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FREEDOMWAYS                  SECOND QUARER 1973

did not receive very much of the black vote. Blacks still identified with the Republican Party.

amenia conference, 1933

With this background the Second Amenia Conference met August 18-21, 1933, seventeen years after the First, in a definite attempt to deal specifically with economic problems facing people during the depression and to bring together Youth and Age interested in the problems of Blacks. "And more particularly Youth, with a fringe of Age; and not extreme youth. Eliminating four admittedly among the elders, the others ranged in age between twenty-five and thirty-five, with a median age of thirty, that is, they were well out of college and started on their life work, and yet, as the invitations suggested, they were still with inquiring minds and still unsettled as to their main life work." All were college graduates except one; two were Doctors of Philosophy. Among the younger conferees there were five social workers, five college professors, four YWCA workers, three teachers, three lawyers, two artisans, two librarians, a physician, a student, and a YMCA worker. Representing age (more or less willingly) were two editors, a professor and a social worker. Those present were picked almost haphazardly from a list of over four hundred names sent from all parts of the country. Du Bois wrote: "Their difficulty was mainly the difficulty of all youth. Inspired and swept on by its vision, it does not know or rightly interpret the past and is apt to be too hurried carefully to study the present. . . . Only by such linking of past, present and future can real national and group advance be made, and this, I think, the Amenia conference was conscious of before it adjourned."

The basic question was: In view of the present world depression and the race problems which have exhibited themselves in Germany, India, Africa, the West Indies and the United States, what should be the ultimate goal of a young, educated American Negro with regard to:

1. occupation and income

2. racial organization

3. inter-racial cooperation

Most of the discussion dealt with economic conditions and the influence of education and politics on the welfare of the masses especially the great mass of black laborers. In the end these were the resolutions:

"This conference was called to make a critical appraisal of the

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