Books: Mood Ebony

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FREEDOM—WHEN? by James Farmer. 197 pages. Random House. $4.95.

As a founder of the Congress of Racial Equality and its national director since 1961, James Farmer helped perfect such civil rights weapons as the sit-in and the freedom ride. But Farmer has decided that "more sophisticated weaponry" is now required, and he is resigning as CORE's leader next month to direct a Government-aided literacy and job-training program. Freedom—When? is part tribute to the organization he grew up with, part testament of his beliefs, part personal memoir of 46 years, and part civil rights manual.

Farmer traces CORE's development back to 1942, when it was so colorblind that one of its white female work ers, mugged in an apartment corridor, neglected to tell police that her assailant was a Negro—"for fear," writes Farmer, "of indicating prejudice." Now, he notes, CORE is in a "mood ebony," and he quotes a man as telling him, "Brother Farmer, we've got to dig being black." No black nationalist, Farmer digs it nonetheless. "We are not so worried if we get to be known as Negroes," he writes. We are desegregationists, not necessarily integrationists." To the question posed by his book's title, he replies that freedom will not be now—not only because prejudice persists but also because of "those impersonal forces of modern economic life which produce mass unemployment, urban squalor, education inadequate to the demands of our technological economy."

Occasionally, Farmer refuses to let facts dilute a good argument. He claims that last year's Watts riot "probably could have been contained by police restraint," though Watts really boiled over only after Los Angeles police pulled out of the ghetto for hours in hopes that it would cool off. Similarly, in an overlong section on the failings of U.S. policy in Africa, he mentions "the recent visit" of Red China's Mao Tse-tung, though Mao has never been near the place. But Farmer's talent, after all, lies in leading, not writing.