The Negro out of Fashion

AMERICA

From MURRAY KEMPTON

NEW YORK

MR JOHNSON did not intend to set, but clearly anticipated, the direction of American politics when he observed last summer that those negroes who were annoying us with the cry of 'black power' had best remember that there are nine of `us' for every one of 'them.'

By now, in most places in the United States, there are many more votes to be won from being against the negro revolt than there are from being for it. We depend, as we have not had to for a long time, upon our politicians being decent against their own best interests; they have a way of accomplishing this in a surprising number of instances; but it is asking a great deal of them.

The negro is a subject which it is extra- ordinarily difficult for an American to say any- thing about which is not both tendentious and fatuous. Still, one has to try.

First there ought to be a confession of one's own tendency. A few weeks ago, the liberal Democrats on the Committee on Education and Labour of the House of Representatives gathered to curb the powers of their chairman, Adam Clayton Powell, who had abused them in shame- less bouts of personal self-indulgence and private prerogative. Congressman Powell is a negro; so in commenting on his deficiencies, the New York Times took the occasion to regret that he had wasted so many opportunities to 'be of service to his people.' My personal reaction was that Adam Powell is a descendant of the oldest continual bloodline in the United States and that, since it could well be said that any negro is among the few Americans alive absolutely certain to be recognised by Thomas Jefferson if he returned to earth, it was about time for the New York Times to recognise that Adam Powell's 'people' are all of us and not just the negroes.

And yet the negro remains a stranger to the whole of the United States as he had never been in our South. What is called the backlash is therefore far more serious and permanent in the North than it is likely to be in the South.

There were riots in San Francisco last week; the immediate judgment of detached observers was that they immensely improved the chances of Ronald Reagan to be elected Governor of Cali- fornia. But I do not think the riots are the problem. They reinforce our fear of the negro, to be sure; and perhaps that fear obscures the fact that so far every one of them has been confined to a negro ghetto and that their victims have either been negroes or, in a smaller number of cases, those white people we have sent to police negroes. The only conspicuous instance of inter- racial violence as such was that which showed itself when Martin Luther King dispatched negro pickets into various sectors of Chicago that had never before had negro residents. The negro came there as a stranger; what is extraordinary is that most residents of these neighbourhoods blamed King for what he incited rather than themselves for what they did, and that their politicians contended with one another in the alacrity of their acceptance of this version. King's pickets, who were peaceable, seem in fact to have contributed as much to the white backlash in Chicago as any rioter who was violent. Our dis- gust then is not with the negro who riots so much as it is with the negro who does not know his place. Our trouble comes not from our guilt about what was done to the negro for three hun- dred years, but from our complacency about what we have done for him lately. We can only understand that attitude and what it does to us when we see it operating in a specific case.

The other day, the New York City Board of Education opened its new Intermediate School 201 on the fringe of Harlem. It is not often men- tioned in the newspapers without an accompany- ing definitive adjective—'the fifty million dollar Intermediate School 201.' It is certainly a notable advance in the construction of ghetto schools; there is an overhang extending all along its sidewalk to protect outsiders against the rain; it is a school that can be picketed in all seasons.

It very likely will be. At the end of its first day, its children, all negroes, came out escorted by policemen assigned to protect them from the black nationalist pickets who were demanding that its white principal be discharged. The prob- lem began last spring when the school had almost been completed, and a group of Harlem mothers went to the Board of Education to find out whether it would be integrated. The Board tem- porised; not until the week before the school was to be opened did it admit that it would be im- possible, without unsettling public protest, to bus white children into the slum where 201 sits.

One Harlem broker then suggested a way of appeasement. If 201 could not be integrated, then the Board of Education should establish it as an all-black school, with a negro principal in charge, and its staff and curriculum controlled by a negro community council. The Board of Education anxiously accepted. It agreed with the parents that Stanley R. Lisser, 201's white principal- designate, would be transferred to another school and a negro Assistant be made acting principal in his place. It was generally known that the Board had told Lisser to get out; even so, it insisted that he degrade himself by announcing that he had voluntarily requested a transfer. This great demonstration school had therefore been opened with an official lie.

Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the teachers revolted and refused to serve unless Lisser were restored; and the negro assistant who had been designated principal agreed with them and declined the appointment. 'I am not a qualified principal,' she observed significantly.

The contempt for Harlem inherent in these events was obvious. You do not give persons you deem to be without equipment the right to con- trol a school about which you care. You do not force a principal you respect to lie in public. You do not yourself lie in public, if you respect the children whose education is in your charge. And you do not give them a principal who, by your standards, is unqualified, not even a lady whose honour is so much higher than your own that she feels it her duty to say so. To do these things is to define your fundamental indifference; you have said what the South has said so long: it is their school; if they want it, let them have it.

By now the mothers who had begun this pro- test were fading away, leaving it to the nationalists; they had struggled awhile with an institution which could only offer them a remedy so distorted and now they were beginning to be again resigned to believing that their children would always get a poor education. 'If he was a good principal,' one of them said about the un- foitunate white Lisser, 'wotild he be in a school up here?' An outsider could go on believing that Lisser might be a very good man indeed and still understand a mistrust rooted in being lied to for a century and watered by being lied to just three days ago.

One noticed that, for the first time in all the melancholy memories of conversations with mothers assembled behind police lines outside American schools, these were the first who talked about almost nothing except the education of their children. Just what have we done to make women this rational believe that only a negro principal can be trusted with that task?