 'There lived a great people-a black people-who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.' This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility."

Like everything else in the situation until then, these words were spontaneous. After that, neither words nor actions were.

Spontaneity dies quickly, and you cannot mobilize 50,000 people around momentary impulse. The Negroes of Montgomery mobilized. They brought all their resources to bear on a single objective-to be free of the nagging injustice of segregation on the buses. Within a matter of hours the eighteen Negro taxicab companies, commanding 200 cars, agreed to transport passengers at bus rates, and when it was found to be unlawful for taxis to charge less than a minimum forty-five cents, which few Negroes could afford day in, day out, the Montgomery Improvement Association organized a transportation pool of

private cars. Later, with the contributions of local Negroes the Association purchased fifteen station wagons, registered each in the name of a different church, and added them to the pool.

One dispatching office was expanded to forty-six, manned by dozens of volunteers for the morning and evening rush periods six days a week. Forty-two pickup stations were located along major bus routes; and 400 private cars engaged in this voluntary operation at its peak.

It cost a lot of money. Thanks to world-wide press coverage, money, unsolicited, poured in. It came from every State in the Union, and from church groups in nearly every city in the United States. It came from Europe, Asia, Africa; from black and brown and yellow and white. Sometimes inspiring words came with it: "The immediate issue has not been won as yet but such faith and determination is bound to be triumphant."

The boycott was "triumphant," segregation was ended on the buses and streetcars, but only after a long and sometimes bitter struggle. The supporters of segregation hopefully expected that the boycott would peter out; that winter weather would chill the determination of the boycotters. But Montgomery's Negroes remained firm despite cold weather and harassment of many kinds. Still the buses rolled empty. Negroes continued to walk. "Yes, son," an old Negro woman told an inquiring reporter, "my feets is tired, but my soul is free."

For by this time Negroes had discovered more than the physicalresources of courage and strength which brought victory for the boycott and the desegregation of Montgomery's buses.

They had discovered that they were not alone. A moral consensus was beginning to form, and Negroes were drawing spiritual strength from deep wells of religious faith. "The spirit of God was in our hearts," Dr. King said later. Race-consciousness, too, had been greatly intensified, first by the unity that had emerged in their victorious struggle, and second by their knowledge of what black Africans were accomplishing in Africaalthough the struggle of Africans was not the same as the struggle of Montgomery Negroes who, after all, were Americans seeking full integration into national life, not freedom from an alien rule. Above all, the Negroes of Montgomery were drawing on the American heritage of pragmatic idealism, on a tradition of humanistic learning, and, unmistakably, on the substance of a philosophy most would never learn.

Always incarnate in the deed is the spirit of the doer, and in the end it is the spirit that comes up for judgment. Be-

hind the concrete act of the boycott, the unexpected tenacity of purpose, and the continuing dramatic manifestations of the will to freedom stands a philosophical intelligence, and moving through the act, the purpose and the will is a spirit reborn twice in our century. Mahatma Gandhi embodied it first in modern times, and his age, too, was reluctant to receive it. All ages have been reluctant. No doubt a murmur of surprise and rejection pulsed through the multitude when Christ said: "But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also."

No sagacious social reformer had then created a technique and no philosophical intelligence had erected an edifice of thought through which this demanding spirit-indeed, this spiritual demand-eould have effective expression. It was not until the nineteenth century that Henry Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy created the theoretic structure, and not until the twentieth that Mahatma Gandhi fashioned the technique. Each of them, responding to the demands of his own character, responded also to the social imperatives of his own time.

How alike they were! Some of the similarities were bedded deep in personality, but others were due to accidents of social circumstances that wore the ugly face of moral wrong: American slavery for Thoreau, Russian serfdom for Tolstoy, Indian colonial vassalage for Gandhi. These men were unorthodox but deeply religious; anarchists of one kind or another; ascetics to one degree or another; non-conformists; independent thinkers who, following different paths of experience, nevertheless came to like conclusions.

T

OLSTOY PROBABLY had not read Thoreau, whose works were not published abroad until the 1890's, when the Russian's seminal work was done, yet he formulated his theory of nonresistance to evil on exactly the same moral premise on which Thoreau based his argument for civil disobedience. Though Tolstoy makes much more explicit use of it in The Kingdom of God is within You than Thoreau does in his essay, "Civil Disobedience," the New Testament was an inspired source of thought for both.

And Gandhi read both-for he was essentially like them.

He once remarked to an American friend, "You have given me a teacher in Thoreau, who furnished me through his essay on Civil Disobedience scientific confirmation of what I was doing in South Africa .... And Russia gave me in Tolstoy a teacher who Continued on next page

HISTORIAN,novelist, essayist, and teacher, Saunders Redding has concerned himself in much of his writing with the subject that is the title of one of his books: On Being Negro in America. He speaks in that autobiographical volume of the conflict between "two distinct reactions-the one normal and intrinsic to the natural self; the other, entirely different but of equal force, a prodigy created by the accumulated consciousness of Negro-ness." He has never resolved this conflict, but it has served to give even his historical works, They Came in Chains and The Lonesome Road, the illuminations of a double vision. That same double vision of himself as an American and a Negro appears in An American in India, Professor Redding's report on his lecture tour in India.

"As a writer," he has written, "I feel that my first obligation is to truth. Since life is tragically short, there is only so much truth that one can experience and know about in the wholly personal and intimate way that is necessary to the writer .... I call myself a realist. I have never taken intention for performance. I am not tolerant."

Both his parents had attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., and it was assumed that he and his brothers would go to college too. Mr. Redding chose Brown University in New England. "It was at college that I began to give serious attention to writing, not as a career but because I liked it; though only heaven knows why, since even then the effort used to tear me apart." His novel, A Stranger and Alone, has been called "an angry book, written with both insight and skill." He continues to divide his time between teaching, as Professor of English at Hampton Institute in Virginia, and writing.

American

Negroes

adapt "satyagraha"

furnished a reasoned basis for my non-violence."

Gandhi's non-violence, as Professor Homer Jack has pointed out, was an "epochal social invention." And it is not altogether a matter of chance that American Negroes adapted this invention to their own social needs. Their sympathy for it has roots in their psychological condition and in their history.

There is the classic image of "Uncle Tom," the Negro who remains serene and unprotesting despite injustice and ignominy.

Yet there is an enigma here, or at the very least a paradox; for the present generation of Negroes scorns and rejects that image.

One may explain this rejection as being the result of an older generation's bitter disavowal of the Negro's humiliating past, as that past is reconstructed in Harriet Beecher Stowe's epic novel. But the paradox remains. There were elements of truth and reflections of reality in the character of Mrs. Stowe's hero.

Nor were "patience," "forebearance," and "humble simplicity" all. There was "steady good sense" too, and "something about his whole air self-respecting and dignified."

But Negroes rejected these affirmative traits along with the submissive ones, primarily because these, overshadowing the stiffer virtues, came to represent a structure of Negro personality too much glorified for its capacity merely to endure suffering by the romantic apologists for slavery; it came to represent an abdication of natural rights; it came-in the final analysisto be a supine embracement of one's own degradation.

obtain such fundamental rights as freedom from mob violence, unrestricted use of the ballot, freedom from segregation, etc.

Have you, out of your struggle in India, a word of advice and encouragement to give us ?"

Gandhi: "All I can say is that there is no other way than the way of non-violence-a way, however, not of the weak and ignorant but of the strong and wise."

In 1944, when Martin Luther King, Jr., enrolled as a freshman at Morehouse College, Dr. Mays was its president. that applied to Morehouse. It was "strong on race," -that is, mili tant in defence of Negro rights. This is not to say that it was racist-it had (and has) white members of the faculty: it is to note only that it was strong on race because, antecedently, it was strong for social justice. It taught that a society that condones inequities in civic life must change or perish. It believed a phrase that had appeared in its bulletin, "Education is for life and for service to humanity." It promoted the proposition that all men are brothers. Add to these the words of hope and promise expressed in the American creed that "all men are created equal" and you get an idea not only of the atmosphere of Morehouse College but of the notional content of humanistic learning in the best colleges, white as well as Negro, all over America. Morehouse prepared its students not only for change, but to be the agents of change. As freshman there, Martin Luther King first read Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience."

"Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority?"

King read: "A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight."

Thoreau led to Gandhi, and Gandhi led back to Tolstoy, who had written that, "Resistance by force to what each regards as evil ... is only one of the methods of settling the dispute ....

There is another method-that of not resisting evil by force at all."

King's dialectical learning continued with the influential social philosophers, among them Rauschenbusch and Marx, Plato and Aristotle, Rousseau, Bentham, Mill and Locke. But King read history too, and particularly American history, and especially the history of the Negro in America.

Thanks to governrnent financing of education for World War II veterans, and to the post-war levelling off of the economy at new high plateaus of production and income, and to slowly broadening opportunities, thousands of young Negroes were getting the same kind of learning and acquiring from it similar points of view. So, too, were some whites, for an increasing number of their institutions were offering courses in American Negro history, literature and art, and many more white scholars were putting intellectual freedom to the uses of social change.

Continued on page 12

T

HERE IS A PHRASE

a'

also historically true but seldom projected in popular romantic fiction; and there were other groupings of virtues-of obdurate courage, of spiritual force, of faith in ideals; and these prevail-in the Negroes' own stories, songs and spirituals.

Surely Dr. Howard Thurman, the Negro educator and clergyman, was thinking of these virtues that day in 1936 when, telling Gandhi that American Negroes were ready to receive his message, he went on to say: "Much of the peculiar background of our own life in America is our own interpretation of the Christian religion.

When one goes through the pages of the hundreds of Negro spirituals, striking things are brought to my mind which remind me of all that you have told us today."

Howard Thurman was neither the first nor the last Negro leader to make the pilgrimage to Gandhi. Many Negro Americans revered Gandhi as a great man long before his true greatness was recognized by those who opposed him. Although, of course, the masses of Negroes did not feel the impact of Gandhi's ideas, nor know the significance of Gandhi's programme in South Africa and India, their leaders did. These leaders knew, too, that Gandhi was "concerned with the fate of coloured peoples everywhere." Consider also the fact that Gandhi himself was "co loured," and the further, more important fact that a religious tradition was viable in his life and work, and the measure of his greatness, as Negroes saw it, comes full.

No wonder certain Negro leaders, in groups and singly, went seeking Mahatma Gandhi-in the late 1930's and in the 1940's. Not only Thurman, who had graduated from Morehouse College in 1923, but Dr. Mordecai Johnson, then president of Howard University, who had graduated from Morehouse in 1911, and Benjamin Mays, whose long interview with Mahatma Gandhi contained this exchange: Mays: "Negroes in the United States are struggling to

T

HERE WERE OTHER

IMAGES,

to own needs.

At the call of their leaders, people walked to their places of work, braving adverse weather, rather than use segregated buses.

Grey Villet, Life

Negro sought

American Gandhiji's

leaders advice.

What was happening was that the older modes of thought were passing. The old personal-philanthropy approach to social problems-and specifically the race problem-had proved inadequate. The idea of the Negro's political wardship was dead, and with it the idea of the "talented tenth" of Negroes who would be permitted to rise to eminence in the national life.

Deadest of all was the idea of an imperio imperium-a locked-in Negro community within the white community-and the executive branch of the government had certified its demise. It had done this by issuing an executive order against discrimination in government service and in industries under government contract, by establishing a Federal commission on civil rights, and by encouraging committees,set up in twenty States to press for non-discriminatory employment practices in private industry.

But Negro Americans were not content to depend on government action alone. The organize-to-protest idea was still in use, still vital, as Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Congress for Racial Equality were soon to prove. Indeed, it was because of organized protests, mounting vigorously, that the history-created image of the Negro as a non-entity was dissolving. Non-entities do not protest. They do not organize legislative lobbies, and electioneer for adjustments of their grievances. They do not make themselves a nuisance in the body politic by laying claim to a share in concepts that, as nobodies, they are not expected to understand. So the image was dissolving back into the fog of myth from whence the world's guilty conscience had conjured it.

Powerfully aiding the process of dissolution was the most basic of Western and American concepts, namely the equality of man. The average American may not be very conscious of his convictions-he does not wave them like flags-but put to the test, the convictions have a way frequently of proving out. Even when the conviction of the equality of man appears to be denied by inequities in the social order, it does not die. And although he occasionally neglects and seems to betray it, the average American loves democracy.

