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Show Rustin Part II The Struggle For A Liberal Conscience All of this increases the tensions in American Ameri-can life. Indeed, it is scarcely surprising that today more and more young Negroes in the urban underclass are becoming convinced that a violent confrontation with white society is both necessary and inevitable. After doing more in recent years than any other native American group to make American democracy realize itself, many young Negroes are now on the verge of losing all faith in democracy. It is at this point that we begin to see some of the negative effects that the Negro's response re-sponse to injustice can have upon the society. I am speaking, of course, of the supermilitancy, looting, rioting, and burning in which black despair is now being expressed. Given the peculiar way in which the white society tends to respond to Negro violence, activities such as we witnessed this summer could well push the races further apart and risk the possibility of a militant racial confrontation in America. Specifically, these activities could create a climate in which the fears and passions of whites and blacks could be organized and po-liticalized po-liticalized by demagogues and opportunists; and a situation could well come about in which the whites opt once and for all out of any responsibility for social progress and redress for the society's non-whites. Ultimately, the present situation could well set the country upon a course of political and racial repression that could end for many years to come the American-dream of a civilized multi-racial relationship. (This is the second part of Bayard Rustin's essay on racial tension and the public character. Part I was printed Thursday.) By BAYARD RUSTIN Though it is not a pleasure to admit it, America itself has been lucky in the insistency of the Negro's assault upon racial prejudice and tension. This assault, from Reconstruction to the present time, has been enormously more beneficial to America than to the Negro himself. him-self. c , Especially since the turn of the century, the Negro, in constant and often lonely political politi-cal motion, has kept American democracy alert and flexible. By his challenge of racial codes throughout the country, segregated education ed-ucation and public facilities, and- jim crow voting practices, etc., the Negro has not only kept our democracy from settling down into smugness and atrophying into racist and other kinds of reaction, but has also given it another an-other chance to realize itself more justly in the lives of its citizens and more attractively in the eyes of the world. This revolution process pro-cess goes on, and it is one that I have no doubt will be ultimately successful. But that is not all. The Negro struggle awakened and energized a whole new generation gen-eration of Americans students, creating in them a new sense of idealism, a new awareness aware-ness of their relationship to the politics of their time, and a new concern for the state of their republic. These young people threw themselves vigorously into the civil rights struggle in the North and in the South, helped abolish the last vestiges of McCarthyism on the American campus, strengthened the peace movement, and brought critical intelligence to bear on the conduct of American foreign ' Dolicv. Social Planning the Answer But the opportunities for avoiding such a future are equal to the dangers that such a future poses. The current circumstances present pre-sent a challenge to the growth of a courageous national" leadership and the development of a national will dedicated to the eradication of the conditions that threaten to tear society apart. The development of this leadership and this will depends upon a number of things. But chiefly it depends on the understanding and acceptance of the uses of social planning and that there is nothing necessarily un-American un-American in such planning. In any event, the continued degradation of the- Negro's social and economic life is not going to be reversed without conscious planning. plan-ning. The health and education of Negro children are not going to be radically improved im-proved without social planning. And millions of unskilled, unemployed, and under-employed men are not going to be put back to work or assured of a steady income without social planning. Such planning, of course, must be democratic in nature. It must also be one of the objectives of such planning to recognize the need for public programs and guaranteed incomes, for it is no longer possible for private enterprise, to, on its own, put the vast majority of workers in this country back to work: the government will have to serve as what has been called "the employer of last resort." But none of this will be possible without the leadership and the will. And the leadership leader-ship and the will will not be possible as long as our society continues to be plagued with the self-delusion of security. This is perhaps one of the greatest dangers we face as people, for the pursuit of individual security, while ignoring ig-noring the need of it in the lives of other people, can lead to the death both of social concern and the soul of leadership. Moreover, I believe there is only one kind of genuine security, and that is the realistic confrontation of insecurity both within and around us. Our society as it exists today is profundly insecure, for whites as well as for blacks, and there will be no exist for any of us until we voluntarily confront the fact of its existence and develop out of that confrontation confron-tation a census of will and determination to create a mutual security for all. It is not as difficult a job as it might seem. It requires only the courage to concede each man's right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (C) 1967, Newsday, Inc. Movement Exposed Bigotries Our struggle went on to revitalize the American liberal conscience, providing it with a resonant domestic issue at a time when foreign for-eign policy seemed to offer it the only meaningful mean-ingful arena for the expression of its civilized concerns. The renewed concern with the problems prob-lems of poverty was a direct result of the sustained Negro drive for a decent life, and therefore the war on poverty, for blacks and for whites, as inadequate as it is, must be counted as one of the genuine contributions of the Negro struggle to the broader American social revolution. By no means least, the Negro struggle exposed a variety of political and racial bigotries which for a long time had remained hidden behind the facade of our pious democratic rhetoric. By showing them up, the Negro movement left no doubt as to which of our groupings were working firmly within the tradition of democratic principles, and which of them were simply exploiting, exploiting, ex-ploiting, for their own dark designs, the protection pro-tection offered by these principles. Money Is the Problem As we must see, many of these efforts deeply affected and, in some respects, even changed the face of American life. But much of the good that America derived from the black . struggle has not been translated proportionately proportion-ately in Negro life, particularly the lives of. those Negroes left out of the civil rights gains, those left in the slums of our big cities, those stranded without money and without food in rural areas, and those left behind by the technological and automotive revolution. Even now, while the country is spending hun dreds of thousands of dollars a day for each Viet Cong killed, it is spending no more than 50 dollars a year per person in the war on poverty. So the stark conditions of the Negro underclass un-derclass remain virtually unchanged. Unemployment Unem-ployment among Negro teenagers is triple that of whites; unemployment among Negro adults is double that of whites; the median income gap between Negro and white has widened; there are more Negroes in segregated segre-gated classrooms now than there were before 1954; the slums have grown more intolerable, and show no immediate signs of improving. |