The Other 97%

Friday, Aug. 11, 1967
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their own tract of land (Blackistan? Negronia?) to what a writer in Manhattan's Vil lage Voice calls "the copulative approach," aimed at complete elimination of racial differences through intermarriage (though if Brazil and the Philippines are any measure, subtle new discriminations would arise based on how much cafe one inherited and how much laif). Harlem Black Nationalist James Lawson even demands "reparations" amounting to $7,000 for every black person in America.

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As for the "moderate" Negro leaders, they have come up with proposals that only recently might have struck many Americans as most immoderate. One such scheme is A. Philip Randolph's "Freedom Budget," originally proposed two years ago. It would wipe out the ghettos, provide a guaranteed annual income, increase spending on education, housing, vocational training and health services. The price tag: $185 billion over a ten-year period.

Young's proposal, put forward four years ago, was for a "Domestic Marshall Plan" that would cost $145 billion over ten years. He noted that the Negro suffered a "discrimination gap" caused by "more than three centuries of abuse, humiliation, segregation and bias." Because he is consequently incapable of competing equally with whites, said Young, he needs "more-than-equal" treatment.

The Inside Man. When the plan was first announced, it was considered hopelessly Utopian—and Young was considered rather radical for even daring to suggest it. Last week, however, everybody seemed to be embracing it. Hubert Humphrey and ten House Democrats called for a "Marshall Plan" for the cities. Roy Wilkins told a Washington audience that "if we can under write the economies of Germany, France, Italy and England and see that these people recover their equilibrium, then we can underwrite the cost of re covering the equilibrium of our own native black people."

None of those who urged a Marshall Plan for the cities named the original author of the plan. Politicians rarely do—and that is one of the problems with which the Negro moderates must cope. Actually, the sort of work Young does rarely brings him public notice, but knowledgeable observers are aware of its value. "No matter who is shouting for Negro rights in the streets," says Clarence Hunter, spokesman for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, "you must still have Young to go inside and deal for the jobs and the training." Says Young: "You can holler, protest, march, picket and demonstrate, but somebody must be able to sit in on the strategy conferences and plot a course." Though the Urban League has in many ways changed almost beyond recognition from the National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes that was set up in New York in 1910, its role and its goal—"not alms but opportunity"—have remained essentially the same.

Founded by white and Negro social workers and philanthropists only a year after the N.A.A.C.P., the league's first job was to help the Negro migrants who were just beginning to pour from the fields of the South into the big cities of the North. Starting with a budget of $8,500, it provided travelers' aid, trained Negro social workers, conducted studies of social and economic condi tions among Negroes in the cities. By