visible or not, it is primarily at the municipal level that public services are organized and delivered to their intended consumers. The quality of programspublic welfare, education, urban renewal, housing code enforcement, fair employment, law enforcement and correctional practices-all of these are crucially shaped by the character of municipal government.

When private agencies take positions on this expanding range of governmental programs, they are quite mindful of their interests. This statement will hold even when their interests run counter to those of what are now the most depressed minority poor, as they often do. If minority groups expect to influence the proliferating arenas of governmental activity, they will need their own organizational apparatus to help. Such an apparatus will provide a stable cadre of technical and professional personnel who can examine the merits of alternative public policies, survey the practices of governmental agencies, and activate their own low-income constituencies in behalf of needed changes.

In these terms, then, ethnically based social welfare structures facilitate the assertion of expressly ethnic interests, and they provide a vehicle by which to influence important spheres of public policy. For lack of private money, an insufficient sense of community, and other reasons as well, the contemporary minority slum does not contain many such institutions. There is no Negro federation of philanthropy in New York or anywhere, although some of the new ethnic organizations now developing may be the beginnings. But these organizations are meeting intense opposition from city officials who have no wish to accelerate the growing cohesion of minority groups by supporting the development of new organizations. Other forces also oppose them, as witness the unrelenting fury with which the press in New York has attacked HaryouACT and its executive director, Mr. Livingston Wingate. Settlement house leaders deplore the idea of permitting ethnic or class segments to build separate organizations, arguing that the true goal of community development is to bring everyone together in the same structure. The logic of this position is that community problems are common ones and can best be solved through cooperation and communication. All things considered, however, it is rather difficult to see how the interests of the Puerto Rican slum tenement dweller are congruent with those of the Jewish landlord or those of the unregistered Negro with those of the Italian political machine leader. If there are techniques of communication by which genuine conflicts of interest can be eliminated they ought to be disseminated as rapidly as possible, especially to Syracuse. There, it appears, communication has broken down, for the Republican mayor is quite distressed that antipoverty funds are being used to encourage the poor to register, a form of "fomenting and agitating" that will lead to no good, only to Democratic votes, he says.

That powerful and divergent ethnic as well as class interests are at stake in this controversy over the involvement of the poor is thus becoming rather more obvious. Those who are appalled by the possibility that these conficts might be exacerbated, especially as a result of governmental policies, fail to understand that strategies of conciliation and coalition will not bring the poor into the mainstream of American life. What the poor need are a heightened awareness of conflicting interests and the means to organize separately. For within coalitions of unequals, it is not typically the case that the least equal have much success in advancing their interests. Judging from the history of ethnic groups struggling to gain a foothold in our pluralistic society, it seems clear that the growth of ethnic separatism is a precondition for eventual penetration of ruling circles and full economic integration. Minority groups will win acceptance by the majority only through developing their own bases of power, not by submerging their unorganized numbers in coalitions dominated by other and better organized groups.

Within this broader framework, to conclude, the debate over the involvement of the poor in the antipoverty program raises the question of whether new power bases are going to emerge in the ghetto. The issue is not just how many and how well the victims of poverty will be assisted through casualty programs, but whose institutional power is to be enlarged through control of antipoverty funds. If new programs are operated exclusively by municipalities or established voluntary agencies, the relative powerlessness of the contemporary ethnic poor will be perpetuated, and their poverty with it.

No one should suppose that a single system of new institutions-such as pri vate social welfare ones-can produce the collective force to overcome the deeper inequalities in our society. The building of ethnic identity, solidarity, and power is ordinarily accomplished through a series of organized communal experiences.

While some may be more important that others, all contribute to the overall impact. These are the terms, then, in which the pressure for a "new social welfare voluntarism" must be understood. The question is whether this movement will be allowed to develop in one city after another or whether powerful coalitions of governmental and traditional voluntary leaders will succeed in blocking it.

