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SIDNEY HOOK
leaders of the FSM and their faculty allies before the Regents dismissed
him. Their strategy was to get rid of the liberal Kerr, who on
one· sign was called a "cur," in order to confront the class enemy
unmasked. Just as some of the extremists of the Negro rights movement
have denounced "the white liberal" as their most dangerous and hypo–
critical foe, so have some of the leading spirits of the radical student
movement denounced as their most dangerous enemy the liberal Kerr
and his handful of mostly mute faculty supporters. Immediately after
Kerr's dismissal, Mario Savio and a few cohorts issued a statement in
which they exultantly declared: "Good riddance to bad rubbish. The
multiversity is dead; long live the University. The new governor's ad–
ministration has started auspiciously"
(U.C. Daily Californian, 1/23/67,
"Radicals Applaud Dismissal of President Clark Kerr"). On second
thought the members of the group admitted having spoken in haste. All
they retracted, with tongue in cheek, was the word "rubbish." "We were
wrong to call any man 'rubbish'" (1/25/67). Although other activist
leaders were less offensive, they made no secret of the fact that they
did not regret in the least Kerr's dismissal.
3. I do not believe that the majority of the American people are
racists. The opposition to open-housing laws can be attributed to various
factors, not least among them to Negro riots. In time the justice of
legislation outlawing discrimination in housing will be recognized despite
the opposition of a small group of racial bigots. The passage of a na–
tional fair-housing bill is only a matter of a few years unless the country
is torri. by racial strife. Meanwhile a great deal can be done to accelerate
the trend towards school desegregation, especially in the South, and to
enforce existing rights under recent civil rights legislation.
The defeat of the Civilian Review Board in New York, although a
keen disappointment, was not a triumph for racism. During the course
of numerous conversations with friends and neighbors in which I pre–
sented "unanswerable" arguments for the retention of the Civilian
Review Board, I convinced myself that most of those voting against it
did 'so out of a simple and irrational fear that the streets of New York
City would become even more unsafe if the Board were retained. The
campaign for the retention of the Board blundered badly in implying
that it was primarily needed for the protection of Negroes and Puerto
Ricans against police brutality and arbitrary arrest. Most of those who
voted against the Board did so in the belief that they were voting for
their own protection.
Those who like Susan Sontag assert that "America was founded
on genocide," that the American people are "racist," that "the white
race
is
the cancer of human history," far more threatening than the
