TOM HAYDEN
about, but more interested
in
"the Jew" who won't give her a toilet
or a closet, and who will evict her
if
she complains. She uses the
facilities next door, and hangs all her clothes on a big peg.
Miller was home from work (drives a truck for the county) at
3: 00, so I caught him before he got in the house where I knew he
would take a nap. In the first few discussions I had with him, he
was what we call "strong." From Georgia, confidently supports a
family and holds down a job, been stepped on by white people
all
his life, "very fond" of me .but says I can't understand the race
problem because I'm white. Hard on Johnson: "That man can pick
up the phone and drop that ole bomb! Now why can't he pick up
the phone and help us, you tell me that!" About the same question
most people here ask, only Miller is perhaps angrier and more inform–
ed. His brother Willie, 19, also tough. Sitting on the porch with us,
he said he'd like to "rack up" some white people like they did in
Los Angeles. Everybody seems either to favor or absolve what the
people did out there.
I began talking with Miller about the traffic light. When I first
got here a month ago, the people I talked to thought the traffic
problem was a good issue to organize around. I used to think
such issues were "superficial," they didn't deal with "real problems,"
etc., .but I've felt my thinking shift bit by bit this year. I had to learn
that
real
children are killed, all the time; that families are worried
about their
real
children. What the City fails to do about "minor"
ills, which by its own laws it should correct, is a measure of the
callousness of the officials. That the people accommodate, by their
silence at least, to the City's failure on such small matters, is a measure
of how deeply they feel the futility of changing anything. Most people
I talked to see the traffic problem, not on the basis of narrow self–
interest, but as part of a system so abrasive that
it
cannot implement
its own laws without militant pressure. The twenty I'm working with
see it as a departure point for a community movement, and a way
to wrest something real from City Hall. They started with a petition,
not because most people believe in "channels" as such, but because
"we should give them a chance." A little apprehension too, over
doing something "wild" that "other colored people" might not under–
stand. So Sampson and I collected two hundred names one Saturday
morning, and the following week Miller's sister Rosalie took them
down to the Mayor's office. (She was afraid, .because of Welfare,
