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LE ROI JONES AND NEW WRITERS    JACKSON

"tell it like it is"-preferring the false prestige of the black bourgeoisie or the deceitful "acceptance" of buy and sell America, something never included in the legitimate cultural tradition of "his people"-he will be a failure, and what is worse, not even a significant failure. Just another dead American.15

In his last essay which attempts to speak to the white man rationally ("What Does Nonviolence Mean?"), Jones warns his reader that a war is going on in the United States, and it is high time people stopped picking on the petty peculiarities of the semantics of the war, and instead understand its motives. But Jones, in speaking of this race war, is aware that the Black man will not be able to achieve full independence within the framework of the present society, for he writes:

In order for the Negro to achieve what I will call an "equality of means," that is, at birth, to be able to benefit by everything of value in the society, of course the society would have to change almost completely.16

After the murdering of the four Negro children in Birmingham, Jones' militancy is solidified. And it is at this time that he knows that violence both psychological and actual is the only way to deal with the brutal white power structure:

The only genuine way, it seems to me, for the Negro to achieve a personal autonomy, this equality of means, would be as a truly active moralizing force within and against American society as it now stands. In this sense, I advocate a violence, a literal murdering of the American socio-political stance, not only as it directly concerns American Negroes, but in terms of its stranglehold on most of the modern world.17

The author sees an eventual crumbling of the sick values and structure of America. In "The Last Days of the American Empire," Jones ceases to address himself to the white man and commands the Black masses to take a look at themselves, to look deeply at the white man's sickness, and to act accordingly. Many of the sentences in this essay are written in "caps," to give the black reader a sense of urgency in the necessity of his MOVING toward total emancipation: "YOU BLACK PEOPLE ARE STRONG...MOVE!"

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