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FREEDOMWAYS                     SECOND QUARTER 1973

Of course Malcolm had shortcomings but they only serve to enlarge his human dimensions because here was a man who came to express, as much by the example of his life as with his message, all we hope to realize in ourselves as human beings. He was the embodiment of courage, loyalty, dedication, integrity, genuine love for his fellow victims of oppression the world over. To even pose the question of whether he hated whites is demeaning, an insult to what he really stood for. 

I wish Mr. Goldman could have appreciated one simple fact that is always lost, unwittingly or by design, on liberals--that to be a revolutionary is the truest mark of a humanist. Brother Malcolm measured up magnificently. 

Loyle Hairston

 

IDEOLOGICAL BANKRUPTCY 

THE MAKING OF BLACK REVOLUTIONARIES. By James Forman. The Macmillan Company, New York. 568 pages. $12.50.

IN THIS 568-page recipe for the "making of Black revolutionaries," the author has made a number of gross miscalculations. Through this major attempt to portray himself as the "backbone" of the civil rights movement of the '60s and the "guiding light" for future struggles of Black people in America, James Forman has painted an extremely distorted picture of a great period in the history of the Black Liberation movement. 

Not only has he made a painstaking effort to discredit the contributions of Dr. Martin L. King, Jr., and other Black leaders and organizations of the '60s, but it becomes obvious that he has done so in order to build support for his present pseudo-revolutionary undertakings. 

Forman would have us believe that of all of the Black organizations springing up during the civil rights era, SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) was the only serious and radical one. And further, he would have us believe that within SNCC, he alone was conscious of the limitations of an organization founded on the principle of non-violence; and that he had some "great foresight" which could build SNCC into a "revolutionary vanguard" organization for the future. 

At an earlier point in history, one might simply have shrugged

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-21 17:45:19