Civil Rights: The Awful Roar

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of any other so-called "public accommodation." Substantial progress has been made: in the past three months, at least 275 towns have desegregated some sort of public facility. But the average U.S. Negro still seems to view his exclusion from public places as the worst insult of all. "I don't know anything that humiliates me more than to be out in the car and have one of my daughters ask to go to the bathroom and have to tell her, 'No, we can't stop at any of these places,' " says S.C.L.C.'s Rev. Andrew Young. "Every time one of them wants to go, it's a family crisis." The public-accommodations section is the most controversial of all in the Kennedy Administration's proposed legislative package on civil rights. But Attorney General Robert Kennedy is determined to fight it through despite the legalistic debate over the best constitutional basis for such a law. "The other sections of the bill are ways of tunneling in to get at the smoldering origins of the fire," he says. "This one takes care of the flames."

In striving toward Negro goals in these fields, Roy Wilkins must often tolerate wild men even within his own organization. Perhaps the most outspoken of these "Mau Mau," as they are called by responsible civil rights leaders, is the N.A.A.C.P.'s Cecil Moore in Philadelphia. Moore pours his venom on everyone: "The Urban League was created to be a beggar. CORE is made up of an infinitesimal number of Negroes and an even lesser number of frustrated whites who are trying to salve their guilt. Half of all social workers are queer."

Wilkins stands in direct contrast to such demagogic types. The 14-hour days he normally puts in at his job are severely straining his strength. He survived surgery for stomach cancer in 1946, but he has a serious gall-bladder ailment that keeps him off the cigars and social drinking he used to enjoy. It does not, however, keep him out of his ivory Triumph sports car, which he loves to drive along parkways near the apartment he shares with his St. Louis-born wife Minnie in an integrated neighborhood in Queens.

Although he is a rebel whose anger burns fiercely, Wilkins maintains an ability to analyze rationally even the most emotional of problems. His mind drives toward specific detail (it also collects such trivia as the number of Cokes bottled annually in New York City, the timetables of obscure railroad runs) rather than fuzzy generalization. And when Wilkins speaks of his lifetime in the Negro revolution, his subdued eloquence is of the sort that—if anything can—may yet create an accommodation satisfactory both to most Negroes and most whites.

"It's really thrilling and exciting to be a Negro in the '60s," he says. "The whole gamut of Negro life is an adventure if you can roll with the punches and not let it get you into the valley of bitterness. I've never been motivated by any persistent strong feeling against white people. Thank God, I've never lost my anger, though, and I've used it sometimes. White people are like colored. They are glad and sad. They know poverty and trouble and divorce and sickness. I may be an incurable optimist, but I believe there are more people who want to do good than do evil. The Negro couldn't have made it without the help of some white people.