528
BAYARD RUSTIN
support of that community has to be won, through hard work and
ongoing programs. Its morale must be nourished by victories.
Meanwhile, the civil rights organizations in the aggregate have
won the right to speak for the Negro community, and they retain that
right until it is challenged or withdrawn by the community itself.
Charges of "sell-out" may be hurled at will; until new organizational
forms are thrown up, capable of demonstrating, concretely and not
merely rhetorically, that
they
and not the established organizations
are the chosen instruments of the masses, the critics remain entitled
to their views, but they must be tempered with humility. They must
beware of a disease peculiar to their kind: elitism.
This admonition
is
especially relevant to the second component
of the new radicalism, which I view as a qualitatively different
phenomenon from the first. It
is
not rooted in an oppressed cla&<; in
any socioeconomic sense. It is a new intellectual class. Sociologically,
its origins are in the mushrooming of higher education, in the fact that
some five million youth are presently enrolled in colleges and univer–
sities, a figure to be multiplied in the years ahead. Graduate students
play an important role in molding the outlook of this new cla&<;.
Its
members, by and large, have been reared in middle-class affluence,
not grinding poverty or racial discrimination. Their motivation
is
moral (not material), their quest
is
for new values (not programs),
and, perhaps above all, they seek situations and experiences which are
affirmations of meaningful personal existences. This largely existential
search not only explains much of the abstract anti-institutionalism
of the new radicals; it also throws light on some differences between
the current student movement and its counterpart of the thirties and
forties. Better educated than the latter, the former is nonetheless less
ideological. It
is
also less intellectual-in that, as Irving Howe has
suggested, it is ahistorical and less discriminating. (In my view,
this
condition tends to arise not when the intellectual class is small and
struggling to assert its distinctive role, but when
it
has become large
enough to see itself as institutionalized and therefore generates the
tensions making for disaffiliation and self-negation. The condition
itself is a by-product of affluence.)
Reacting against the increasing bureaucratization and impersonal–
ization of the campus, and rejecting the vapidity, conformity and bore–
dom of middle-class life, the students disaffiliate from both. They
(:ome to the Negro and to the poor in search of meaning.
