NEW RADICALISM
193
California, Sol Stern, a student, says: "White, middle-class students
in the North also need a liberation movement for they have no com–
munity in which they exercise citizenship." Robert Moses, who has
been working for years with the black poor in Mississippi, adds: "What
we're exploring is how to release the energy in people so that they
work. They
want
to work . . . but they want to do things that are
meaningful. They don't
w~nt
to be run at the end of .a string." And
speaking of the voiceless in northern ghettos, Bill Strickland of the
Northern Student Movement emphasizes: "We must build around
local needs, but people must learn that only a national solution is
going to change their lives."
More and more of us, says John O 'Neal of the Free Southern
Theater in Mississippi, are becoming speechless. "How," he asks, "do
you distinguish between the Negro and the cat who faces some big
machine that's going to take his job from him? Or some cat who
is
faced with some big fool sitting in Washington or Moscow or Peking
making decisions that will affect what he does in the morning? What
words does he have to deal with that?"
The odds are very much against the new radicals' finding the
political means to provide words with consequences for the steadily
growing ranks of the speechless, but that
is
their primary goal. It is,
of course, the oldest of radical goals. But these radicals are new and
they are acting in a time which is qualitatively so much different–
particularly different because of the change in the nature of the
"enemy"-from any previous time. They are, moreover, free of the
emotional investment in past failures that makes the ideas and fac–
tional fixations of the preceding generation of American radicals
-with few exceptions-seem so irrelevant to them. Simultaneously
empiricists and utopians, they will, if they succeed, change many more
definitions than that of work.
