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FREEDOMWAYS    THIRD QUARTER 1973

emerged something called the "labor lawyer" who joined with the activist from the picket line and sat at the collective bargaining tables dealing with the giants of American industry in steel, packinghouse and longshore. So this unity relationship between the technician-scientist on the one hand and the activist in the movement sustained itself until the period in the 1950's when the onslaught of "McCarthyism" resulted in breaking up that unity.

With the era of "McCarthyism" and repression the leadership of the labor movement became increasingly conservative so that strength of mass movement declined. The NAACP picked up the challenge and while the NAACP had a mass membership, it was not its leaders' style to develop mass organization and mass direct action. Consequently, the mass involvement became limited to taking out NAACP membership. At the same time the NAACP did organize legal technicians who handled their court activities as well as educational technicians specifically around the fight for the equalization of teachers' salaries. All of this came before Montgomery.

Great athletes like Jackie Robinson and many others who followed him into professional sports began to break the hallowed records of baseball, football and other "pasttimes," they too were part of the Freedom Movement. What was true of our sports and scientific figures was no less true of our talented artistic personalities. The expansive musical works of such talents as Duke Ellington and Lester ("Prez") Young, after World War II were reinforced by a new generation of artists-Miles Davis, Billy Strayhorn, Charlie Parker, McCoy Tyner, Gil Evans-whose art reflected the freedom thrust and internationalist character and spirit of the movement. At a time when the United States, as a society, was entering a period of cultural repression in its intellectual life based upon the pollution of "anti-communism," these people's artists, for a whole generation, proceeded to build upon the earlier works. So we rolled into the '50's, up to Montgomery and mass-action, culturally, indeed, to borrow a title from a popular record album-Miles Ahead.

This democratic momentum was also aided by the creative works of our poets. The most progressive among them, such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden and others, mastered this particular discipline and gave to us a poetry of beauty, social substance and universal appeal-a poetry with power because it enabled the human spirit even while providing insights into the contradictions of this society.

The world movement, too, continued to create a climate favorable

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-26 11:42:50