This is not to say, however, that the average American of whatever stock fully understands democracy, or his own convictions about it. He understands most of its mechanics and Text continued on page 14

" Non-violence

is the

way

enough of the complicated structure of its institutions to make them serve him. But he needs also to be reminded again and again that democracy is a covenant of faith that does not work except by repeated acts of faith.

Mrs. Rosa Parks did not understand this that day in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.

But the four Negro college students who sat down at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, understood it. If theirs was a spontaneous act-as certainly it was-it was committed in the knowledge that the democratic covenant of faith is best preserved by repeated challenges of that faith. They were in rebellion, but not against democracy. They were in rebellion against local customs that contravene the basic law that all men have equal rights to freedom and justice. Negro students were soon joined by white college students who knew what the ideals of democracy had taught them: that whatever diminished the dignity of any man diminished all men.

Within a week the movement spread to other cities in North Carolina. Within a month every State in the South, excepting Mississippi, had seen its like-the "sober-faced, well-dressed students," whose dignified determination was unruffled by abuse, and who never raised so much as a finger or a tone in violence.

The numbers grew from four to 4,000, to 40,000, Negro and white, actively involved. Local police, acting under local ordinances, arrested representative numbers for "trespassing," "loitering," "unlawful assembly," and "disorderly and riotous conduct." Many of those arrested chose imprisonment, even when offered the alternative of paying a fine. By March the "sit-ins" had become a great moral crusade, and student leaders sprang up in colleges throughout the land. By the end of 1961, segregation had been ended in restaurants and at lunch counters in more than 200 southern communities.

Wherever it spread, and whatever its objects-eating places, . bus terminals, waiting rooms, theatres, churches-the "sit-in" represented an act of faith in the inherent dignity of man, in the concept of equality, and in the belief that, as Martin Luther King has said, "the universe is on the side of freedom and justice."

To put this another way-paraphrasing the Negro novelist, Ralph Emerson-the fate of Americans is to become one and yet remain many.

A

PERIODOF comparative quiet, interrupted by isolated small-scale demonstrations followed the 1960eruption. But the series of partial breakdowns of the old rigid barriers of segregation in some southern States had two effects: it showed that the racial situation in America had become more open to change than at any time since the period directly after the Civil War; and it encouraged demands for greater and faster progress in achieving the goal of first-class citizenship for all Negroes.

In 1963, starting in Birmingham, Alabama, and then spreading throughout the country, peaceful Negro demonstrations (in which many white persons joined) erupted on a larger scale than ever before. In many southern communities, public facilities and accommodations were desegregated even before the demonstrations. Others sped up the process as a direct result of the mass protests, which were inspired by Reverend King's philosophy of non-violence or passive resistance. Statements and actions by leaders of government, business and professional life

of the

strong

and

wise."

revealed a heightened sense of urgency in fulfilling the country's pledge of full equality for all of its citizens.

On August 28, 1963, there took place the largest peaceful mass demonstration in the nation's history. More than 200,000 Negroes and whites gathered before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to bring the problem of civil rights before a wide national public and to urge action on every level of government.

And it became clear at this historic assemblage that Martin Luther King was the moral spokesman of the rapidly growing movement which demanded fulfilment of America's democratic promise. "I have a dream," he told the vast audience, which included Senators, Representatives and members of the administration, "deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ... that all men are created equal."

M

ARTIN LUTHERKINGadded in this speech: "We (Negroes) must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul-force." He has also written, "Most (people) do not believe in non-violence as a philosophy of life." He might have added that they do not understand it either.

As a philosophy, non-violence is couched in a very complicated and special language in which the Greek agape equals the Hindi ahimsa, which equals love, which equals all-men-arebrothers, which equals love-thine-enemy, which equals passive resistance to evil. But passive resistance is not passive at all: it is "active non-violent resistance to evil," which is the Gandhian technique of "Satyagraha."

As a technique, active non-violent resistance to evil has two interdependent parts: a constructive programme-in this case, the abolition of legal segregation and the winning of the white man's friendship and understanding; and a "destructive" programme of non-cooperation with the system and the agencies -social, civil, economic-which are responsible for segregation and the laws that support it.

In carrying out this technique, the non-violent resister is not only willing to accept violence without inflicting it, he also invites violence upon himself. And how does he justify this reversal of man's instinct to avoid pain? "Suffering is redemptive both for him who suffers and him who imposes it," King writes.

"Rivers of blood may have to flow," Gandhi said, "but it must be our blood. The hardest heart and the grossest ignorance must disappear before the rising sun of suffering without anger and without malice."

Elaborated as Gandhi elaborated it in Satyagraha in South Africa, My Soul's Agony, and at least two other books, it is an entire system of mystical philosophy. It is a far remove from the moral philosophy of Tolstoy and the even simpler political philosophy of Thoreau. Simplified as Martin Luther King simplified it, non-violent resistance becomes the principle of Christian love. "It was the Sermon on the Mount, rather than the doctrine of passive resistance .... It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negroes to protest with the creative weapon of love .... In other words, Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method."

Resist not evil! It is a stern injunction. Translated into passive resistance, it is a sterner doctrine. It is a call to conscience, to courage, and to the greatest idealism. It is an exercise of the spirit. And translated into action, so, too, is democracy. •

All children must have equal right to develop,

EQ U ALITY CO MES TO THE SCHOOLS

THE 1954 Supreme Court decision, desegregation of public schools at all levels has made steady progress almost everywhere in the country, including school districts in the Deep South which were, until recently, a stronghold of white supremacy.

The Supreme Court ruling "represented both good law and good judgment-it was both legally and morally right," President Kennedy told the U.S. Congress in 1963.

The time, he added, had come to realize that the court-ordered desegregation could not be thwarted either by violence or by legalistic evasions.

One regrettable exception, however, was the University of Mississippi, where incidents of violence accompanied the end of segregation and the battle for integrated education is not yet fully won. Much remains to be done, especially in the field of primary and secondary school desegregation. But here also prospects are bright, with additional schools joining the integrated rolls each year.

S

INCE

Aim zs to desegregate all levels of education.

The last two years, notably, have seen many desegregation plans put into effect. public schools in Atlanta, Dallas, New Orleans, Memphis and elsewhere-were desegregated peacefully. Besides, various specialized institutes, until recently exclusively white-some coming under the National Defence Education Act, some conducted by the National Science Foundation-are now opening their doors to Negro applicants voluntarily.

Desegregation in higher education, comparatively, has presented little difficulty.

Unlike the University of Mississippi, many State supported and previously all-white universities in Georgia and South Carolina have in recent years accepted the historic challenge with calm and maturity. Even earlier, several other State supported universities-those of Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas and Kentucky-were integrated without incident or disorder.

The pictures on these pages present a sampling of the advancements being made to give Negro children equal opportunities for education. • In 1962 alone, more than sixty school districts-inclUding

Fringe benefits of integration inclirap" nnJrf! faGs- fOr

l~ewu Ie-a"ctters:

Integrated education is becoming a fact of Ii/e. even in Deep South.

THE NEGRO AND THE LAW CONSEQUENCES of human slavery-consequences not entirely eliminated even today, despite ninety-seven years that have passed since the American Constitution forbade all such servitude-have presented in our time to the United States its most troublesome racial problems. We have had other ethnic frictions, of course. Voluntary migration of over 40,000,000 people from every part of the globe to our country has made some such difficulties inevitable.

But our main racial problem began in 1619 when a Dutch ship brought to our shores a cargo of Africans. The captives were sold as slaves at Jamestown, Virginia. This original wrong, and the succeeding wrongs which stemmed from the same human indignity, have brought trouble and sorrow throughout the following centuries.

An appraisal of the present constitutional position of racial minorities in the United States must be made with some recollection of these three and a half centuries of history. Our constitutional ideals have not been stationary.

They have, we hope, improved with the development of our moral concepts. But for some members of any society time works slowly. Some traces of old social attitudes still survive, some consequential residues of the beliefs of past centuries still remain among us, here and there, almost a century after a bitter war ended our human slavery. Our constitutionalism is partly a system of morals. And moral growth is a slow process.

Social and legal attitudes in the United States vary in space, as well as in time.

A feature of our Constitution which must be remembered in appraising today's problems of racial minorities is the Federal structure of our republic. Federalism is part of our deep commitment to a theory of limited government. Among us a cherished political doctrine insists that governmental power be restrained rather than absolute. And one means to

L

INGERING

this end is a measure of local autonomy, constitutionally guaranteed. Respecting some matters of government, our nation is divided in fifty separate polities, fifty States, each semi-independent as to those laws thought to govern matters essentially local rather than national. Schools, hotels, theatres have customarily been considered such local, State-controlled matters. Each State has its own elected Governor, its own legislature and its own system of courts. In the same city often are found governmental officers of the central government- and officers of the States, each performing his own separate duties in neighbouring buildings.

Of course, the Constitution of the United States, and Federal statutes passed under its authority, are supreme. But in matters which the Constitution leaves to State control, State governments have the last word. This toleration of local autonomy, within reasonable limits, is one expression of our distrust of an all-powerful central rule.

Here then, I undertake a brief survey of these two great facts in our constitutional story: change for the better, during many generations, of our moral, and so of our legal, attitudes towards our fellow-men of different races; and the effect on this change of the peculiar, mosaic-like governmental structure of component States which makes up our Federal Union.

As the eighteenth century closed,

people in many of the thirteen American States came to feel that capture and sale of Africans, often by African tribesmen, and their importation for slavery was a great moral wron'g. Our southern States, however, were largely dependent on slave labour for the conduct of their plantations. Deep sectional differences thus developed; resulting constitutional compromises are apparent in the now obsolete slavery provisions of the 1789 Constitution. One such clause permitted importation of slaves until 1808. But this provision did not prevent the Congress from enacting regulations governing the conduct of United States shipping. And so from 1794 on, the Congress imposed heavier and heavier penalties on any citizen engaging in the overseas slave trade. From January I, 1808, the Congress prohibited all importation of slaves.

In 1820 our Congress by statute treated overseas slave-trading as piracy, punishable by death.

The legislatures of some of our States, too, began to pass anti-slave-trade laws.

For example, the State of Maryland by a statute of 1796, provided that any Negro brought into that State for sale or residence should become free. State courts enforced such laws, and their judgments freeing slaves were affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Unfortunately, the law is a complicated business. In 1857 a man named Dred Scott, held as a slave, brought suit claim-

A PROFESSOR OF LAW at Harvard University, Mr. Sutherland served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and has long been a student of constitutional law. In this article he discusses the rights of racial minorities in the United States, and the process by which the American Negro during the past century has gone from slavery to full citizenship.

The Supreme Court Building is near the U.S. Capitol in Washington. All major civil rights cases have been argued here.

ing that he had become a free man when his owner had removed him into the northerly frontier territory, once part of French Louisiana, in which, by an Act of the United States Congress, slavery had been forever prohibited. The Supreme Court of the United States, to which Scott's case finally came, held that because of his slave ancestry, he was not a "citizen," and so was under certain procedural disabilities. It further held that the Act of Congress purporting to abolish slavery in the northerly territory was beyond the constitutional powers of the central government. The unfortunate Scott was thus neither a citizen nor a free human being.

Dred Scott's case, a symbol of the evils of slavery, became a rallying cry for anti-slavery sentiment in the northern part of the United States. Memory of Scott's case was one of the influences in the 1860 election of the anti-slavery President Abraham Lincoln. Civil War between the northern and southern States broke out early in 186l.

Four years of bitter conflict, costly in lives on both sides, ended with the defeat of the South; and three Amendments to the Federal Constitution soon wrote the result into our fundamental law. The 13th Amendment of 1865 provided that slavery should not exist within the United States or in any place subject to its jurisdiction. The 14th Amendment of 1868 provided that all persons born or naturalized in the United States should be citizens of the United States and of the State where they reside, and that no State should abridge the privileges or immunities of any citizen of the United States nor deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person equal protection of the laws. In 1870 the 15th Amendment provided that rights of the citizens of the United States to vote should not be denied or abridged by any State or by the United States by reason

of race, colour, or previous condition of servitude.

The constitutional history of racial minorities since 1870 has been written in the judicial construction of these amendments. Within fifteen years after the end of the Civil War, Americans of African descent began to establish in the courts their right to equality in the administration of justice and equality in voting procedures. Our courts declared unconstitutional and invalid any State laws to the contrary. Most such cases, naturally, originated in States where slavery had prevailed and whe're nonwhite population was substantial. In 1880, for example, the Supre1Ue Court upheld a criminal charge against a Virginia State judge for failing to select Negroes as jurors. Administration of justice was to be colour-blind.

