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POLITICAL POWER    GUYOT & THELWELL

"giving" certain offices to selected Negroes. This assimilation of the emerging Negro politicians on the bottom of the old political structure means that these men serve as adjuncts of the very same power block that the community had struggled with for the vote. These "leaders" become vote deliverers, more responsive and responsible to the old line leadership of the white power structure than to the community they allegedly represent. By this device the white community manages to substitute patronage for power, and ensures that whatever political organization exists in the Negro community is dependent and subordinate to the old machine, leaving the community with an echo rather than a choice.

We face all three maneuvers in Mississippi. The first and most pressing in terms of immediate human needs is the economic squeeze, to which we simply have found no answer. Much of the movement's resources has had to be devoted towards the effort to find economic alternatives outside the white-dominated general economy of the state. Since 1961 food and clothes have been collected in the North for distribution in the state during the winter. But this, like the establishment of "Tent City" refugee centers, is a limited and temporary response, reaching only a bare fraction of the people affected. A grant of $1.6 million which was announced by the Office of Economic Opportunity last November for the purpose of distributing federal food surpluses in the Delta has not been used by the state as of this writing. Nor has the Department of Agriculture acted directly to initiate such programs because, as they tell us, they are waiting on local authorities to act.

Meanwhile the people struggle, and alternatives are sought. The organization of projects such as the Poor People's Corporation, the Mississippi Brick Co-op, sewing and farming cooperatives of all kinds, "freedom farms" to feed the families of strikers and evictees are expressions of this search for alternative sources of income. But these cannot be regarded as anything but a desperate holding action, a stop-gap by people who have tried everything. Should these projects be successful beyond the expectations of the wildest idealist, they will still be inadequate in the face of the dimensions of the needs. Unfortunately ingenuity and desperation are no substitute for capital. 

Early this year over 1,000 people, most of whom were displaced, came to a conference on food, land, money and jobs which had been called jointly by the MFDP, the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union, and the Delta Ministry of the National Council of Churches, which

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