[From the Commentary magazine, July 1964]

THE MEANING OF NEGRO STRATEGY

(By David Danzig)

In May of 1963, the world was abruptly made aware that a new minority community had emerged as a significant and self-conscious force in American society. The evidence was clear, eloquent, and disturbing. In Birmingham, Ala., during the week of May 13, the formerly dispersed and demoralized masses of Negroes suddenly became a well-organized, resolute body of citizens, marching forward to their daily encounter with the city's police force and fire department. The following week in Nashville, Tenn., students of Fisk University led a protest march of their fellow Negroes through the main avenues of the city as part of a new campaign for complete desegregation. In Raleigh, N.C., 500 college students broke 3 years of relative racial peace that had followed the desegregation of lunch counters, and launched a similar drive for total equality by a demonstration at the Governor's mansion. In Greensboro, N.C., a thousand Negroes attempted to sit in at two movie houses and a public cafeteria. In Cambridge, Md., as in Albany, Ga., the long, desperate struggle was joined again, while in Selma, Ala., the first stage of a new one was initiated by Negro leaders in a campaign to register voters. But it was not only in the South that the presence and pressure of a coherent movement were unmistakably apparent. Immediately following Birmingham, the groundwave of protest began to swell in the Negro ghettos of New York, Chicago, and Detroit, as well as in pleasant suburbs like Orange and Englewood in New Jersey. Following these 2 weeks in May the tide of Negro group action continued to grow through the late spring and summer, rolling across the eastern half of the Nation and culminating in the great demonstration in Washington on August 28.

The most immediate and dramatic reaction of the white community was that of resentment and resistance. Nothing was quite to match that long Saturday night of May 18 in Birmingham when the motel where Martin Luther King had set up headquarters and the home of King's brother were both bombed, and when for some hours Negroes and police struggled amid the havoc and terror of an incipient race war. But almost everywhere that Negroes protested there was violence or the threat of it. The demonstrations in Nashville ended in knife fighting between Negroes and whites; in Greensboro 241 marchers were arrested while a mob of whites swirled about them under the banners of "Blacks, Go Home," and "Go Back to Africa." And the mood of white resistance was to continue making itself felt in the infamous church bombing in Birmingham, and in the chain of assaults and police harassment that eventually extended from Jackson, Miss., to New York.

This outcropping of violence and intransigence, bombings and imprisonment, however, tended to obscure the less dramatic but more significant development of a new stage in Negro-white relations. For example, even as the Birmingham police were packing the marchers off to jail, an unprecedented series of negotiations was taking place between the leading businessmen of the city-six white and six Negro-which culminated in an agreement providing for a phased integration of lunch counters and the opening of job opportunities to Negroes. So, too, the Negro demonstrations in Nashville, Raleigh, and Greensboro, were promptly followed by the establishment of new biracial committees to plan further desegregation, backed by statements from the white business leaders of both cities calling for the removal of all public and business policies that denied rights and services on racial grounds. And similarly, in Orange, N.J., the efforts of the Negro community resulted in an order from the State commissioner of education to present a plan for integrating a segregated elementary school in that town

In other words, what underlay the specific conflicts both in the South and in the North during this 2-week period in May was the emergence of an organized Negro community in each town representing the interests of its members and able to negotiate for them. Even the agreement reached in Birmingham-though it

was soon to be repudiated by the business community of the city, not to mention the city government, the State police, and the fanatical terrorists-is an illustration of this development. Written in the spirit of civic pragmatism that has been displacing the rabid intransigence of the racists, the Birmingham agreement reads like what it essentially is: a pact between two distinct political bodies: Responsible leaders of both Negro and white communities of Birmingham, being desirous of promoting conditions which will insure sound moral, economic, and political growth of their city, in the interest of all citizens of Birmingham, after mutual consideration and discussion of the issues relating to the recent demonstrations in the city, have agreed to * * *

What we have here, in effect, is a radical departure from the traditional conception of civil rights as the rights of individuals. This departure lies at the heart of the "Negro Revolution," and may, indeed, almost be said to be that revolution. Today, in America as elsewhere, the Negro has made us forcefully aware that the rights and privileges of an individual rest upon the status attained by the group to which he belongs-that is to say, by the power it controls and can use. That this fact determined race relations in the 19th century is clear enough: Hillaire Belloc, disdaining to rationalize colonialism as "the white man's burden," put the matter very simply: "When all is said and done, we have the Gatling gun and they have none." To the extent that power is available to him, the Negro is now responding in kind. And in the American pluralistic pattern, where social power is distributed by group, the Negro has perforce come to recognize that he can achieve equal opportunities only through concerted action of the Negro community. No longer addressing himself exclusively to the white man's attitudes of prejudice, to effecting changes in "the hearts and minds of men"-an approach that dooms him to gradualism-the Negro now confronts the white society on the issue of his rights with all the political and economic strength that his group is able to wield.

