July 17, 1968

March Failure May Restore Moderates

The Blacks blew it — and more's the pity.  Resurrection City is now a footnote of history.  It sputtered out of existence mainly because it served no useful purpose.  It's approach to the real problems of the Negro was negative in the extreme and so was doomed to failure from the start.

Who side-tracked Dr. Martin Luther King from his necessary and noble crusade to free the Southern black man from discrimination?  Certainly no friend of the Negro.

In place of a clear issue of civil rights, some one or some thing led Dr.  King to substitute contentious goals only remotely related to the root problem.

It wasn't too big an ideological jump from the southern farms to northern ghettos.  It's hard to draw a line between civil rights to social rights, so the original crusade of limited objective was easily transferred to a larger field of action.

However, escalation of the civil rights movement to encompass the Vietnam war and finally to welfare was a tortuous shift that never came off.

The irrelevancy of war and welfare to the evil of discrimination has now become painfully apparent to the Negro himself.

Likewise, violence and insults are revealed to be dull tools of progress.  Bombast is good therapy for frustration but it does little to advance the legitimate aspirations of the disadvantaged.

Whether the angry, militant Negro likes it or not his future is dependent upon the willing cooperation of the white majority.  Even the demagogues of politics can't help the Negro in the long ran.  Passive resistance of the majority is subtle and pervasive.  It responds slowly to moral persuasion, but not at all to threats.

The Dixiecrat practices segregation for reasons not wholly bigoted.  Yet, the southern white persons who impose the injustice are a minority in the United States — and probably in the South as well.

Force might be effective in gaining civil rights for the Negro from the reluctant southern minority.  Unfortunately, a start in this direction was squandered for some unknown ambition of Dr. King.  Public tolerance of militancy has withered under the hot sun of violence.  Further improvement of the Negro as a group must now await the cooling of public indignation.

The rationale of civil disobedience requires a degree of sophistication current Negro leaders do not seem to have.

Jesus Christ understood the technique, as did Mahatmas Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau.  They defied specific 1aws and gracefully accepted imprisonment as a consequence.  Theirs was a negative act against a negative law.  The shenanigans of SCLC, CORE and SNICC are sad imitations of the delicate art.  Their demonstrations in recent years have not been against bad laws but, presumably, for enactment of new laws.

Since prejudice in the South has been relegated to the back burner, Negro leaders have sought arrests for such petty infractions as illegal picketing, blocking traffic, lying down in public corridors, and disrupting daily life.  These are hoodlum tactics prohibited equally to all of us.

Negroes were on solid moral ground when they took places at restaurants and bathing beaches where they were prohibited by law or custom.  But they lost their cause when their activities degenerated into thumbing noses.

Resurrection City was a farce from beginning to end.  Once the mules and wagons were dragged into the scene it was obvious the show-offs were in control.  Rev. Ralph Abernathy was prisoner to his desire to wear Dr. King's mantle.  He was unable to moderate the hot-heads who have dominated the movement in recent months.  In public he blustered as his rebels demanded, but in private he apologized to government officials for their excesses.  He was not his own man.

The encampment was a disgrace to our Capitol because it was not illustrative of the problem needing redress.  Beatings, robberies, shootings and fighting were frequent within the shantytown.

In the end Rev. Abernathy was reduced to negotiating with the police for a time and place to be arrested docilely.  By some strange reasoning that escapes me, a short term in jail is supposed to "save face" for Abernathy.  So he was arrested for unlawfully assembling on the Capitol grounds, and a bus load of his followers were given the same fate for overstaying their camping permit.

It is all quite sad, because Negroes do need a popular leader of their own race — but one of responsibility and wisdom.

What is needed at this junction is lobbying skill, not civil disobedience.  The independent Negroes who seek only their constitutional rights and opportunity through self organization are on the right track.

The positive acts of voting pressure are necessary for positive new laws.  It is time to kiss off the black radicals and their white apologists.  It is proper that the problems of war and the poor be left to other champions anxious to serve.

It is possible, and desirable, that from the wreckage of civil disobedience should emerge a new and creative approach to the American Negroes' dreams.

Author: Lindsey Williams