BLACK POWER
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frontations between angry Negroes and racist whites are going
to
become
more and more bloody, and reprisals are going to be carried out on a
nondiscriminatory basis. And the white liberals are going to suffer as
much as any other group of whites.
There is also the fact that if the white liberals remain in seclusion,
they are going to wake up one morning and find that they, as well as
the Negroes, have no power. There will be sheriff's posses in every
county, North and South, and everybody in uniform will have a can of
Mace that he's itching
to
use on the enemy.
George Wallace might not be in the White House, but the man
who will be there may not be much better. Full-page ads in the
Times
wouldn't help even if they could be published. There would be no
place to go except underground, and white liberals have been too
comfortable for too long to enjoy lives of
furtive
paranoia.
Stephan Thernstrom
As Martin Duberman observes, "if Black Power means only
that Negroes should organize politically and economically in order to
develop self-regard and to exert maximum pressure," no civilized person
can object to it, and I believe that even the more exotic and apocalyptic
variants of the doctrine have had certain positive consequences, at least
within the white liberal and black communities. However great the
chaos and confusion of the present and the uncertainty about the future,
the problem of the Negro is now at the forefront of public attention,
and the irrelevance of much of the traditional civil rights program to the
ghetto-dweller and the sharecropper is obvious to all. Only a few short
years ago the view that the poverty and powerlessness of the ordinary
Negro-American was the root of the race problem was confined to the
radical fringe; now that diagnosis is widely accepted, and the focus
of debate is on possible solutions. This dramatic shift is the product
of a variety of circumstances, but the Black Power ferment is mani–
festly an important one.
It does not appear, however, that Black Power spokesmen have
thought very coherently about strategies and programs to deal with tne
grievances they articulate. There are the demented few who play at
revolution, but the dominant thrust of Negro protest today is toward