The Negro bloc of yesterday, in short, has become the mass movement of today. The speed with which this change has occurred, as well as its tendency to become identified with specific personalities like Martin Luther King and with specific incidents like those in Birmingham or Jackson or Albany, have deflected attention from the more general meaning of what has been happening. First of all, it is clear that the upsurge of Negro action is not merely a matter of temporary fervor; it is rather a profound response to a number of pressures which have been generated by the Negro's changing relation to American society and which, taken together, constitute a social upheaval of major significance. Among the more salient of these pressures is the accelerated migration of Negroes from the South to the North and from rural areas to the cities. While the State of Mississippi has been losing over 30 percent of its Negro population in each of the past two decades, cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles have been experiencing an equally phenomenal rise in their Negro populations. Within the deprived and impacted Negro ghettos, the demands steadily grow for improved housing, education, and other public services. At the same time, the mounting population and its concentration in big cities provide Negro leaders with an increasingly strong base of political power. For example, in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago's Black Belt, whose Negro population has increased by 80 percent since the war, a grassroots political movement has sprung up recently which has been agitating effectively for better police protection, school facilities, and housing, and which has forged a new spirit of group solidarity and communal responsibility that has enabled its leaders to oppose the acquisition of the best sections of the neighborhood by the powerful University of Chicago.

In the economic sphere, similarly, the advent of automation and other technological advances has produced a growing unemployment rate among Negroes and a widening split between Negro and white incomes. As the pressures of Negro poverty and frustration mount, the barriers of job discrimination become that much more unendurable; the result has been a concerted effort to breach them through mass demonstrations against labor and management alike, as well as through boycotts, selective buying, and other pressure tactics.

Given all these tensions within the Negro population, it is not surprising that they should be pressing for action. What is surprising, however, is the solidarity and skill which have characterized Negro action during the past year. The march on Washington presented an especially conclusive example of Negro unity. Such unity-indeed, unity of any kind-is new in Negro life; one of the important effects of the strategy of mass demonstrations has been to create a sense of community among a people whose group ties were deliberately and per

sistently shattered during the period of slavery and whose subsequent social history has produced, for the most part, no larger unit of community than the church congregation. The spectacle of 200,000 people marching last summer through Washington, along with the other group demonstrations in the North and South and the innumerable acts of individual heroism, have produced a new feeling of collective self-awareness, of peoplehood. The "march on Washington," moreover, was a testimony to the rapid progress that the Negro has been making in wielding power. The organizational feat involved in planning and carrying through the huge demonstration, and the discipline of the marchers themselves, most of them Negro, marked an impressive stage in the maturing of the community. And it showed that a new Negro bureaucracy had come to the fore whose political sophistication and organizational talent were comparable to those of the best leadership found among the other ethnic and religious groups.

Thus, within a very short time, the Negro has developed the rudimentary group coherence and indigenous leadership that enables him to speak for his own rights and interests. Lacking these strengths, the Negro has in the past necessarily been dependent upon whites to represent him in American society. Both the Urban League, his main social agency, and the NAACP, his main political action group, were founded by whites and until recently have functioned within the ambience of the white community. Similarly with the Negro's political power, which has been mortgaged to the liberal coalition of the big city political machines and the CIO that was created a generation ago under the New Deal. While the Negro has not as yet withdrawn from this coalition, he is no longer willing to accept the theory that what is good for the Democratic Party is necessarily good for him. Nor is he any more patient with the "trickle down" concept of prosperity when it is advanced to him by big labor than was the union man himself when he heard it expressed by big business during the Hoover years. Having taken into his own hands the reins of his destiny in American society, the Negro has found that the gradualism to which so many northern liberals are committed can be as pressing an obstacle as the intransigence of the southern conservatives, and consequently he has been forced to assert specific Negro demands in the North through his attacks upon the unions, upon de facto school and housing segregation, and through his drive for greater political patronage and a more independent use of the vote. What is now perceived as the "revolt of the Negro" amounts to this: the solitary Negro seeking admission into the white world through unusual achievement has been replaced by the organized Negro insisting upon a legitimate share for his group of the goods of American sociey. The white liberal, in turn, who-whether or not he has been fully conscious of it-has generally conceived of progress in race relations as the one-by-one assimilation of deserving Negroes into the larger society, finds himself confused and threatened by suddenly having to come to terms with an aggressive Negro community that wishes to enter it en masse.

Accordingly, in the arena of civil rights the Negro revolution has tended to take the struggle out of the courts and bring it to the streets and the negotiating tables. Granting the potential for unprecedened violence that exists here, it must also be borne in mind that what the Negro people are now beginning to do, other ethnic minorities-who brought to America their strong traditions of communal solidarity-did before them. With this powerful asset the Irish rapidly acquired political strength, and the Jews succeeded in raising virtually an entire immigrant population into the middle class within the span of two generations. Viewed in this perspective, the Negroes are merely the last of America's significant ethnic minorities to achieve communal solidarity and to grasp the role of the informal group power structure in protecting the rights and advancing the opportunities of the individual members of the community.

