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FREEDOMWAYS  FOURTH QUARTER 1966

  "Will integration help?" Dr. Fuchs asked them. The boycotters felt strongly that it would.
  If Negroes and whites go to the same schools, then if the teacher don't want to teach Negroes nothing then the white people won't learn nothing; and if the teacher wants to teach the white child, so then they have to teach the Negro children too because they all going to the same school.
  From their hopeless helplessness as young children in forgotten segregated schools, these young people were forged by the boycott and its leaders into a social force determined to exercise some control over their own lives; to wring from a hostile society the education denied them. Estelle Fuchs does a brilliant job of description and analysis of this transformation.
  The immediate victories of this great effort are known. The Superintendent of Schools was fired; the long-delayed "600" school changes were begun; the recommendations for change made by State Commissioner of Education James E. Allen were finally adopted, a whole year after they had been made. As in every other advance made in the ten years that Reverend Galamison has been leading the school integration battle, the Board of Education moved, haltingly and hesitantly, only when forced by sharp crisis or threat of crisis, granting a small measure of the Negro child's right to an equal education. 
  Estelle Fuchs has written a good book. The events and issues she describes and analyzes sum up the experiences of a decade of social struggle of one type. Today, a year after the events discussed, the thoughtful reader must evaluate whether or not these events have closed this phase of the struggle. The meagerness of the gains that are made by ever more massive effort; the slow pace with which each gain is wrested from unwilling hands; all this contrasted with the headlong speed with which the process of further segregation of schools and more widespread illiteracy is proceeding—force the invention of new weapons of social struggle.
  "Black Power" has been defined in many ways and some have said it means retreat into the ghetto and into ghetto schools run for and by Negroes, a pattern well known to every southern and many northern communities. To this writer, "Black Power" means taking control of one's destiny. Instead of wresting a small gain from a hostile establishment, wherever possible to wrest some of the power of that establishment—its power to give to one child and deny to another—and to use that power to break the mechanism of segregation, to provide equality of education and of choice.

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