HE 14THAMENDMENT is subject to one important qualification. While that Amendment forbids the States to discriminate unjustly against racial groups, its terms contain no prohibition against discrimination by private citizens. The Federal Congress, under our theory of limited powers, can only legislate concerning those matters constitutionally entrusted to it, and the 14th Amendment grants to Congress no authority to make laws against private racial discrimination; it forbids public, not private injustice. An 1883 case, giving effect to this principle, was a disappointment for the former slaves and their children. The Supreme Court had before it an Act of Congress forbidding racial discrimination by hotels, theatres and passenger carriers, none of them operated by the public authorities. The Court held the Act of Congress invalid because it exceeded the Federal powers; it attempted to regulate wrongs not perpetrated by a State. ]n 1886 the Supreme Court, this time

T

applying the "equal protection clause" of the 14th Amendment in favour of some Chinese nationals, held that a California administrative official was constitutionally required to observe racial impartiality in granting or withholding licences to conduct laundries. Chinese, alike with others, were entitled to earn a living.

In 1896 the Supreme Court faced a particularly difficult problem. A nonwhite railway passenger, travelling within Louisiana, challenged the constitutional validity of a statute of that State requiring railroads to provide "equal but separate" accommodations for the different races.

The Supreme Court upheld the State law on the premise that separation of races was not inconsistent with their equal treatment.

T

HATDECISION was not overruled until 1954; but during the interval the constitutional position of the minority races improved in other important respects.

They made notable progress in political standing. From 1885 on, the Court sturdily upheld the voting rights of nonwhites. For example, in the United States, selection of candidates who stand for election to public office is ordinarily made in "primary elections," in which members of the political parties vote for those whom they wish as their party candidates in the final election. In some States, the predominant party undertook to limit party membership to white citizens, thus excluding non-whites from participation in primary elections, and effectively preventing them from influencing the final election. In a series of judgments during the thirty years following 1925 the Supreme Court struck down all such "white primary" devices.

In 1946 the Supreme Court found in the "commerce clause" of the Constitution a weapon to use against some "equal but separate" State laws. The Constitution entrusts to the central government control of commerce "among the several States." The Supreme Court held State "equal but separate" railway or omnibus laws invalid when applied to passengers on a journey in more than one St.ate.

Such a Stat.e travel-segregat.ion law, if enforced at the State border, would oblige travellers to rearrange their seating and would thus interfere with inter-State commerce which is the peculiar concern of the Federal Government. So in 1946, on int.er-State journeys, "equal but separat.e" ceased to be the rule.

The Supreme Court made ot.her great advances towards racial equality by a series of decisions holding unconstit.ut.ional any attempt by law to restrict nonwhit.es to segregated residential areas. In 1917 t.hat. Court held invalid a city ordinance which in effect established by law some city blocks solely for t.he residence of whit.es, and others solely for non-

Supreme Court judgments

thwart segregationists' taetzcs.

whites. Some private persons, who were buying and selling houses, tried to avoid the effect of this judgment by writing in their deeds of conveyance a requirement that the premises never be occupied by any but white residents. In 1948 the Supreme Court frustrated this device; it held unconstitutional the judicial enforcement of any such private bargain. All branches of government, the judicial as well as the legislative and executive, are forbidden to have a hand in restricting a person's choice of residence.

Meantime a series of courtroom contests went on over the provisions of law, in seventeen States and in the District of Columbia, permitting or requiring the maintenance of "equal but separate" facilities for public education. In a number of cases involving State universities, the Supreme Court applied the requirement of equality with much strictness, directing that such public institutions, as a condition of racial separation, be in fact equal. The steady success of non-white citizens in so many different types of constitutional lawsuits began to suggest that before long the 1896 doctrine of "equal but separate" would itself be repudiated. The Supreme Court of the United States is not bound to follow its previous decisions when it becomes convinced that they were mistaken, and so there was a constitutional possibility of ending the legality of all "equal but separate" statutes. occurred on May 17, 1954, a notable date in our constitutional history. The Supreme Court on that day decided cases concerning "equal but separate" public schools in four States and in the Federal District of Columbia. In all these cases that Court gave judgment in favour of school children who were protesting against compulsory attendance at segregated schools. It overruled its own 1896 precedent which had established the doctrine of "equal but separate." Shortly thereafter the Court rejected "equal but separate" laws governing local omnibuses and such places of public recreation as municipal golf courses and bathing beaches. The Supreme Court thus by 1956 established the constitutional invalidity of any law, State or

E

XACTLY THIS

Court's 1954 school segregation opinion.

To those who are unfamiliar with the operation of our Federal Union, and with the theory of limited government under which we rule ourselves, it may seem inexplicable that our great and powerful nation, which has spoken through its Constitution and its Supreme Court against racial discrimination by any State, still delays forcible requirement of obedience by several of its States. But law in action differs from law in theory. A judicial decree, strictly speaking, operates only on the persons summoned to court. And thus far, comparatively few of the many thousands of State and local school officials in these areas where desegregation is unpopular have been summoned.

Additional proceedings are continually being started, but all this takes much time.

Practical human difficulties retard the transformation of custom among millions of people. The remarkable fact is that so many have complied, not that a comparatively small number still resist.

Five years ago, when in Little Rock, Arkansas, the local and State authorities appeared to be using force to oppose the national will in desegregation, the President at once sent United States troops who promptly restored order without shooting. Little Rock was, fortunately, an isolated instance. Traditionally we proceed by persuasion, not by force.

national, requiring that non-white people keep to themselves.

The difficult constitutional progress of racial minorities in the United States since the historic decisions of 1954 can only be understood by keeping in mind the substantial degree of local governmental independence provided by our Federal system. The ancient attitude towards non-whites still persists among many white citizens in some of the seventeen States where State law had long segregated the schools. The other thirty-one States -as well as Alaska and Hawaii which have achieved Statehood since 1954were not affected by the Court's decision, since their public schools were unsegregated. In the State public educational systems schools are not maintained

by Federal, but by State officials. Such schools are regulated by laws passed by State legislatures. The" State legislators are elected by constituents who, in a certain number of States, resent the Supreme Court's 1954 judgments, and are eager to find ways to avoid or delay compliance. Thus despite the Supreme Court's unequivocal declarations, practical problems of enforcement remain.

In justice to our people I should point out that a substantial degree of compliance with the desegregation decrees has in fact occurred. As soon as the Supreme Court ruled against segregated schools, the President of the United States directed that the District of Columbia desegregate at once. That area, of course, is entirely controlled by the national government; the District, containing the capital of the Union, falls within no State jurisdiction. In a majority of the seventeen segregated States, gradual desegregation began at once. In eight of the seventeen, there was delay. Five of these originally recalcitrant eight States, urged by subsequent Court decrees, have now begun the process of desegregation in part of their schools. In Louisiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee there is now substantial enrolment of non-whites in those State colleges formerly maintained for white students only. But in three of our fifty States the opportunities for delay, which are inherent in State autonomy, up to this time still obstruct implementation in the lower schools of the Supreme

"

HE DISTANT observer may ask why the Federal Congress does not pass more laws to enforce the Constitution as construed by the Supreme Court. Such legislation has, indeed, been considered in the Congress during recent sessions.

When such a statute is enacted. Federal agents can be sent to the recalcitrant States to take appropriate measures. In 1957, the Congress passed just such a law to prevent local obstruction of voting.

But as yet the national legislature has not provided Federal enforcement of State school desegregation. Perhaps our Congress has waited in hope that the few resisting States will soon see the light.

This hope is not misplaced. The southern United States is changing rapidly.

Its economy is turning from traditional concentration on agriculture to much manufacture and commerce. This change opens up new economic opportunities for technical employment of many non-white citizens who in the past have been field hands or unskilled labourers. Churches have used their influence for racial justice. Most important of all, political participation by non-whites is increasing.

We move ahead.

In 1776, our Declaration of Independence expressed an ideal of human equality then unachieved. We only now seem to approach its realization among races.

We can well hope that the next generation will find our whole nation believing, with that Declaration, a truth" ... self evident; that all men are created equal. ... " •

T

THE

GANDHIAN

ABLE EXPONENT DISTINGUISHED

PHILOSOPHY ACROSS NEGRO

THE

OF NON-VIOLENT SEAS IN

LEADER

DR.

OF THE

MARTIN

CIVIL

HE PREACHES Martin Luther, leader of Christianity's Protestant Reformation, has today a new significance for some twenty million Negro Americans. It is part of the name of the famous clergyman and social reformer who heads their struggle for civil rights with all the fervour of his illustrious predecessor.

King was baptized Michael Luther King. But when he was six years old and had his first experience of racial discrimination, his father, a Baptist minister, talked to him about the founder of Protestantism and said: "From now on, you and I are going to be called Martin Luther King." This second baptismal may have provided some of the inspiration for the ceaseless struggle for reform in which the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, has been engaged for many years.

To his role as a zealous reformer and passionate advocate of the Negro American's cause, thirty-five-year old King brings a philosophy which is largely alien to Western concepts and practice but is in the highest Christian tradition. It is the Gandhian philosophy of non-violent resistance. Since his early childhood King has had an aversion to violence in any form and, even when bullied or insulted, has never retaliated by hitting back. This self-control has its roots in spiritual force, not in fear. Whenever the dictates of his conscience have demanded it, he has shown an unflinching readiness to face danger.

He has confronted violent mobs, has been physically attacked three times and stabbed once, and his strong convictions have landed him in prison on no less than fourteen occasions.

It was at Crozer Theological Seminary, Chester, Pennsylvania, which he joined after passing out with distinction from Negro Morehouse College in Atlanta, that King made his first acquaintance with

T

HE NAME OF

RESISTANCE

Gandhi's ideas and the doctrine of passive resistance based on truth and love. Earlier he had read Thoreau's essay on Civil Diso bedience and studied the works of the great social philosophers Plato, Aristotle, -Rousseau, Locke and Mill. But it was a lecture on Gandhi by Dr. Mordecar Johnson, president of Howard University, that fired his imagination and stimulated his interest in the techniques of non-violent resistance to unjust laws or practices. He studied whatever books of Gandhi he could lay his hands on and realized that the Mahatma's philosophy of "satyagraha" or truth-force .had great potency in the area of social reform.

At Crozer, Martin Luther King won many laurels. He secured first position in the final examination and was named the seminary's outstanding student. He also had the rare honour of being the first Negro to be elected president of the student body consisting of about a hundred white students and six Negroes.

He then obtained admission to Boston University for his post-graduate studies and wrote a theological thesis to earn his Ph.D. degree. At Boston too he met his future wife, Coretta Scott. Towards the end of 1954, some fifteen months after their marriage, King moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in America's Deep South, to take up his duties of pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

In his book Stride Toward Freedom, published in 1958, Martin Luther King writes that, when he accepted the pastorship at Montgomery, he had not the slightest idea that he would become involved in a crisis in which non-violent resistance would be applicable. Yet before he had held his ecclesiastical office for a little more than a year there occurred an event which was to have profound repercussions on race relations in the United States. It gave King his first opportunity of trying out the Gandhian technique of "satyagraha" on American soil and cata-

HAS

LUTHER

RIGHTS

AN

KING,

MOVEMENT.

LOVE pulted him to fame almost overnight.

This small event, considered insignificant at the time, was the refusal of a Negro woman named Rosa Parks to give up her seat to a white passenger in a crowded city bus, according to local custom and law. Her action became for the Negroes the symbol of what King described afterwards as "the expression of a timeless longing for human dignity and freedom." When she was arrested and jailed, the Negro community in Montgomery resolved that the time had come for effective remedial measures.

After consultations between influential members of the community it was decided that they should boycott the buses until the discriminatory seating arrangement was ended. A boycott committee, later converted into the Montgomery Improvement Association, with King as president, organized the movement with skill and efficiency. Assisted by donations from all over the United States and even from abroad, they set up and operated car pools. In spite oHhreats and continued harassment and the prosecution of some ninety Negroes on charges of violating an ancient anti-boycott law, the Negroes did not retaliate.

The harassment reached its peak when King's house was bombed while he was away at a meeting. Fortunately his wife and children escaped unhurt and King, hastily summoned from the meeting, was able to control the infuriated Negro crowd. Addressing his followers from the shattered porch of his house, King exhorted them to be peaceful. He said: "We believe in law and order. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies .... If I am stopped, our work will not stop, for what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just-and God is with us."