Indeed, ethnic groups (including of course the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant group) have played a much more significant role in American society than is commonly recognized or at least admitted. Except in the realm of politics, where the backing of a given ethnic group is often the primary qualification for office, we tend to maintain the fiction that American society is made up of isolated individuals who depend mainly upon their own talents for the position they achieve in it. The truth is, however, that the economic structure of the Nation has been no less strongly influenced by ethnic factors than political ones. Wherever we look-whether at heavy industry or dairy farming, public utilities or banking, the building or the garment trades, organized crime or law enforcement-we find clearly marked ethnic patterns of occupation opportunities. Though these patterns have been breaking down in recent decades, in many of

the older industries and vocations it still makes a difference whether one's forebears came from Ireland or Italy or whether one's first name or last name is Milton.

The converse of the fiction of social individualism has been the idea that minority organization hinders assimilation and perpetuates the disabilities of minority status. In the light of this idea, the immigrants pouring into America at the turn of the century were repeatedly advised that naturalization was an individual-and not a group-process and were admonished to shed their group identities and organizations as rapidly as possible. Today, Negro solidarity and its forms of collective self-assertion are provoking a similar anxiety and counsel from the dominant group. Disapproval by the majority, however, is unlikely to have much influence on the new Negro movement. The traditional approach to civil rights and equal opportunities as the slow but continuous expansion of democracy on an individual basis means little to a group which is demanding the immediate rectification of a severe and continuous injustice to it. Moreover, when the authority of State governments and the power of most social and economic institutions have been used to deny the individual Negro his rights and opportunities merely because of his membership in the Negro group, it seems only fitting that he should muster the power he possesses to establish his rights and opportunities on a group basis.

But Negro action has not only turned the civil rights program into a conflict between groups, it has also extended this conflict to employment, housing, and education. Looking beyond the demand for civil rights, Negro leaders see that the "open society" of 1964 is in many areas even more closed to their community than was the ethnocentric WASP society of 1900 to the waves of new immigrants, and that the inequities suffered by Negroes are more extreme. Even in jobs, residential neighborhoods, and schools where Negroes are not excluded by explicit policy, their absence in significant numbers is rightly seen as proof of discrimination. The sad and brutal truth is that de facto segregation permeates our institutions and exerts a cumulative force: like a tropism beyond the reach of law, it impels the white man to identify with his race and to turn his back on the Negro.

The real issue, then, is not that of giving special consideration to Negroes to compensate for past injustices, but that of adopting realistic measures which will begin to correct a profound tendency in our society to exclude and penalize the Negro. So profound is this tendency that even where the the formula "regardless of race, creed, or color" has been taken seriously, the Negro has found himself excluded on the ground of inadequate qualifications. The present anxiety about "maintaining standards" is far from new: it is a traditional ethnocentric reaction to any serious threat from outsiders, and it is as often a rationalization for prejudice as a concern for quality. Certainly the recently expressed determination of the building trades unions to maintain the "standards" of their craft must seem unconvincing to any occupant of a modern New York apartment. Where there is good will, the problem of equipping Negroes would seem to be no more difficult than that faced by American industry during World War II when it created virtually a whole new skilled work force through on-the-job training. After all, no one is suggesting that Negro laborers should immeidately be sent to medical school, though no doubt a good many more Negro college students with good grades in biology should be.

To deal with this form of institutional prejudice the Negro activists have adopted the new strategy of attempting to fix responsibility on the manage ment level-housing authorities, trade union officials, corporation executives, boards of education, and so forth. Such an approach to the objective of increasing vocational, housing, and educational opportunities must sooner or later involve a discussion of numbers. However, insistence that the number of Negroes in some industries, housing projects, and schools be increased to a proportion reasonably related to Negro incidence in the population has been misrepresented, sometimes intentionally, as a demand for a rigid quota that would be imposed for the benefit of Negroes and at the expense of whites. Both Governor Rockefeller and President Kennedy received strong support from the white commurity when they condemned quotas. The President did son practical grounds: "We are too mixed, this society of ours, to begin to divide ourselves on the basis of race or color." The Governor made his opposition a matter of doctrine, arguing that such quotas were both unlawful and counter to American principles. The New York Times, having acknowledged that Negroes are justified in being impatient about the rate of unemployment in their community, went on to