They and We [antikvár]

PREFACE The first edition of They and We was completed in 1963, the year the civil rights movement reached its zenith. Black Power was but a hushed whisper then. Few who listened to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. address a quarter of a million Black and White Americans assembled on the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 realized that he, his people, and their allies in the struggle—and their enemies— were about to enter a new era. The whisper was to become a roar. Those days, just a quarter of a century ago, now seem light-years away. In the period before the March on Washington thousands participated in a movement marked by righteousness and perseverance, liberal faith and Judeo-Christian principles, justice and love, and a great deal of confidence in the American system. It was oriented primarily toward forcing the country to honor its own vaunted ideals and to win for all the rights most White Americans took for granted. But by 1964 the tone, temper, and orientation began to change. Many Whites were eased or pushed from positions of leadership; many Blacks (and brown and red Americans in their own fashion) eschewed the rhetoric of integration for the rhetoric of revolution. In many ways the rhetoric was reified. In a real sense there was a revolution. First, the members of the dominant White majority were told over and over that they, all of them, were racists. A spate of books hammered home the theme. Many black people who, for any number of reasons, had not organized themselves before began to add action to their verbal attacks. Demands were made, met, escalated, and often met again. The litany began where the old civil rights leaders had left off: "Freedom Now" and "We shall Overcome" to "Look Out, Whitey, Black Power's Gon' Get your Momma." Then came the call for recompense, for special treatment. Ultimately, in what many saw as justified and others saw as racism-in-reverse, the pleas for admission and fairness became a cry for affirmative action, even for favoritism. As the demands, particularly of college students, were beginning to be responded to by frightened faculties and xi