The year-long boycott, which brought Continued on next page

((Our creatlve protest must not degenerate into violence." the bus company to the verge of ruin, ended with the judgment of the Supreme Court that segregation in buses was illegal. The majority of the white population gradually became reconciled to integration in public transport. And everyone agreed that the honours of the campaign lay with the young, scholarly clergyman who had guided it so successfully and with scrupulous regard for his principles of truth and non-violence.

The Negro Americans' demand for integration of public transport facilities is of course only one of their many legitimate claims to equality of civil rights.

They rightfully expect the end of discrimination, in those parts of America where it still exists, in eligibility for voting, in employment, in housing, in education, and, in fact, in every sphere of public life.

Aroused to a new sense of dignity and self-respect, they have been asking for the basic rights and privileges guaranteed

to them by the American Constitution.

More than that, since the continuing struggle for equality of status has important social implications, they look to their white compatriots for a change of heart, for the sense of justice and liberality of spirit which will rise above narrow considerations of race and colour.

It is this change of heart that Martin Luther King hopes to bring about by his philosophy and practice of nonviolent resistance. His strong faith in non-violence was reinforced by his fourweek visit to India early in 1959. The visit was made under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee and the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, with the specific object of studying the Gandhian philosophy in the land of its origin. King toured various places in the country and met prominent Indian leaders including Prime Minister Nehru and Acharya Vinobha Bhave. On his return to the United States, he declared that nonviolent resistance is "the most effective weapon" in the Negroes' fight for racial equality.

After the victory in Montgomery, King continued to combine his ecclesiastical duties with other constructive social work for his community including such activities as setting up relief and banking facilities and assistance in voters' registration. He helped organize the sit-in and freedom-ride movements for desegregation of lunch counters and integration of inter-state public transport, and ,-participated in a mass demonstration in Albany, Georgia, at the end of 1961.

But it was in 1963 that King planned and conducted those large-scale passive resistance campaigns, ending with the famous March on Washington, which focused the whole nation's attention on the civil rights issue, its enormity and urgency.

The main venue of these campaigns and demonstrations was Birmingham, Alabama, a stronghold of racial prejudice and segregation. After a series of meetings with local Negro leaders, King laid his plans carefully and announced early in the year that he would lead demonstrations in the city. Perhaps even he did not anticipate the chain of events which followed-the enthusiastic mass Negro response, the extent and vehemence of the diehard opposition, the spreading of the movement to hundreds of other centres and its country-wide repercussions. "Bull" Connor, the city's Public Safety Commissioner-who let loose police dogs on the demonstrators, attacked them with fire hoses and clubs and made wholesale arrests day after dayexemplified in his person the stubborn resentment of the white diehards. His ruthless methods served to give greater momentum to the Negro effort and to give it national dimensions. Even as the Birmingham jail filled with thousands of Negro demonstrators, including King

himself, thousands of whites and Negroes in numerous cities in the North and South began to participate in sit-in campaigns and demonstrations to support the demands for civil rights. And as the movement gathered strength, it not only helped close Negro ranks by drawing many from the middle class who had hitherto stood aloof, but also won the sympathy and active support of more and more white people.

The sporadic acts of violence during or in the wake of these demonstrations, do not detract from the efficacy of the non-violent technique consistently preached and followed by King. The burden of his theme has been that the Negro American's struggle for equality must be conducted "on the highest plane of dignity and discipline" and must be free from bitterness and hatred.

The memorable rally in Washington on August 28, 1963, which drew some 200,000 "freedom marchers" from all over the United States, resounded to the full-throated slogan "We shall overcome." The most eloquent, moving and meaningful address at this rally was delivered by Martin Luther King who reiterated his faith in non-violence. He said: "We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. . ..

The marvellous, new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny." King ended his address with one of the finest perorations on freedom ever made by a public speaker.

That there is a strong and influential body of white people in full sympathy with the Negro Americans' aims and aspirations is evident from the large measure of support which the Administration's Civil Rights Bill has received in the U.S. Congress. One of the first acts of President Johnson after assumption of his new office was to meet Martin Luther King. The President has made it clear in unequivocal terms that he is not only as dedicated to the American ideal of racial equality as any of his predecessors but is anxious to take positive steps to translate this ideal into reality.

In his first major address to Congress he said: "We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked 100 years or more. It is time to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law." The President's task will doubtless become easier with the support of enlightened leaders like Martin Luther King. To this enlightened leadership must go much of the credit for arousing national consciousness of the race issue and for the considerable gains made by the Negro American in 1963-aptly called "the year of the Civil Rights revolution." •

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Violence is impractical because the old eyefor-an-eye philosophy ends up leaving everybody blind.

HERE CAN BE NO GAINSAYING the fact that we face a crisis in race relations in our nation. This crisis has , been precipitated by the collision between the forces of liberation and the forces of domination. One of the greatest expressions of this crisis is the resistance to the Supreme Court's decision outlawing segregation in the public schools; at times this resistance has risen to ominous proportions. But the old ideal of racial segregation, of paternalistic relationships, has exhausted itself, and the American society is seeking to reorient itself around the idea of desegregation, the idea of integration, the idea of person-to-person relations. This is the crisis of our age.

Now when a crisis develops in a society, there is always an attempt to' solve the problem developed as a result of the crisis and to get rid of the precipitating forces.

Certainly those who have been oppressed or who have been the victims of the forces of domination, are always seeking to deal with the crisis. And there are three ways" that oppressed people can grapple with their oppression.

One method is that of acquiescence;: there are those individuals who feel that the only way to deal with their oppression is to resign themselves to the fate of oppression.

There are those who surrender and find themselves becoming conditioned to things as they are. They feel that it is better to. live with these things than to go through the ordeals of changing the old order to the new order. There was a man who lived in one of the Negro com'munities in Atlanta some years ago; he used to play his guitar and sing various songs, and one. day he was heard singing a song that went something like this: "Been down so long that down don't bother me." I guess he had achieved a level of freedom-a freedom of exhaustion~ He had given up the struggle.

So that is a method of acquiescence-but it is not the way. It may be the easy way at times, but it is not the moral way and it is not the courageous way; it is a cowardly way, for the individual who adjusts to an evil system is at that moment a participant in that evil¡ system, and

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This is an abridged version of Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr.'s address at Howard University) which was delivered ex tempore.

he must take some of the responsibility for the perpetuation of the unjust system.

There is a second way that oppressed~people can deal with their oppression and that is to rise up with violence and corroding hatred.

Now, of course, we know about this method. We know about violence and I am not here to say that violence has never worked. One who studies history soon discovers that nations have often received their independence through violence. Violence has often brought about momentary victories, but I would go on to say that while violence can bring about temporary victories, it can never bring about permanent peace and it ends up creating many more social pI;oblems. Violence in the long run, in the struggle for rachll justice, is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical for many reasons, and I think one of the best reasons is that sp many of our opponents would love for us to start a' violent revolution; they would use this as an excuse to kill many innocent people under the pretence that they are inciting a riot.

I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, that (Commissioner of Public Safety) "Bull" Connor was always happy when somebody on the sideline from the Negro community , threw rocks, but he was always unhappy when we remained non-violent. He knows how t9 deal with violence, but he does not know how to handle non-violence.

And violence is impractical becaus'e the old eye-foran-eye philosophy ends up leaving everybody blind. This method is wrong. This method is immoral. It is immoral because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for everybody. It is wrong because it seeks to annihilate the opponent rather than convert him. It is wrong because it leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue.

So I am still convinced, in spite of the tragedies that we faced in our Birmingham and other communities, that non-violence is the most potent weapon available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom and justice. If we succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of long and mighty bitterness.

There is another method, a third method, and that is . the method of non-vioJent resistance. I feel that this is

N on- violence says that is a powerful social when you allow suffering pain and violence inflicted on yourself:

the method which must guide us through this tense period of transition. We are moving from the old order to the new order. We have the inevitable birth pains, the inevitable tensions that accompany the birth of a new age.

But I believe that non-violence is the method that can achieve the ideals and goals and principles of this new age.

Now let us look for a moment at this philosophy and 'its basic meaning. Because we talk a great deal and we hear a great deal about non-violence we often fail to realize that this method has an under-girding philosophy.

First, I would like to say that the philosophy of nonviolence contends that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. Means and ends must cohere. Means and ends are inseparable. The means represent the idealin-the-making; in the long run of history destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends. Immoral means cannot bring about moral ends and so non-violence contends that means and ends must cohere. Non-violence is the relentless pursuit of truthful ends through moral means.

The second point that I would like to bring out about non-violence is this: It contends that one's aim must never be to inflict injury upon the opponent. In Indian philosophy they call this idea "Ahimsa"-non-injury.

This stands at the centre of the non-violent discipline and the non-violent philosophy and it has two aspects: First, of course, you avoid external physical violence.

One thing we say to everybody getting ready to participate in a non-violent demonstration is that you must not retaliate the physical violence. If you are hit, you must not hit back; you must rise to the heights of being able to accept blows without retaliating. And so non-injury means that you ref\!se to engage in external physical violence.

But it also means that you are constantly moving to the point where you refuse to hate your enemy. You are constantly moving to the point where you love your enemy.

Now a lot of people are confused at this point. They ask me from time to time: "What in the world do you mean when you talk about 'love your opponent'1" Somebody said to me after a lecture the other day: "I can go along with tactical non-violence and I think you are right that it is the best tactic and the best technique. But when you start talking about this 'love' stuff, you lose me."

Well, this "love stuff" stands at the centre of non-

suffering force and to be

violence. The highest expression of non-mJury is love, and I think many people misunderstand love at this point.

They think that when you talk about "love" you are talking about a sentimental, affectionate emotion, and I would be the first to say that this is absurd; it is nonsense to urge oppressed people to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. This is very difficult and almost impossible.

So when I try to explain what I mean by this "love stuff" I turn to the Greek language. It has a word, "agape."

Now agape is more than aesthetical or romantic love.

Agape is more than a friendship. Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive good-will for all men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. Theologians would say that it is a love of God operating in the human heart. When an individual rises to love on this level, he loves every man, not because he likes him, not because his way appeals to him, but he loves every man because God loves him. He rises to the point of loving the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that person does.

This is always a goal and it is beautiful to have a method of struggle where it is possible to do this, for we are coming to see now that hate is dangerous. It is as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. It is a wonderful thing to have a method of struggle where it is possible to rise to the level of love and yet stand up with determination against the unjust and evil system. You come to the point of hating segregation and standing up against it, with all, your might, and yet maintaining an understanding love for the person who is misguided.

There is another point in non-violence and it is this: It says that suffering may be a powerful social force, and interestingly enough this is one of the points that violence would bring out. The forces of war and violence will agree with non-violence at this point. Both violence and nonviolence agree that suffering can be a powerful social force, but the difference is that violence says that suffering is a powerful social force when you inflict the suffering on another, but non-violence says that suffering is a powerful social force when you allow suffering and pain and violence to be inflicted on yourself. It goes on with a conviction that unmerited suffering is always redemptive.

And so the practitioner of non-violence will say to Text continued on page 47

Interviewed by Nathan Glick, the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People reviews progress made by Negroes in their struggle for equality.

ARCHITECT OF EQUALITY UESTION: Mr. Wilkins, you are the Executive Secretary, and thus chief officer, of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the NAACP. Just what is your organization's purpose?

Q

ANSWER: Its purpose has been, since its inception, to secure the full constitutional rights of Negro American citizens, get rid of discrimination and segregation, knock down racial barriers to progress.

Is the NAACP a purely Negro organization, or have whites played a role?

Q.

A. Well, we have had white members since the very beginning.

Some of them were in the organization of it and have been members of the board of directors, and some have been members of the staff. Our membership of 400,000 includes many white members throughout the country, and even some in the South.

Would you say something about when and how the organization got started?

Q.

A. It started in 1909, as a result of the race riot which took place in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1908. At that time William English Walling, a white native of Louisville, Kentucky, wrote a piece for the Independent, a weekly magazine, on the East St. Louis riots, saying that violence had come to the North and that the Negro citizens' rights were being trampled upon and that unless somebody organized to do something to come to their aid we would have racial war. Some people read that piece and out of it grew the organization of the NAACP. Would you explain the term "civil rights," which is used in most news stories and discussions of the campaign for Negro rights. How does it differ from civil liberties?

Q.

A. "Civil rights" has come to be sort of a short cut to mean the rights granted by the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and implied in the Declaration of Independence. "Civil liberties, " on the other hand, have to do with protecting the freedoms of expression that we set forth in those documents-freedom of thought, for example, and freedom of speech, and absolute freedom of advocacy. Civil rights take in the right to vote and the right to be free of racial or religious discrimination. I don't suppose there is a hard and fast line between them. They are very closely related; they might be said to be first cousins.

