Races: The Other 97%

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retaliation, revenge and vindictive activity" that will ultimately punish innocent Negroes as well and thereby play right into the hands of the extremists. "Such a course," says Young, "would simply change the 3% to 97%."

Errand Boys. When Harlem erupted in 1964, touching off a four-year span of summer riots, Bayard Rustin, director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute and organizer of the 1963 March on

Washington, was attacked as an Uncle Tom merely for trying to calm people down. His reply then was: "I'm prepared to be a Tom if it's the only way I can save women and children from being shot down in the street."

Today Young and the others are called Toms—or worse—for the very reason that they have assiduously maintained communications with the white community. Philadelphia's volatile Cecil Moore, suspended last month as head of the local N.A.A.C.P., calls them "the white man's black errand boys." Saul Alinsky, a self-styled white radical who prefers pressure to persuasion, compares Young to the "cooperative natives in the Congo" who were used by the colonial rulers "to keep the rest of the natives quiet." Few of the teen-age rioters even know who Young is.

Yet, as Rustin says, "relevant is the word" where Young is concerned. "Whitney Young is relevant—more than any other person today. He has been getting work for people." Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Raymond Pace Alexander, a Negro, agrees: "He has done more for the elevation of the Negro in the industrial world than anyone else."

Time Running Out. Tall and burly (6 ft. 2 in., 208 Ibs.), with greying sideburns and modest mustache, Young looks like a mellow Gamal Abdel Nas ser. He would cut an imposing figure in any executive suite—and, judging from his success, has already done so in quite a few. Last year alone, the Urban League found jobs for 40,000 unemployed Negroes, got better jobs for another 8,000.

Little publicity attended this accomplishment—or those of the other moderates. Understandably, they resent it. Said Wilkins last week: "Every militant who comes up and stamps his foot and says a dirty word and shakes his fist and pounds the desk and tells the mayor to go you-know-where—he is instantly the harbinger of a new trend." To be sure, the moderates acknowledge that the militants have helped them in one way. With every incendiary statement from the Black Power evangelists, the moderates find a more receptive audience among whites, who see them as constructive alternatives to the nihilists.

A Rumble of Thunder. Actually, Young dislikes the term moderate. Says he: "It isn't a question of moderate v. militant but of responsibility v. irresponsibility, sanity v. insanity, effectiveness v. ineffectiveness." Nor does he consider himself a "gradualist." Young saw the present crisis developing more than three years ago. In his 1964 book, To Be Equal, he warned that "the March on Washington was just a beginning, and the Freedom Rides, sit-ins, kneel-ins and pray-ins thus far have been only a rumble of thunder on the horizon signaling the storm that will surely engulf all of us if tangible, meaningful results are not achieved with speed and sincerity."

Since then, the Negro