Civil Rights: The Awful Roar

Friday, Aug. 30, 1963

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(10 of 10)

"Southern whites have a stake in this movement. You can't keep a man in a ditch without staying in there with him. White people have been prisoners of this situation, just as we have been. The whites living today didn't cause it and neither did we, but the whites sustain it because it's comfortable and profitable.

"This urgency? This new push? Well, it's cumulative. It's the emergence of Africa. It's being hungry. It's military desegregation. It's the G.I. Bill. It's major-league baseball with Negroes. It's the 8,000 to 10,000 Negroes graduating from college each year, 100,000 since the war. It's the mechanization of farms —the move from farms to Southern cities and then to Western cities. It's the consumer demand television builds. It's kids being impatient. That's why we have it now.

"The back of segregation is broken. A whole new era is before us. This will be a period when the Negro will have to make readjustments. We must counsel our Negro population on induction into an integrated society, teach them that you can't blame all disabilities on race, because this is self-defeating. A great number of Negroes are ready for all their rights now. A great number are not fully aware of the competition and responsibility which await them in an unsegregated world.

"There's going to be beer, and doubleheaders with the Yankees, and ice cream and mortgages and taxes, and all the things that whites have in their world, and tedium too. It's not going to be heaven."

^{* Du Bois left N.A.A.C.P.'s research staff under pressure in 1948 because of his leftist political activities. In 1961, at the age of 93, he joined the Communist Party, became a frequent visitor to Russia and Red China. He has lived in Ghana since 1960, became a citizen this year.
* Other Negroes who hurdled racial barriers at Southern colleges amid extensive publicity seem to be faring better. Vivian Malone, who entered the University of Alabama with Hood, has pursued her studies without incident. Cleve McDowell, who followed Meredith at the University of Mississippi, still shares campus quarters with U.S. marshals, sticks to his law studies in lonely but dedicated fashion. Harvey Gantt has earned better-than-average grades at South Carolina's Clemson College, replies good-naturedly to the teasing of white students: "If you don't cut it out, I'll have lunch with you."}