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IN PRAISE OF SCIENCE                                  O'DELL

to the further progress of our movement. The great conference held in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 resulted in a large assemblage of "Third World" countries and peoples. Twenty-nine countries were represented at this great convening of peoples who knew the meaning of colonialism and its ideology, racism, trough experience and pledged their cooperation to each other in a new spirit of internationalism. The Bandung Conference of 1955 took place some six months before our Montgomery Bus Boycott that same year. Two years later the Socialist world community launched [[/italic font]][[Sputnik]] into the universe, proclaiming the scientific and technological revolution which is destined to shape the academic character of education for the next century. This combination of changes in political and economic systems on the one hand and the growth of scientific and technological productive forces, constituted two dimensions of a world revolutionary process that was in motion by the time sixties opened up.

  The Montgomery events began a slow revival of the mass movement. In effect, the Supreme Court had provided this movement with the tools. There can be no doubt the Supreme Court was influenced in making this decision by the upsurge of the anti-colonial movement on a world scale and the need for the United States to backup its claims to be "leader of the free world" by trying to create a better image of itself in the world. Eight years before the Supreme Court decision William Patterson, one of our most talented and creative legal minds, had organized the Civil Rights Congress to protest the many injustices the Afro-American community faced. This militant organization prepared in 1951 a petition to the United Nations documenting years of lynchings, discrimination and racist crimes. The petition asked the U. N. to consider the charge of genocide against the government of the United States. This petition was submitted under the definition of the terms set forth in the Covenant Against Genocide adopted by the United Nations earlier. Patterson and his colleagues understood the importance of the new body of international law which the United Nations was creating as a weapon for all oppressed peoples.

  And so we set about to implement the decision of 1954 that segregation was unconstitutional. And we asserted in this period the [[/italic font]][[moral]] right that we had to end this insult to our dignity as a people. The Black Church became the mobilizing center, and our clergy became, what we might call, the "natural leader ship" of this particular phase of our movement. In that period we operated more on faith in the justice of our cause rather than scientific analysis. Then,

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