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FREEDOMWAYS                SECOND QUARTER 1972 

future will be black; and that lists of Afro-American heroes will continue to multiply.
For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown God, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power;
For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when, in memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;
For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born.
The unresolved struggle of the darker brother has always been- and will continue to be-the most intriguing and progressive movement in American history. The selections contained in this anthology are well-tempered (like the studies of Bach's clavichord) and have broad appeal. This collection is particularly suited to schools, libraries, and homes of any creed or color.
Today's connoisseurs of literature must give proper emphasis to the outstanding achievements of Black Americans. Vital as the gospel songs of Mahalia Jackson, earthy as the Hughes' poem, "Me and My Mule," this bold expression strikes a sharp contrast to the clasped-hand sterilities of the white academy.

Patricia Gow



BLACK GENOCIDE

THE CHOICE: THE ISSUE OF BLACK SURVIVAL IN AMERICA. By Samuel F. Yette. G. P. Putnam's Sons. 307 pages with index. $6.95.

A FEW YEARS AGO when novelist John A. Williams outlined a plan for black genocide (The Man Who Cried I Am, Little, Brown & Co., 1967) the black reader, though disquieted, could sidestep the horrible possibility by noting that the account was fictitious. This can no longer be the case, maintains Samuel F. Yette in The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America.

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BOOK REVIEW            CASH

Mr. Yette, a Newsweek correspondent, burrows deep into historical records of the past decade to denude various governmental practices which militate against American Blacks. But, certainly, this has all been done before to some extent. What distinguishes The Choice is not just a pervasive sense of ultimate urgency neatly woven by the author but an amazing expertise in research. Carefully sifted facts and proofs are collected to substantiate the author's position.
For example, Mr. Yette labels the 1960s as a period which "wavered between liberation and liquidation and became a decade of pacifica- tion." Then he explains with commendable clarity how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the war on poverty were "the two major holding actions." Further elaboration documents the Job Corps as a rich haven for its white administrators instead of a solution for poor Blacks. General methods of appeasement, moreover, could be summarized by terms like Puritanism, Moynihanism, and Shriverism-all of which denote various rationalizations for exploitation of the poor by the affluent.
Observations of several scientific attempts to establish the inferiority of black people, of repressive legislation and tactics akin to those of a police state, of "Rice Cup Congressmen" who consistently devise methods to keep in check the poor minority-such observations lend credence to the plight of Blacks who repeatedly find themselves the brunt of every type of oppression, no matter how subtle or how overt. Then, too, the author does not settle for shallow sensationalism. Discussing concentration camps in America, he succumbs to no tantrums. Rather, he calmly draws attention to Title II of the McCarran Act, to computer banks that store surveillance data, to "no-knock search and seizure and preventive detention," to the unnoticed, though abortive, efforts to repeal the McCarran Act. In the end, Mr. Yette's professorial restraint proves an effective rhetorical device.
Like any heavily documented work, The Choice may seem pedestrian in parts; yet the importance of the message makes it worth the reader's while to endure. At one point, the author quotes a text which says, "it is not easy to perceive or believe the deliberation and skill that go into the institutionalization of racism, war profiteering, and socio- economic dependency and exploitation." However, Blacks do not have time to be skeptics. And of all the possible tragedies listed that might await Afro-Americans, one which Mr. Yette does not include is the probability of too few people reading The Choice. But here, too, this would be their choice.
Earl A. Cash

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