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TOM HAYDEN
But we must decide soon. But how to do it without splitting
NCUP? There seem to be three tendencies: (1) some people want to
work with Richardson somehow; (2) some people need time to decide;
(3) some people would rather continue regular community organizing.
A major problem is finding an organizational formula that allows
these different interests to exist without conflict. A second problem is
that of the "timetable" in general. In the Richardson campaign, and
in anti-poverty and urban renewal as well, there are pressures de–
manding that you meet the system's timetable or else "miss out."
It creates a motive for quick, elitist decisions, followed by a selling
campaign among those who were not in the decision-making. The
point is that we need
time,
if
new orientations are going to root and
grow in people. Just possibly, we're far enough along so that people
may force decisions to include them. Perhaps Richardson can't get
our "manpower" without opening up
his
organization to people's
voices, demands and energy. Maybe. Otherwise where do we go?
WEDNESDAY:
Nine o'clock. New reality on 18th Avenue. A traffic
cop, four "watch children" signs, and a stop sign at the cross street.
People taking notice, talking about it, surprised and a little proud.
ELEVEN o'CLOCK:
Talked to friends in New York and Washing–
ton about money to pay for food at Newark Conference. People
coming from Deep South and Midwest still have to raise their own
travel money. Depressing that people can only get together on a
national basis by having connections with the existing national or–
ganizations. A lot of them are getting to the Newark meeting, though;
we expect large numbers from Mississippi in the wake of their mass
lobbying for the challenge.
NOON:
Downtown to buy back issues of the
Newark News.
Stopped to see Morton Stavis, Newark attorney who is a council
to the MFDP, and who always helps out NCUP. He'd been thinking
about the Los Angeles thing. He was leaning to the view that the
long-run "solution" lies in reconstructing the Negro family (seems to
be the Johnson-Humphrey view also). He would do this by a planned,
complex program of jobs, changes in the welfare structure, education
and other attacks on the generational "cycle" of poverty.
We had a long discussion about it. I said I had no "constructive"
alternative to propose, but that his idea might be neither good nor
practical. Just whose family structure do they want Negroes to follow?
Not mine, I hope. Lyndon Johnson's? The white folks in the suburbs?