Q. Would you tell something about your own background, and how you came into the NAACP?

A. There isn't much to say there. I went to school in the midwest State of Minnesota. was graduated from the University of Minnesota, studied journalism and sociology and economics.

Went into journalism and worked for a weekly paper for eight years in Kansas City, and then moved to New York to be assistant secretary of the NAACP. And I've been there since 1931. For fifteen years, while being Assistant Secretary, I was also the editor of the NAACP monthly magazine Crisis. Since 1955, I've been the Executive Secretary of the NAACP and lectured and spoken in practically every State in the Union.

Q. Now your fifty years ....

organization

has

been in existence some

Q. Fifty-five years. How would you compare the progress made, let us say, in the first thirty years, up to 1940, with the progress in the fight for civil rights since then?

A. I would say the rate of progress has been very much greater since 1940-it has accelerated tremendously. We regard that as evidence of the heavy blasting and groundwork that was done in the first thirty years, plus the impact and acceleration that came from the second World War when it took all hands pulling together to get the job done and thousands of Negroes got a new chance to show what they could do.

Q. You've been in the civil rights movement, the NAACP, since about 1931. You've seen changes take place under four Presidents: Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy. And now with Mr. Kennedy's sudden and tragic death, we have a new President, Lyndon B. Johnson. Could you review briefly what has happened in each of these administrations in the area of civil rights and the approaches taken by each of these Presidents?

A. Franklin Roosevelt came to be President at the time of the great depression when all the country, white and black, north and south, east and west, was the victim of this great decline; and his activity had to be to extricate the country from it. But his contribution to the area in which I am particularly interested was that, by and large, the Negro was included in the recovery programme. Not so much through Mr. Roosevelt's personal

The Negroes' objective zs attazn:ment of full

constitutional

rights.

dedication to this proposItIOn, as to his dedication that the country as a whole had to be brought out of the depression.

So that the measures that were proposed benefited Negroes, willy-nilly. Some special arrangements were made to correct special disabilities, but the Negro worker's participation in the WPA, for example-the programme of public works which hired the unemployed-and in other New Deal programmes was on the basis of his citizenship. Mrs. Roosevelt was the one who gave a racial equality flavour to the President's reform programme. She was the one who gave Mr. Roosevelt the reputation for being a liberal on the race question.

Q. What would you say was the major development in the field of civil rights during Roosevelt's various administrations?

A. Mr. Roosevelt issued an Executive Order in 1941 which required employers working under Federal contracts to hire workers without bias related to race, colour or national origin.

This was a great advance.

The year before Mr. Roosevelt had authorized: first, the promotion of a Negro to the post of Brigadier General (the first one in the history of the U.S. Army); second, the appointment of a Negro as Special Assistant to the Secretary of War (now U.S. Court of Appeals Judge William H. Hastie); and third, the training of Negro fighter pilots. Although this was to be at a segregated Air Force Base in Tuskeegee Institute in Alabama, the training of Negroes and the opening up of the air arm to them were significant events.

Under Mr. Truman, the most significant thing-and I think the long-lasting thing-was Mr. Truman's appointment of a Commission on Civil Rights and the reception of its report in 1947.The report recommended the abolition of racial segregation from American life-not just from American housing or American employment, but from American life. Mr. Truman did not bury this report and its recommendations. He sent the legislativerecommendations to the Congress in a special message on February 2,1948 and thus threw the civil rights matter into the national political hopper-and it's never been out of it since.

Were there any other significant developments .under President Truman?

Q.

A. Yes, there was an Executive Order issued in the summer of 1948 abolishing segregation in U.S. armed forces. This was a great step forward.

In Mr. Eisenhower's administration one act, in my estimation, stands out. That was sending Federal soldiers to Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. This was for the purpose of backing up an order of a U.S. Court. The State of Arkansas had defied that order and had called out its National Guard to defy it.

Q. Could you describe the situation that required the order?

What was under dispute there?

A. Well, Negro students attending an all-Negro school had applied for admission to the formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, under terms of the Supreme Court decision of 1954, which called for the abolition of racial segregation in all public schools. They had gone through the Federal Court, and the Court had ordered them to be admitted.

In fact, the administration of the city of Little Rock had concurred in a plan by which they were to be admitted. But when

Roy Wilkins, a prominent Negro leader, is executive secretary of National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.

the actual time came for them to go into school, the Governor of Arkansas, Orville Faubus, called out the State's militia and said he would prevent the students from entering Central High School. This, of course, became a defiance of the order of the U.S. Court, and Mr. Eisenhower called out the Federal troops in order to enforce the order of a Federal Court.

Mr. Eisenhower did a couple of other things in this area.

He abolished segregation in all schools located on Federal military posts; and he also abolished discrimination in treatment of employees, civilian employees, on all Federal posts-that is, no separate cafeterias, etc. These are little heralded.

Another advance that took place during Mr. Eisenhower's administration was the desegregation of all public facilities in Washington, D.C. One more thing should be noted, I think, about the Eisenhower administration. It was not directly responsible for it, but a great action took place while it was in office and that was the Supreme Court decision calling for an end to racial segregation in the public schools of the country.

Mr. Eisenhower did appoint Earl Warren, the former Governor of California, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Of course, he did not appoint him for the purpose of handing down the school decision, but it was a good appointment and the unanimous decision, written by Justice Warren, was an important one.

What do you think that decision?

Q.

IS

the long-range significance of

A. I think it's equivalent to a Second Emancipation Proclamation. I don't think there's any doubt about it, because it says that the Constitution will not permit differentiation between citizens on the basis of race and colour. That's the message of the 1954 decision.

Q. Now we come to President Kennedy's administration. How would you estimate what was done by his administration?

A. Well, he did a great deal-despite all the criticism and the people who say it hasn't been enough (and I say it hasn't been enough i). He did a good deal on appointments at the higher levels of the executive branch, on employment in the Federal establishment, on exposing and weeding out some of the practices that have led to discrimination in employment, on improving employment of Negroes in the higher brackets of the Federal civil service-above that of $5,000 and 6,000 bracket. And he had an attitude on this question, and it counts to have an attitude, and his attitude was transmitted to all Federal agencies and departments through the Cabinet.

A. The attitude is that the Negro has not been given his rights, he has not been given a fair break. "Where we are at fault in this matter, I want a correction to be made"-this is what he transmitted to all of his deputies, and we have seen genuine action to correct abuses that have existed in the past. They haven't all been corrected, all the imbalances have not been wiped out, and a great many things remain to be done. But the administration did take action.

Mr. Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, has filed more lawsuits to back up the right of Negroes to vote than any Attorney General has filed here before. These lawsuits, of course, refer mainly to certain southern States where there are restrictions and where there is discrimination. There is no restriction on the right of Negroes to register and vote in the North.

How many southern States do you think are the centre of this resistance to the Negro's right to vote?

Q.

A. I would say not over eight or ten out of the whole fifty.

And the restrictions in those eight or ten vary greatly. In some of them the restrictions are minimal. In others they are very great, as in Mississippi. In some States they differ between urban and rural areas, for example, in Georgia, which is one of the Deep South States. Negroes vote very freely in the city of Atlanta, the largest city in the State. But in rural Georgia counties they have difficulty registering to vote.

Q. What did you think of President Kennedy's pronouncements on the Negro's rights?

A. Well, Mr. Kennedy's two speeches-his television speech and his speech to the Congress transmitting his civil rights programme-were the best pronouncements on this topic ever to come from any chief executive. His television speech especially went right to the heart of the matter: the moral rightness of it.

It was emotional and moving. I don't know of any Negroes in this country who heard or read that speech who did not feel that the President had really laid it on the line.

Q. How would you describe the current mood of the country on the matter of civil rights?

A. The whole atmosphere of the fight for equal rights has changed in recent years. Now almost for the fitst time the segregationist element seems to be on the defensive, and the forces of equality and just treatment seem to be more united, more aware of the problem than ever before. I think the Negro himself has been a big factor in this, as well as the political leaders, and as well as the White House. Because the Negro himself has given the signal that he no longer can go by the patterns of the past, and that he is willing to take measures of protest and of other action to see that such treatment does not continue. He has, of course, had the encouragement in this by the action of the Federal Government in certain areas. Now the present administration, by proposing the civil rights legislation to the Congress, has remedied an area in which it was deficient, as far as civil rights are concerned. Mr. Kennedy expected, I think, to get through this issue without any civil rights legislation and found it could not be done, so he acted.

Q. How do you assess President Johnson's position on civil rights? Do you expect him to carryon Mr. Kennedy's programme?

A. I have every confidence that President Johnson will carry forward the civil rights programme initiated by President Kennedy. You will recall his important role as Senate Majority Leader in securing passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, which gave the Federal Government increased powers to protect the voting rights of Negroes. These laws, incidentally, were the first Federal civil rights legislation in this century.

President Johnson has often expressed his deep personal commitment to the ideal of full racial equality. And addressing Congress a few days after the death of John F. Kennedy, he urged the legislators "to enact a civil rights law so that we can move forward to eliminate from this nation every trace of discrimination and oppression that is based upon race or colour."

Some critics of the United States have argued that the Negro cannot achieve his true freedom, true equality under the existing political system, that what is required is a complete political and economic and social revolution. Is this the perspective of the NAACP? Q.

A. I think it is ridiculous to say that you need to change the whole system. We have plenty of opportunity in our own structure for alterations to take place that will fulfil the needs of

Imbalances are still present) but many barriers have been swept away. our people. In fact, what we want is precisely to carry out the full meaning and logic of our Constitution and our stated national ideals.

Q. A good deal has been written lately about the Black Muslim movement. Would you describe the aims and membership of this movement?

A. I don't believe this movement has had a serious impact on the Negro community. The American Negro, whatever else he is, is pretty thoroughly American. He believes in this country.

Now along comes a man who says: "Give up Christianity, give up American citizenship, give up the idea of integration, give up the idea of association with white people, of working with white people, talking with white people, expecting any reason from white people, and cut off all these ties and come with us.

What we black people have to do is stick together and build our own institutions."

The American Negro can't very well accept this philosophy, which goes counter to everything he's been working for and talking about, that is, integration into the American scene and as an American citizen. The Black Muslims want to establish their own Negro country within the United States. Our perspective, in the NAACP, is of course the opposite. We believe in integration, they believe in separation. And it would seem that most American Negroes want to be integrated into American society. They don't want the kind of separation which the Black Muslims have advocated, especially since the Black Muslims have carried on their campaign under an anti-white, antiChristian, anti-Semitic banner. This has no place in a democracy with a pluralistic society.

Q. To what extent is the current movement for civil rights due to the emergence of an increasingly educated middle-class group of Negro citizens, and to what extent does it resemble a mass proletarian movement in the old sense?

A. There is some mass movement, of course. But these demonstrations are composed of college students, of high school students, of housewives. Generally, they are people educated a little above the average-middle-class people.

Q. When James Meredith was admitted in 1962 as the first Negro student at the University of Mississippi, there was violence and a force of armed Federal militia was called out to protect his right to study at that university. Would you explain the background of this incident?

A. This was an exceptional case. Negroes can of course go to any northern college. And in the South there are many private and State-supported Negro colleges which they attend. The Bureau of the Census estimates that more than 200,000 Negro students are currently attending American institutions of higher learning. Mr. Meredith was one of substantial number of Negroes who applied for admission to formerly segregated or all-white colleges in the South and his was the only case where troops had to be called out. The barriers to Negroes in such colleges have been coming down for some time. In 1948, for example, Negroes began attending the University of Oklahoma, the University of Arkansas, Louisiana State University, and the University of Texas. These were State-supported, so-called white colleges.

Negroes were also attending the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, the University of Tennessee,

University of Georgia, and so on. One of the last ones to accept Negro students was the University of Alabama last June.

In 1962 there remained only the States of South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi that had no Negro students in their State universities. Mr. Meredith went into the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1962, and Clemson College in South Carolina, which was a part of the State university system, admitted a Negro architectural student by the name of Harvey Gantt, without any trouble, without any troops, without any upheaval whatsoever. Then in 1963, the University of Alabama, accepted three Negro students-one a mathematician who's working on the space agency programme, trying to help find a way to the moon, and two other regular Negro applicants.

