Viewing page 80 of 132

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

FREEDOMWAYS                     FOURTH QUARTER 1968

tion with, or insightful understanding of the victims of compensatory education.
  The most pervasive and significant of the influences on education for the black ghetto child now appears to be due to the changes which black people are making in themselves, and which they are introducing into the society. The white racists have believed that white is right and that whites can do anything they choose. The white racists still believe that they have the right to spoil things or make things right. It is the arrogance which black people now challenge and more and more it is stated that this arrogance is what had led us into Vietnam, and is responsible for what has been done to the liberation movements all over the world, and to the liberation movement of black people here at home. Today more and more black people believe that there is no real desire or sincere program for basic social change.
  Most black people cannot understand why so many white people do not accept the Kerner report which said that the United States is a racist society. More and more black people dislike the fact that black people are still being asked to side with white people who think that if the blacks went a little slower or if they didn't express their anger, more would be accomplished. And all those clichés bug black people, like "We did it, why can't you?" or "What do you people really want?" When white people say "Hasn't there been a great deal of progress in the past few years?" the black man says, "Yes, there has been a little. But I don't have to settle for a little."
  So, perhaps the most significant factor influencing present concern over the education of the black ghetto children and youth is now coming out into the open. For some. the summer programs and swimming pools and other activities are seen as not only a "cooling down" operation, but also as a blind alley, a kind of miasma or form of planned retardation, and as a sop to the conscience of whites. Martin Luther King Jr. and now Ralph Abernathy, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, LeRoi Jones, Malcolm X, the hippie movement growing out of white youth participation in SCLS in Mississippi, Resurrection City, and the black nationalist movement have all made the white man aware. A large part of this awareness is the explosion of the 400 year-old myth of the "good nigger." It also is due to discovery that many black people don't even have pity for the white racists.
  There is, then, very little question but that the "discovery" of the need to compensate for the disadvantage of the black ghetto
374