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UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Tuesday, January 9, 1968
What whites did to Negroes
Take a man. Remove him from his homeland, where he has dignity and a proud heritage. Transport him across the ocean and let him survive unspeakable conditions, only to be humiliated and sold as human chattel when he reaches his destination.
Make him a servant. Treat him as a child. Deprive him of family bonds by denying legal recognition of his marriage and separating him from his own when it is financially advantageous. Then free him.
Give him his leave without education, without family, without a place to go or a job to take up. Stare at him; call him ignorant; shun him; keep him from getting a decent job. Then wait a while.
Watch him migrate to the city. Watch him eke out a living with the menial jobs that are available to him. Note his miserable living conditions, his inadequate education, his restlessness, his inability to form stable family ties. Then give him some rights—legal ones, of course. Let him attend your schools, move into your neighborhoods, have a chance to work at your firms.
But shun him still; laugh at him; call him names. Separate him from yourself whenever possible. Deny him his dignity, his manhood. And then renounce him for his hate, his bitterness and his lack of gratitude in the face of your tolerance and generosity.
The man, of course, is the American Negro. If 1967 was the year of the protests and the protester, then he is certainly one of the important men of the year. His presence was felt in places like Detroit, Newark and our own Wichita. And the thought of his presence is still likely to arouse fear even though those summer riots are over.
The Negro in 1967 was a man on the move, a man who has finally found an effective means of articulation—militancy. No matter how distasteful this new political stance may be to whites, it
is nonetheless potent. The Negro is gaining recognition. And through recognition, he may be granted a certain kind of respect—the kind of respect that is given to those who wield power.
Power is an important word to him. No matter how it is defined by the diverse elements of the civil rights movement, power means an opportunity to stand on his own feet, to be treated like a man. Power means an end to the centuries of submission that have kept the Negro "in his place" and perpetuated his cultural lag. Power means self-respect, and with it, hope for the future.
It is understandable that the manifestations of the Negro power movement will frighten white and reinforce their old prejudices. What is tragic is that Americans seem blind to the facts. Whatever the Negro is today is the responsibility of the white man. The American Negro is his creature.
Whatever is vile and despicable in the Negro is the product of a history that began with vile and despicable whites capturing and selling black men as slaves. But the responsibility is one that whites deny or minimize. The prejudice is kept and thereby reinforced and perpetuated.
If democracy is to be a living thing and not just an abstract concept, Negroes must be given more than the legal rights that bring integration, open housing and equal opportunity employment. They must be given the one thing that all men deserve—dignity and respect as men. Informal discrimination quashes whatever good is accomplished by legal civil rights, because it denies them this.
When American finally see themselves as they are, they will discover that the "land of the free" is racist. Perhaps that discovery will make them realize that something must be done. And that something does not begin with the federal government. It begins with you and me.
What's new in paperbacks
Here is an assortment of light reading for you students who have all that time to spare. The first is a western, an oldstyle western with newstyle touches, to fit the times. It's called Rough Night in Jericho (Gold Medal, 50 cents), and it's by Richard Meade. It's also a movie with Dean Martin, of all people, and George Peppard, of all people. A raw town and plenty of gunfights.
Gold Medal also is bringing out some books by Alistair MacLean, the first of which are *South by Java Head and H.M.S. Ulysses* (75 cents each). MacLean is one of the best in the field of high adventure. His setting is frequently the sea, in time of war or in time of espionage, and his heroes are quite believable people. These two are real dandies. Last year it was "Modesty Blaise"; this year
it's A Girl Called Fathom (Gold Medal, 50 cents), by Larry Forrester. Raquel Welch. A tough but beautiful broad. Spies. Suspense. James Bond-type stuff that comes out a bit on the Maxwell Smart side. Finally some cartoons for you in a cartoon book, Smythe's Andy Capp Strikes Back (Gold Medal). There are quite a few Andy Capp fans around, and this one is expressly for them, and maybe nobody else.
“Never Saw A Guy Do So Much Traveling Without Seeming To Get Anywhere”
Also new in paperback is Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Vintage, $1.95). Hofstadter has become a regular in paperback editions, and these essays show why. As we view the American scene of 1987, left to right, we can see what he means by "the paranoid style." Hofstadter surveys the late 19th century, Manifest Destiny, Barry Goldwater, McCarthy, the free silver movement and other manifestations of his theme.
Another noteworthy historian has a new paperback, this being Kenneth M. Stampp's The Era of Reconstruction: 1865-1877 (Vintage, $1.95). Here is a standard, a well-known interpretation of what another historian has called "The Tragic Era." Stampp is less harsh on the radicals than some historians. He writes clearly and eloquently in treating this period now being given careful scrutiny because of the civil rights crisis in America.
A prize-winning history is Paul Seabury's Power, Freedom, and Diplomacy: The Foreign Policy of the Unied States of America (Vintage, $2.45). It won the Bancroft prize in history in 1964, one critic contending that it was the best book in that field that year, as well as one of the best since the Forties. The discussion is both historical and contemporary.
The Hill With It by john hill
The frozen wilderness of white stretched out before me, unbroken except for an American flag and the KU flag which emerged side by side on the ice crust.
Fraser Hall once looked pretty big, I thought to myself, peering down at the layers of snow around the building.
Then I looked up and yelled to a lone figure slowly walking through the heavy snow on the arctic-like campus, wearing two heavy parkas, three mufflers and an old mitten.
Slowly trudging through the snow, Cold Hand Luke finally reached my side and we zhivagoed to class together.
"Cold enough for you?" he said, brilliantly. "Did you hear about the outside thermometer on the military science building? It went A.W.O.L."
"That's nothing," I said, shivering. "It was so cold this morning that my roommate fell out of bed and broke his pajamas."
"Decided what you're going to do for finals this semester?"
We plowed ahead through the cold for a while.
"What you're going to do for finals this semester?"
"Well," I said, not sure what he meant, "I kinda thought I might take them."
"No, I mean have you decided what nutty thing you're going to be doing during finals time that is a typically college student kind of thing to do that doesn't really help relieve any pressure that it's supposed to but makes a good story to tell about what you did during finals."
"I haven't really thought about it," I replied, trying not to sound un-cool, or un-hip, or whatever one who isn't is un-
"You mean you're not even going to grow a beard?" he gasped in disbelief. This wasn't easy. Try gasping in disbelief sometime wearing two parkas and three mufflers.
"Uh, no, not this semester," I said, thankful that he didn't realize that there are those of us who have been growing a beard for years without noticeable results.
"You could go sledding, for example," he said from deep within his various parki. "Why don't you steal a tray from your cafeteria and slide down a nearby hill and frolic in the snow?"
"Because I don't have a tray, cafeteria, nearby hill or a frolic," I said, with Vulcan-like logic.
"How about bridge? That's a great way to kill valuable time. You could really—"
I cut him off with a look that indicated that the closest I came to bridge was playing a mean game of Old Maid.
"I know what you can do. There's always Staying Up All Night Studying Before The Test, which lends a haggard appearance and martyred, resigned attitude while taking the test."
"That sounds good," I said. "Besides, there's always an off chance that I could pass my finals."
"Wait a minute," said my friend who reached his class and was disappearing down into the snow to find the building, "that won't do after all. It's not unusual enough. This is Finals Week; you've got to do something really different. There's an image to keep up," said the echoing voice from the snow.
He was gone before I could tell him that as I plowed along in the cold, it occurred to me that this particular finals week one will be doing the unusual if he can manage to keep warm, but it was too cold to try and find him.
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