And although Governor Wallace of Alabama went there and symbolically interposed himself between them and the university, they were enrolled. Now this leaves no State without at least one university, a State university, a so-called white college that has had a Negro enrolled. Many of them you never hear about.

Negroes have been graduated from the University of Arkansas, where they didn't even have a lawsuit to get in. They just went in and the State institution admitted them. The same thing happened at the University of Missouri. And so Mr. Meredith's case of requiring soldiers to get him in was extraordinary.

Q. You raised the point of the difference between Federal approach to these things and the approach of some State and local governments. Many southerners oppose the efforts of the Federal Government to impose fair treatment on the States and local communities on the ground that it violates "States' rights" guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. What do you think of the problem of States' rights? Is there a legitimate role for States' rights?

A. Indeed there is. We are a federation of States and the States do have a role and they do have rights. But under our Constitution, no State may deny to a citizen of the United States those rights that are guaranteed him by the Constitution of the United States, simply because he happens to live within the borders of that State. Here is where the conflict arises. But it is being resolved and the Federal power is being asserted, although we think it's being asserted too slowly in the racial area. These are emotional issues, and deeply rooted, but we say that's of no moment, that they ought to be corrected. The States do not have the right to do wrong, in our estimation, and the conflict now is between those persons who believe that the States ought to be free to handle these matters as they see fit, and those who believe that the Federal Government has a right to use its powers to guarantee to its citizens the rights which the Constitution says they should enjoy.

Would you describe the differences in your organization's efforts in northern States as against southern States. Are there differences in goals and techniques?

Q.

A. There are no differences in goals, but in techniques, yes.

We are now actively engaged in seventy cities in fifteen States in the North to try to eradicate some form of inequality in public education. It varies from State to State, city to city, community to community. In some it's the artificially constructed school district, in others it's the allocation of teachers, in others it's the general quality of education, and in others it's the overcrowded classrooms in Negro areas with empty classrooms or empty seats in classrooms in so-called white areas. Some of these conditions have required court action, others have required

are passed, do you think that would make a significant further step in the cause of full racial equality?

A. I think so. I think these civil rights proposals are the most comprehensive ever proposed by any President. That doesn't mean that they comprehend every particular problem faced by th.e Negro, nor does it mean that if they're adopted, everything will be solved. It will not. But certainly if this package of civil rights bills is enacted, and especially if they're strengthened in some vital respects, we will be a long way towards realizing our goal, the goal of the NAACP and of Negroes generally.

This legislation raises the problem of the relationship between the President who is the Chief Executive and the legislature, doesn't it? '

Q. One of the early acts of President Lyndon Johnson was to meet with Roy Wilkins and other leaders of civil rights movement.

simply conferences with the Board of Education, others have required more widespread community action and political action.

This illustrates the way in which matters differ. Now in the South there are very few communities-some but not manywhere the political approach can be used, because in a great many of them the Negro vote is not significant.

Q. Do you think there is an analogy between the Negro struggle today and that of earlier immigrant minorities such as the Irish, the Italians, the Jews-who also in most cases started at the bottom of the economic and social scale?

A. I think there is some similarity, but of course the great handicap of the Negro is the handicap of colour-what we call sometimes "high visibility." It was possible for an Irish immigrant, for example, once he became used to the country and its ways, to go up on the basis of ability. I'm not suggesting he had an easy time, I'm not suggesting he did not encounter any prejudice. He did-because of his accent and his nationality and his religion-but these he overcame much more easily than the Negro can overcome the handicap of colour. And while there are similarities to the Italians and to a degree to the Jews, this matter of colour continues to intrude itself as the one obstacle.

A. Oh yes, I don't think there's any doubt about that. When we in the Negro community, especially in an organization like the NAACP, when we talk about what we would like to see done and how bad conditions are, we mean by that that they are not perfect. We want perfection, we want to get rid of all segregation.

But things are improving. There are more and more Negro technicians, white-collar workers, clerks in stores. As a matter of fact, compared with the rest of the world, the Negro in this country, considering that he was a minority, not a majority, has made some rather astonishing progress. If opportunities are open to the Negro and if barriers continue to be levelled, I look for him to take his rightful place in the American economy.

Do you foresee any substantial attitude towards Negroes?

Q.

changes in the South's

A. I do, and changes are occurring. They are not very fast, but they are occurring. There are southerners now who say that integration is going to happen and we ought to help it to happen "our way" rather than, as they say, the "Federal way" or the "NAACP way." I think changes are taking place in the South and I think the problem is going to be solved in the South.

What do you think of the civil rights legislative bills which the Federal administration has sent to Congress? And if they

Q.

A. Well, of course, under our system of separated powers and ?f competing political parties, a President has no guarantees, Just because he sends a bill to Congress, that it will be enacted -and if enacted, that it will be substantially like the bill that he submitted. This is not true in some countries where executive and legislative powers are more closely joined together. But nevertheless in what the Britons have called "the fumbling ways of democracy," we manage to get along. Our President sometimes has great difficulties. He has to please enough Republicans to get Republican votes for the bill. He must not offend the northern and western legislators of his own party. He has to keep his eye on the general population, the wave of popular sentiment.

And he has to watch out for the southern Democrats' he has to weigh their opposition to this type of legislation' and to calculate how that opposition mayor may not be transferred to other legislative projects that he has in mind-to his foreign policy, to his international relations, to his fiscal policy, to the defence establishment, to a hundred other things. This presents grave difficulties for a President. It presented them for Franklin D. Roosevelt, even when he won the election with only two States voting against him in the Presidential election. He still had great difficulty in the legislature in carrying his programme through.

It may be difficult for foreigners to understand our system. I sometimes have difficulty understanding theirs. But we're working with it and we Negroes at least have the hope that things are going so strongly now our way, with our own help and our own initiative and our own determination, that we will get our political system working for our objectives.

Q. Some people interpret the demonstrations going on in various parts of the country, starting Alabama, as signs of the final desperation, the level of the American Negro. Do you think interpretation of what's taking place?

that have been in Birmingham, near starvation that's a proper

A. I don't think it's accurate, because while there are levels in the American Negro society which contain desperate men, poor men, hungry men, out-of-work men, frustrated men-and women-still to interpret these demonstrations as a sort of last lunge of the down-hearted and down-trodden is to misinterpret them. These demonstrations are, on the contrary, the result of newly awakened hope and quickened ambition and the realization that with just a little more effort they will come into the goals that many of them, and their fathers before them have envisaged. This is a revolution, someone has said, of 'rising expectations, not a revolution of desperation. There are, I repeat, Negroes in the rural and urban areas, rural areas on plantations and farms, with little opportunity and little hope, who are desperate. And there are slum areas in the big cities likewise.

But there are so many millions of others who feel that now the~r chance has come in this great and rich country, which is also their country-because we mustn't ever forget that American Negroes have no other country except this country. They have bee~ here 350 years, they have fought for it, they have worked for It, they have contributed to it. They intend to enjoy it. •

Dick Gregory: NTILJANUARY 13, 1961, Dick Gregory was just another Negro comedian-and a highly unsuccessful one. When he could find work in front of an audience, it was in front of a Negro audience.

But few Negroes had ever been successful in the white world of comedy. Negro musicians had long enjoyed wide popularity in the cinema, on radio, stage, television and recordings. Marion Anderson, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and scores of other Negro entertainers had a wide following in the North and South, among Negroes and whites.

But Dick Gregory, who is 32, could not find an audience. He had no steady job; he had, in fact, been dismissed from several jobs, and while he earned an occasional five dollars a night as a substitute master of ceremonies in a few of Chicago's smaller Negro nightclubs, the future was not bright. On Christmas eve, 1960, he spent his last dollar to purchase food for his wife and infant daughter. He had the feeling that America was not yet ready for Dick Gregory.

At the time, he was right.

Negroes performing Negro music were accepted; it was commonly believed that only Negroes could properly perform what was fundamentally Negro music. But the only contribution a Negro comedian could make which would distinguish him from white comedians would be a satirical approach to the racial issue. And every manager who hired entertainers for a primarily white clientele knew that to engage a Negro comedian was to invite bankruptcy.

Gregory had a different idea which was, however, unconfirmed by the jingle of coins at the booking window. During a stint in the Army he had entertained his comrades-Negroes and whites-with basically racial humour. When he said: "To be honest, I really love Abraham Lincoln; if it had not been for Abe, I would still be in the slave market," he touched a responsive chord in his audiences. No one of his fellow soldiers practised the early-day American custom of throwing tomatoes at him to demonstrate their

U

Dick Gregory, left, has become a leading entertainer, also leads Negro demomftrations against segregation.

The Lighter Side of Civil Rights disapproval of his performance, and he soon entertained the idea that, perhaps, with a little luck, he might yet find a white audience which would accept him as a Negro American comedian.

Following his tour of duty in the Army he held several uninteresting jobs for short periods, first as a postal clerk and later as a jet engine inspector, an occupation for which he was totally unqualified.

During lunch breaks he entertained his colleagues with jokes and stories. He told one story about three men who surrounded him in a restaurant. They said: "You can't eat that chicken here. Whatever you do to that chicken, we are going to do to you." Gregory says he solved the problem by kissing the chicken.

When the big opportunity finally came on January 13, 1961, Gregory suffered a moment of doubt. A friend who had been seeking performance dates for Gregory arranged an appearance for him on a special programme. This situation did not cause him alarm, but the audience, he was told, would be white and most of its members were from the Deep South, a region not exactly famous for its enthusiastic acceptance of Negro participation in white affairs.

Armed with only a cigarette, lighter and ash tray which he held in his hand, Gregory moved to the centre of the stage with a majestic gait suggesting the power of a champion track runner (which he was at Southern Illinois University). He stood silent for a few moments examining his audience, and then in his husky baritone voice, he said: "I understand there are a good many Southerners here tonight. I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night."

The reaction was immediate-and favourable.

Almost overnight, on the basis of this and subsequent performances, Dick Gregory rocketed to national prominence. Offers poured in for both television and personal appearances. Soon he was one of the highest paid entertainers in the U.S. Gregory was a success-finally. But success soon turned into a bitter-sweet experience. He enjoyed the money but found himself a higWy controversial figure.

A television programme which he narrated was banned by several southern television stations, and when he made a triumphant return to his hometown, St. Louis, Missouri, to receive a symbolic key to the city from

the mayor, he was refused a room by the management of a leading hoteL The experience became material for a characteristic response: "They gave me the key to the city," he said, "and then they changed all the locks."

Gregory believes that he is the beneficiary of the civil rights struggle which gained intensity following the Supreme Court's decision in 1954. He recognizes that he would still be flirting with starvation if the calendar were turned back to 1951. But civil rights became a national issue and Americans, while concerned with the problem, were ready in 1961, to look at the lighter side. "Laughter," Gregory says, "is the best way to release tensions and fear."

His humour is always timely. When Negroes in Southern cities were boycotting city bus systems to end regulations which required Negroes to sit in the rear section, Gregory assumed a reverse attitude. "Segregation is not all bad," he said. "Have you ever heard of a bus wreck where the people in the back of the bus got hurt?"

Later, Negroes flocked to small restaurants which refused to serve them; the Negroes refused to leave when told they would not be served. The phenomenon became known as "the sit-in," and Gregory described his experience at a sit-in demonstration: "I sat in a small restaurant for nine months. When they finally integrated, they didn't have what I wanted."

Lately he has been active in Negro demonstrations against segregation and has spent many nights in Southern jails for his civil disobedience activities. But when he is not in jail, he fulfils engagements around the country, an endeavour which many believe is more productive for the civil rights effort than his nights in jail.

Not all of his humour has a colour slant. Povertyhis own-is another favourite topic. He points out that he was poverty stricken from 1932 to 1950 and was recipient of relief aid. "No matter how rich I get I can always joke about the poor. Rockefeller can't."

But he always comes back to the race problem, and sums it up realistically: "Where else but in the United States would I have to ride in the back of the bus, have a choice of the worst schools, the worst restaurants, and the worst neighbourhoods-and average 5,000 a week just talking about it?" •

The story of a girl who "put nursing ahead of anything."

A Career of Challenge and Hope whose face betokens a warm heart, Ida Gatling is doing the work she likes best. "I can't picture myself doing anything else than nursing," she said the other day. "There's just no other job I want to do." And then, with a laugh: "I guess if I feel like this I'll never get married. Because J put nursing ahead of anything."

