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FREEDOMWAYS                 FOURTH QUATER 1972 

exploited. Her hang-up with separation is irrelevant- in the past and in the present it is clearly the condition of existence forced upon the majority of black people. Read, for example, Henry Allen Bullock. A History of Negro Education in the South.6 The admirable scholarly justification for integration, culminating in the 1954 Supreme Court decision combined with the best plans for the integration of American schools could not succeed in achieving the goal. Whites evaporated from the most promising plans and reappeared in self-segregated suburbs. The contributions which Miss Stokes states the "black middle American" can make to the crisis of "love, acceptance, and belonging" are not original. One wonders where she has been while black citizens have done everything within their power to make the democratic process work. She advocates the teaching of Afro-American history, because "the black history should be in the mainstream of the thought of white Americans." Olivia Stokes seems to be unaware of the culmination of the legal battles in 1954 and in the civil rights legislation. Finally, Miss Stokes has a lot of self-educating to do in order to "understand the structure of American society and the racist nature in order to bring about change and eliminate the treatment projects which have been so popular in the war on poverty." If this were not the case she would not be in such a rush to make the white folks aware that "democratic, noncontroversial, middle-class" black Americans still do exist nor would she be so condescending toward "the revolutionary activities, as valuable as these may be in the social change process." She concludes with a plea for more top level jobs for blacks and a description of "the new black dimension in American society" as being a "fascinating, dynamic, creative, hopeful development in democracy." It sounds like an attempt to convince both herself and a white, middle-class audience that everything is cool and, as Roberta Flack sings, "Business can go on as usual." 

Les Campbell, who has three articles included, makes some valid points that are quite current, but the Devil is mythological. He speaks from hysteria in passages like "All devils must go...." By the way, Campbell and Stokes make rather peculiar bed-fellows.
 
Nathan Wright has contributed six of his own articles to the anthology, all but one of them editorials written for The Newark Star-Ledger. The exception, on Black Studies, is a speech given at the University of Houston. The first of the editorials, "Humanizing the 


6 Henry Allen Bullock, A History of Negro Education in the South (Praeger, New York, 1970).

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