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DR. NATHAN WRIGHT, JR.
would grow up-suddenly seem to show signs of standing on their
own. In this light, it would clearly
be
an exception to the human
experience for white people--who as a group have nurtured black
people for three hundred years, without the lively expectation of their
immediately growing up-not to be taken aback by signs that black
people are determined to stand on their own.
The puzzled view of white people, who close from their minds
the saving necessity and positive good of power and self-respect for
black men, will be a growing phenomenon with which we must live and
reckon in the months and years which lie ahead. Ironically, they will be
aped also in this circumstance by large numbers of black men who still
hold on to the strange belief, unadmitted even by white men of only
a little discernment; that is the peculiar black people's belief that "white
makes right." Parents would will to be wise but all too few are wise.
Parents and godparents resist the growing up of their children. White
people have been like godparents to black people. We must come to
accept their intention as an earnest for their needed deeds and help
to lead into new understandings those whose goodwill must be informed
far more rapidly by the changing experiences and insights of the new
days which are upon us.
All of
llS
must work together-in some respects discretely, in some
respects in coalition-to meet the serious demands of the urgent times
which we as a nation face.
Freedom will never come unless first our minds and hearts are
free and open to new experience and new truth. Then, there must
also
be
a firm commitment of the will in and under the new circum–
stances of each ever-changing day.
The late Dorothy Thompson wrote at the end of World War II
that peace is not the absence of war but is a positive condition of justice.
So it is with freedom. Freedom is not the absence of bondage but the
perennial open response to truth. Indeed, one wiser than us all has
said, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