Miss Gatling, a registered nurse, works in Washington Hospital Centre, a big complex of buildings a few kilometres northeast of the White House in the nation's capital. Opened in 1958, the privately-financed institution replaced three outmoded hospitals. Its numerous modern fittings include beds for nearly 800 patients, sixteen operating rooms, a 2,OOO,OOO-volt X-ray machine, eye, tissue and bone banks, pocket radios for paging doctors, and an intercom system by which a nurse can detect irregularities in a distant patient's breathing. Laid out and equipped with the advice of physicians, it is designed to assure both in-patients and out-patients the best care that medical science can provide.

It is the doctors and nurses and orderlies and technicians who apply the many forms of therapy and it is from them that sick people get their impressions of a hospital. The kind of impressions they get from Ida Gatling became increasingly clear as she talked.

"I try to show all my patients I'm interested in them," she continued. "You'd be surprised how it helps them. If somebody complains over the intercom that he's having pain, I don't reach for a sedative. I go into his room and talk to him.

I put him flat in bed and make him as comfortable as I can and tell him to try to go to sleep. And I tell him that if he can't get to sleep he only needs to flash his light and I'll come in with a sedative if he wants one. But eight times out of

A

SMALL GIRL

ten patients do go to sleep; because they know that if they really need me I'll come."

Ida Gatling had no childhood ambitions to be a nurse. After graduating from secondary school in her native town of Conway, North Carolina, she went to New York and got a job in a skirt factory.

But her mother fell ill and she decided to go home and look after her. When her mother recovered after seven months of faithful care the daughter knew that nursing was her field.

She trained for her profession in St. Philip's Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, a hundred miles South of Washington. The three-year course included work with surgeons, paediatricians, obstetricians. It also gave her three months' experience in the psychiatric ward of the Brooklyn State Hospital in New York.

Graduating in 1958 at the age of twenty-two, Miss Gatling worked for a year in obstetrics in Richmond and then came to the Washington Centre. Here she worked in obstetrics and neurosurgery before going to a medical unit.

Like the Richmond institution, the Washington Hospital Centre has a school for registered and practical nurses.

Students serve as assistants as part of their training. Miss Gatling, a team leader, is helping train two student practical nurses. Other members of her team are a registered and a practical nurse.

The team is one of two in Nursing Unit I-B. Each takes care of about twenty patients. The other team is headed by Rose-Marie Tominack, a pretty girl of the same age as Miss Gatling. Both teams work with a gray and white uniformed male orderly who wheels beds about, lifts patients and does other routine jobs. The work of both nurses and orderlies is simplified by the presence of wash stands and enclosed toilets in every patient's room.

Ida arrives at her nursing stationa combination of desks, telephones, intercom system and small rooms-at seven o'clock in the morning. There Mrs. Norma Wuertz, the head nurse who supervises both teams, tells her of any last-minute orders from the doctors. If there aren't any, the team members go into one of the rooms and listen to a taped report on each patient made by the night nurse who has just gone off duty.

This information also is recorded on cards-one for each patient.

After listening to the report, Ida assigns several patients to each member of her team, handing over the corresponding cards. She assigns the sickest patients to the registered nurse, an experienced woman of about fifty. If she thinks any patient needs special attention she goes into his room and looks him over herself.

Today this isn't necessary, so the other team members spread out along the hall and she goes to the nursing station's medicine dispensing machine to prepare dosages as prescribed by the patients' doctors. The room fittings include a sink and a small refrigerator for insulin and certain substances that are injected, and a double-locked drawer-to which team leaders have keys-for narcotics.

As she emerges from the room with a tray full of little paper cups with medicines she almost bumps into a gray-haired woman with a kind, tired face. Dr. Jeanne Bateman has been in early to see a terminal cancer case-a woman who is being cared for around the clock by special nurses engaged by her husband.

"Honey, I've put Mrs. Smith on the critical list," Dr. Bateman says. "I tried to call her husband at home but they said he's on the way to the hospital.

With experienced hand, right, Ida administers intravenous feeding to patient.

"! try to show all my patients !'m interested in them."

Mrs. Smith is dying. I don't think she'll last through the day. I feel so sorry for them. When Mr. Smith comes here, ask him to call me at my office. I've got to run."

In one patient's room after another Ida administers the medicines. Some patients get them before breakfast, some during or after the meal.

The medicines give her a chance to talk to and size up the patients. It's obvious that they like her and look forward to her coming.

One middle-aged woman is a diabetic who comes to the hospital periodically for supervision. Before going into her room, Ida studies her card. "I have to keep track of her blood sugar count and the amount of insulin she's had," she explains. "And I keep alert for insulin shock. If she goes into it she gets sugar at once. In her case that means orange juice.

"This patient is now an uncontrolled diabetic. She hasn't been watching her insulin or diet closely enough. Some diabetics are like that. They get tired of the routine and become careless. After she's been here a few days she'll be controlled again. Then she'll be all right till the next time."

She goes into the room. "How are you feeling, honey?" "Pretty good," the patient replies. "This is sort of a vacation for you, isn't it?" "It certainly is," the woman says. "When I come here I can lay down all my troubles."

To a male patient recovering from pneumonia Ida brings an inhalator. She plugs its tube into the oxygen outlet on the wall and adjusts the valve to mete out four litres of the gas. "The oxygen is mixed with medicine in that little bag," she explains. "He gets it every three hours.

Helps his breathing."

The man in the next room is recovering from a hernia operation. As the nurse comes in he is talking on the telephone.

His breakfast tray is gone but one of the students has told Ida that he left the meal untouched. "I hear you didn't eat your breakfast," she says. "I see now why you don't eat and get your strength back. You're yapping on the phone all the time." She smiles as she says it but the words take effect. "Don't worry. I'll eat my lunch," the patient assures her.

Finished with the dispensing, she goes back to the medicine room to set up

dosages for the ten o'clock and two o'clock rounds. She has time now to order from the pharmacy downstairs any medicines needed to replace those she has used.

She gets small orders by pneumatic tube, usually within fifteen minutes.

By 10:30 all the patients are fed and some have had a second pill or capsule.

The rooms are cleaned up and the nurses relax a bit. "This is a good time to talk to patients," Ida says. "And sometimes we can take a coffee break," she adds as the other team leader appears with two cups. "Also, it's a good time to tease Rose-Marie."

Rose-Marie hands her one of the cups.

"The tormenting period," she says.

"This is an easy day," Ida says as she sips her coffee. "One reason is, I know my patients. My girls are out on the floor and they know what to do for them.

And today not very much is happening.

"Some days are different. We may have a patient for gastric washing-taking samples from the stomach through a tube.

Or we may have to give a patient glucose solution-IOO grams of glucose in water, with lemon juice added to make it taste better. Then, to determine how the sugar is excreted, we have to take blood and urine specimens-at first thirty minutes after he gets the glucose solution, then one hour after and then two hours and three hours after. Or we may have a patient whose doctor wants to measure his radioactive uptake. That means giving him a radioactive pill or injecting radioactive dye into a kidney vein and then taking specimens to determine the kidney's activity."

Shelooks at her watch. "Oops! It's time to ,giYeMr. Jones some more oxygen."

She picks up the inhalator. Before she can start for Mr. Jones's room a student asks her to look at the patient in Room 10.

"She's got another earache, Miss Gatling.

I put drops in the right ear, as it said on the card. But now she has a pain in the left."

The little nurse plugs the inhalator into the oxygen line in Mr. Jones's room and then goes on to No. 10. The patient, a woman of about forty, is crying.

"What's the matter, honey?"

"Oh nurse, my other ear hurts now.

I think there's a bug in it."

"There can't be a bug in it, honey. Are you having any trouble breathing?"

"Terrible trouble. I can hardly breathe at all."

"Well, here's the nose spray. Maybe that will help you. Now, I'll just put the nozzle up your nostril and ....

There.

Isn't that better?"

"M-m-m," says the patient non-committally.

"I'll come back later, dear. With some more medicine. Meanwhile, why don't you try to get some rest?" Outside in the hall, Ida says, "We don't have many like that. She's supposed to have a respiratory infection but her temperature and pulse and respiration are normal. Yet since she's been here she's told us she's had pains in her chest and back and legs and now both ears. And sometimes she backs up her claims with a graveyard cough.

I don't think there's anything physical the matter with her at all. But I do think she's got outside troubles.

"We had a woman in here once-a diabetic," Ida went on. "She was all right for a couple of days. Then one night she said she couldn't get to sleep. The night nurse gave her a sedative and then, a few hours later, another. But next morning the patient said she hadn't slept a wink.

When I came on, the first chance I got, I went into her room and talked to her.

We chattered about this and that and finally she told me she and her husband hadn't got along for a couple of years.

That evening he had called her and told her he was all packed up and was leaving her. Imagine that! Leaving her when she was helpless in a hospital! Lots of times it isn't just an illness that gets a patient down. It's worrying about other things."

She goes back to the nursing station and gets two gray robes and white masks.

"Now I'll show you a different kind of patient. We have to put these on because he has tuberculosis and it's infectious.

He's been in No.1 for two months."

As she walks down the hall she explains that the patient is an engineer with a wife and three children. They can see him only in his room-when they put on robes and masks. He's allergic to streptomycin and PAS-two drugs which have sharply reduced the number of TB cases in the last decade-so his doctor is trying isoniazid. If this doesn't prove effective the patient will have to stay in his

room several months more and then go to a sanitarium.

The engineer is a man of thirty-five with prematurally gray hair and the light of humour in his intelligent face. Ida gives him a cup containing two white pills and asks him several questions. He assures her that he got his morning paper, that he has eaten his breakfast, that he feels pretty well. No, there's nothing he needs.

Everybody's taking good care of him.

He asks how the nurse is getting along.

"He never complains," Ida says when she has carefully closed the door. "I guess it's all in the way you look at things."

In the hall she spots a young man in hospital gown, bathrobe and slippers.

He's a patient recovering from pleurisy.

"Where are you going, Mr. Moley?"

"Just taking a little walk, nurse." "Well, I think you ought to get back to bed.

You're not supposed to be walking around yet." She stands there till he enters his room.

At noon Ida sees that her patients get their lunch trays and any medicines due at that time. Then she has her own lunch with Rose-Marie in the ground floor restaurant. It's there for relatives and friends of patients as well as for hospital personnel. On another floor there's a cafeteria and a canteen where night workers can get hot food from slot machines.

After lunch Ida makes another round of her patients. Mr. Moley asks for some cough medicine. The nurse gets it for him.

He explains that he has been coughing violently. "And you're the man who was parading up and down the hall this morning!" she exclaims. "I suggest that from now on you stay in bed till you're better." The patient thinks this over.

"I guess you're the boss," he says. "No, it's not that at all. It's not a question of somebody being the boss. It's just a question of doing what's good for you."

A big man in the next room gets somewhat similar treatment. He came to the hospital after several days of chills, fever, and nausea and his doctor has tentatively decided that his pancreas is inflamed.

The physician has ordered blood and urine tests and intestinal tract X-rays.

Meanwhile he is trying to build up the patient with dextrose and water, administered intravenously.

When Ida walks into his room this time the third bottle of fluid is oozing in and the patient is resentful. "I've had two bottles of fluid already," he tells her.

"And that's enough." "Who told you it's enough?" asks the little nurse. "I did," the patient replies. "You came to the hospital to get well, didn't you?" "I guess I did." "Well, you've got to take the treatment then."

The big fellow knows he is licked.

"Maybe you've got something there," he says. "Of course I have," Ida tells him.

"If you want to get well you have to go along with us."

Towards the end of her shift Ida talks

Her competence, understanding) and interest in her patients are among the assets of Washington Hospital Centre.

with the head nurse to learn if there are any late orders from doctors, looks over the notes her team members have made on patients' cards, and then makes her report on the tape. She plays back her recording to see if she has made any mistakes and stays in the nursing centre until the new shift comes on, ready to answer any questions her successors may have.

She usually rides home with two other registered nurses-her room-mate Jean Cooley, and Anne Simmons who lives near them. All three girls work the same shift and Anne ferries everybody between hospital and home in her car. She won't take any money for this, so they occasionally buy her little gifts.

Home for Ida and Jean is a secondfloor apartment about two kilometres from the centre. It consists of a small living room, kitchen, bathroom, and two good-sized bedrooms.

The two girls went through nursing school together at Richmond and have the same days off under a schedule that gives them every other week-end free.

One week they have Saturday, Sunday, and Monday off. Then they work three days and take off Friday. Thereafter they work seven straight days and then get Saturday, Sunday and Monday again.

Somebody has to work week-ends in a hospital and the girls feel that this is an equitable arrangement.

