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IN PRAISE OF SCIENCE    O'DELL

this century. And there was Adam Clayton Powell, who went from the picket lines in Harlem demanding jobs to the City Council and later to the Congress of the United States in the '30's and '40's. White workers, the aged and others owe a great debt to this black Congressman whose Chairmanship of the House Education and Labor Committee resulted in the largest body of social legislation to be passed than at any period in American history. During this period Harlem's voters also elected Ben Davis, a Harvard Law School graduate, to the New York City Council on the Communist Party ticket.

The tradition of disciplined quality scholarship exemplified by our bibliographers and researchers such as Monroe Work at Tuskegee in the 1920's was further continued by another generation of archivists beginning in the 1930's, among them Ernest Kaiser, Dorothy Porter and Jean Blackwell Hutson.

Our legal technicians like Charles Houston, William Hastie and Thurgood Marshall* designed the strategy for desegregating higher education in the thirties and early forties. And in the fifties Judge Hastie, twenty years later as a federal judge in Pennsylvania, was one of the chief defenders and upholders of the First Amendment during the McCarthy era of hysteria and repression. They remained consistent upholders and advancers of the democratic tradition.

Ralph Bunche's perceptive analysis of the NAACP structure, written in 1940, which called attention to the conservative effect of the self-perpetuating character of its Board of Directors, is a long-neglected contribution to our better understanding of the science and laws of organization.

These personalities and the class they represented of scholar-technicians were products of, or did their work mainly in, black colleges. So Tuskegee, Fisk, Atlanta University, Shaw and Howard were among the outstanding institutions contributing this intelligentsia of scientific and technical personnel. The pioneering work of Ernest Everett Just in cell biology, Charles Drew in blood plasma, Daniel Hale Williams in heart surgery and Percy Julian, the first to synthesize the "miracle drug" cortisone, are examples of work that was internationally recognized by the world scientific community.

In 1940 the height of the CIO drive of industrial workers there
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*Supreme Court Justice Marshall's recent action in connection with the continued bombing of Cambodia represents a serious and unfortunate departure from our Movement's history of concern for human rights. Not only is the legality of such bombings questionable, as the plaintiffs in the case contend, but the immorality of the bombings is beyond question.

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-26 11:41:19