Both girls have boy friends and go out often on dates. Ida's admirer, a patrolman on the Washington police force, often takes her to the plays that are presented at nearby Howard University every week. And occasionally they go to movies.

The girls also are active in the alumnae association of St. Philip's Hospital whose Washington chapter has forty-two members. Ida is secretary of the social committee which plans dances and other functions, including a Christmas party.

Recently the association cleaned out its treasury by giving $200to Junior Village, an integrated institution for homeless children, to help finance weekly allowances. Ida gives $2 a week to the Village and visits it regularly to play with the

children-who range in age from two to thirteen-and show the older girls how to dress attractively and put up their hair in a professional way.

Anne comes from Richmond too, so sometimes the three girls go there to visit.

The round trip is about 330 kilometres.

Often Ida leaves behind her small sums of money to help her two sisters and brother buy things they want. Her father works in a basket factory and the salary he earns is not enough for small luxuries.

One brother and one sister still at home are in elementary school and the sister, who is in secondary school, plans to become a dietician. A good student, she expects to get a scholarship for a college course. Two older brothers are working, one as a long-distance truck driver, the other as a physicist in a Federal Government research agency.

Ida's terms of employment include a reduced rate on medical care for herself and her family. Like most of her patients, she has hospital insurance. Her weekly payment of eighty-one cents entitles her to stay in the hospital as long as is necessary and to have whatever surgery she needs-without extra charge, the hospital paying any balance the insurance doesn't cover. In addition, she can get free treatment at the out-patient department, plus the lower rates doctors charge nurses and their families outside the hospital.

She belongs to the Graduate Nurses' Association which functions as a labour union and seeks to get higher pay and better working conditions for its members. And because she's on its registry she could easily get all the special jobs she wanted as a special nurse for patients like Mrs. Smith. Special nurses earn more than Ida receives; but she doesn't plan to become one. She might get hooked with some patient like the woman with the imaginary ear bug and have to go home with her after she left the hospital.

"I wouldn't like to sit in a room all day with anyone patient," she said. "I like to have many different kinds. Most patients really need me and most of them are nice. I guess that's the main reason why I like nursing." •

DESIGNED TO DAZZLE The girl in the hot colours and lush fabrics on these pages makes visions of grace and elegance appear wherever she is seen. With the long lean look coveted by fashion magazines, photographers' model Liz Campbell is one of some 10,000 American women who earn a living wearing beautiful clothes-but one of the few to reach the heights of her occupation. Daughter of a well-known Negro cartoonist, Liz was designing dresses when, at twenty-three, she was picked by New York's leading models' agency to be a high fashion mannequin. Today she is one of the agency's 100 young women who work hard to display new fashion designs in magazines and advertising.

They are in a constant rush about the city laden with boxes of extra shoes, hats and dozens of different shades of lipstick and eye shadow. They melt under hot studio lights or shiver in next season's swim suits on midwinter beaches ..Many squeeze sittings between acting lessons or novel writing; and most, like Liz, are married. When modelling wears thin, she says, it will be home and family for her. There is still glamour in the future thoughtravel with her photographerhusband Gordon Parks, whose camera made magic with the clothes Liz wears on these pages.

Startling colours fuse dramatically in this photograph of fashion model Liz Campbell. A lavender hat, wrapped with a fire-red ribbon, tops beads and blouse of the same torrid shade.

Mock-jade jewel/ery joins pink with green to ' domin'1te simple shirt.

44

SPAN

May 1964

Subtle, translucent hues combine in jewellery that accents silk shantung blouse. Two-tone motif of necklace and earrings is repeated in gold and amber rings.

This /lower-strewn jacket of upholstery velours is teamed with silk slacks and blouse lit by luminous baubles. The rich textures bring elegance to an otherwise casual outfit.

JOHN

F. KENNEDY SPEAKS ON

CIVIL RIGHTS

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.

-Remarks on nation-wide radio and television address, June 11, 1963.

This nation is now engaged in a continuing debate about the civil rights of a portion of the citizens. That will go on, and those rights will expand until the standard first forged by the nation's founders has been reached, and all Americans enjoy equal opportunity and liberty under law.-Remarks at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, May 18, 1963.

. Let it be clear, in our own minds and hearts, that it is not merely because of the Cold War, and not merely because of the economic waste of discrimination, that we are committed to achieving true equality of opportunity. The basic reason is because it is right.

-Message to Congress, February 28, 1963.

In the last two years, more progress has been made in securing the civil rights of all Americans than in any comparable period in our history. Progress has been made-through executive action, litigation, persuasion and private initiative-in achieving and protecting equality of opportunity in education, voting, transportation, employment, housing, government, and the enjoyment of public accommodations.

-M~Hag~

to Congpp]],

j'PDPWljIJJ

LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPEAKS ON CIVIL RIGHTS

Today Americans of all races stand side by side in Berlin and Viet Nam. They died side by side in Korea. Surely they can work and eat and travel side of the Union by side in America.-State

Message, January 8, 1964.

In the years of the Twentieth Century which remain before us, our country cannot meet what is expected and what is required of it unless and until we overcome those biases which exclude any from full participation in citizenship and productive effort on the basis of race, religion, or region of their birth.-Remarks at Detroit, January 6, 1963.

We have talked enough in this country about civil rights. We have talked for 100 years or more.

It is now time to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law ... so that we can move forward to eliminate every trace of discrimination and oppression that is to Joint based upon race or colour.-Address Session of Congress, November 27, 1963.

Until justice is blind to colour, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the colour of men's skin, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact. To the extent that the Proclamation of Emancipation is not fulfilled in fact, to that extent we shall have fallen short of assuring freedom to the free.

lE, l~~l -UPltY]BWIU, M!lY 10, l~(jl

In the final analysis, civil disobedience means that non-cooperation is as much a moral obligation as is co-operation with good.

his opponent: "We will meet your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, so throw us in jail and as difficult as it is, we will go to jail and still love you. We will still love you, but be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer and one day¡ we will win freedom for ourselves; we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory." .

This is the meaning of non-violence in its deepest dimensions and that is something that frustrates the opponent. It exposes his moral defences, it weakens his morale and at the same time it works on his conscience. He does not know how to handle it.

If he does not beat you, wonderful. If he does not put you in jail, wonderful. But if he does put you in jail, you transform that cell from a dungeon of shame to a haven of freedom and human dignity. Even if he tries to kill you, you develop the inner conviction that there are some things so precious, some things so dear, some things so eternally true that they are worth dying for. And if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he is not fit to live. If an individual at thirty years has not found some great truth, some great principle, some great ideal that he will die for, he is already dead. If he is challenged to take a stand but he refuses because he is afraid -afraid that his home will be bombed, afraid that he may be shot, afraid that he may lose his job-he may live until he is eighty, but he is just as dead at thirty as he is at eighty, . and the cessation of breathing in his life is merely the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

And so non-violence sees this, and it sees that suffering can be a powerful social force.

There is another thing that I would like to bring out here and that is an element of optimism concerning human ~ature in the non-violent philosophy.

Non-violence says that within human nature there are amazing potentialities of goodness. Now I hope I will not be misunderstood at this point because I think all too many devotees of non-violence and pacifism have been all too superficial about the human nature and all too sentimental. They have not been able to see the evil tenden-

cies in human nature. I think we all must realize that there is within human nature a sort of dualism, something within all of us which justified Plato in saying that the human personality is like a charioteer with two strong horses each wanting to go in different directions. There is something within all of us which causes us to cry out with St. Augustine as he said in his Confessions: "Lord, make me pure-but not yet." There is this tension and this struggle within human nature between the high and the low.

But after seeing this and after expressing this realistically, we must recognize that just as there is a capacity for evil, there is a capacity for goodness. Just as a Hitler can lead men to the darkest and lowest depths, a Gandhi can lead men to the highest heights of non-violence and goodness. We must always see these possibilities within human nature; the non-violent discipline goes on with this belief that even the most difficult person, even the person who is committed to the old order with all his might, can be transformed.

Now non-violence says another thing. It says that one must¡ never allow himself to reach the point that he. is willing to co-operate with evil. This brings out one of the most difficult aspects of the non-violent, direct action movement. That is the whole question of civil disobedience.

This is what civil disobedience means in the final analysis: That non-eo-operation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is co-operation with good. This was what Henry David Thoreau said in eloquent terms in his essay on Civil DJsobedience.

Now I know that we are criticized in our movement a great deal on this point and I can understand the criticism at times because we have been telling people to obey the law-and yet we disobey the law at points. We are saying to the people all over the country that everybody should obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, and yet down in Birmingham, Alabama, a few days ago, we disobeyed the local laws and then the State Court issued an injunction and we disobeyed the injunction. How doyou justify all of this?

These are legitimate questions and I think they must be answered. The persons who raise these questions must realize that there are two types of laws: just laws and unjust laws. I would be the first to say that men must Continued on next page

We contend that the law

that is broken must be broken openly, cheerfully, lovingly and with a willingness to accept the penalty.

obey just laws, that we have not only a civil duty but a moral obligation to obey just laws.

And I would go on to say that when a law is unjust we have a moral and an ethical responsibility to take a stand against that.

Now someone would say: "What is the difference?"

Well, I would say, first, that an unjust law is a law that is out of harmony with the moral laws of the universe. A law t~at is 9ut of harmony with the laws of God. Any law that degrades human personality is automatically an unjust . law and a law that uplifts humanity is a just law. Segregation is unjust and the laws supporting segregation are unjust because segregation itself is immoral.

Segregation is wrong, to use the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, because it is based on human laws out of harmony with natural law, the eternal law, the moral laws of the universe.

Segregation is wrong because it is little more than a system of adultery perpetuated by an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality.

Segregation is an evil system and therefore a~y law upholding segregation is at that moment an unjust and an evil law.

Now.when someone says to me: "This is meaningless to me, I don't believe in these abstract things called moral laws and I am n6t religious," I tell them about the laws in the State of Mississippi. An unjust law is a code which a majority inflicts on a minority, that the minority had no part in enacting or creating because that minority was denied the right to vote. So who can argue that any law in the State of Mississippi is a just law?

In the first place, the officials who made that law were not. democratically elected. In Mississippi only 20,000 Negroes (of 986,000 Negroes in the state) are registered to vote. It means that the very legislative body itself is not democratically structured, and so the laws made by that body are automatically unjust laws.

Now in saying this I am not advocating anarchy. I am not advocating defying the law or evading the law.

This is what many of our segregationist brothers do. We do not advocate that; this will not lead to anything.

We contend that the law that is broken must be brqken openly, cheerfully, lovingly and with a willingness to accept

the penalty. I submit that any individual who disobeys a law that conscience tells him is unjust and is willing to pay the penalty by staying in jail, if necessary, in order to arouse the conscience of the community concerning the injustice of that law, is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law.

I submit to you that there is power in this method of non-violence. I know that there are those who have become disillusioned about it. They have come to believe that there is no efficacy in this method. I know that there are those who have been angered about recent happenings. They have come to the conclusion that the non-violent discipline no longer has any relevance and power in this struggle.

But I beg you to see that the gains that we have made in recent years-and they have been tremendous gains at points-have come through the power of non-violent direct action. I firmly believe that we would not have made these gains if we had turned to massive violence.

Through the non-violent method we have been able to bring about the integration at lunch counters in more than 300 cities of the South-and this has been done without a single court suit. As a result of the freedom rides and the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, back in 1955 and 1956, we have achieved almost total desegregation in all of its dimensions in public transportation.

But perhaps our greatest success is that we have created an issue: The issue of Civil Rights. Civil Rights stands as an issue now that nobody can ignore. You can't be neutral on civil rights; you must be for it or against it and this is indeed significant.

Civil Rights is now an issue that nobody can evade and so we must see that we are progressing rather than retrogressing. Yes, we are discovering some hostilities that we did not know about, but these hostilities have always been there in a latent sense and we have just brought them out on the surface and into the open where everybody can see them and the whole of society can grapple with them and get rid of them.

So I am still convinced that there is great power in non-violence and we must be willing to follow this way, this method, this philosophy until we have been able to bring an end to the tragedy of segregation and move on towards a desegregated and finally an integrated society. •

We sllall overcome, We shall oven~ome, We shall overcome some day, De~p'in my heart

We shall overcome some day.

We "sJ!a~llivein peace,

We shall overcome some day.

The whole wide world around, .

The whole wide world around, The whole wide world around, some day.

GO$peI~;nge!MO:halia Jackson is on.aw'.,',America's most

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