Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1968. január-június (22. évfolyam, 1-26. szám)

1968-03-14 / 11. szám

10

AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZÓ — HUNGARIAN WORD

Thursday, March 14, 1968

W.E.B. Dußois and 4The Problem of the Color Line’

This article was published in the February 23rd edition of the Wall Street Journal. We publish it verbatim, and recommend it to all of our readers, their sons and daughters, their grandchildren. Editor

By Howard N. Meyer

William Edward Burghardt DuBois was born in Massachusetts a century ago today, shortly before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment He died in Africa at. the age of 95, on the eve of the civil rights march on Washington of August 1963, when a quarter million Americans assembled to protest the denial of the Amendment’s promise őf equality and justice. When asking a moment of silent prayer for the old man, Roy Wilkins told the gathering, “For 60 years his has been the voice that was calling you here today.”

Descended from a slave who won freedom as a soldier in the American Revolution, DuBois became the first of his race to win a doctorate at Harvard. He displayed in his earliest publications scholarship in both history and sociology that would surely, had he been white, have led to a long and notable academic career. Repelled by the prospect of indefinite segregation in a Negro college, appalled by the state of race relations at the turn of the century, he could not help but become an activist. Though always an individualist, not having a capacity to mix easily or possessing the common touch, he became a leader by the Sheer force of his intellect in the rebirth of militant protest against racism.

While Booker T. Washington still held a one- man monopoly of “black power,” after successfully advocating a policy of accomodation, Dr. DuBois called together a small group of Negro intellectuals and businessmen to lead his people along a different path. They started the “Niagara movement,” so-called because they met first at Niagara Falls, symbolically to recall the Underground Railroad (but on the Canadian side, because no hotel on the U.S. side would accept Negro guests in 1905.)

This group, which was to help found and to ' merge itself into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, met again in 1906 at Harpers Ferry—another invocation of history—and issued a manifesto. That document, drafted by DuBois, “kindled a flame that, much later, would finally awaken the nation.” as Thur- good Marshall, now a Supreme Court Justice, told the 1966 White House Conference on civil rights.

Niagara Resolutions

Those concerned to know “what the Negro wants” have only to turn to the original Niagara resolutions of 1906. “Freedom, manhood, . . .the right to work, and the chance to rise” were the themes. They called for full and equal suffrage and the end of segregation. As proof of the introductory passage, “The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone, but for all true Americans,” they called for an administration of justice that would be not only color-blind but classless. Decrying the inadequacy of educational opportunity that afflicted poor white as well as poor black they warned: “Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.”

Present day intellectuals are concerned with a deficiency in public education that lends ominous plausibility to that forecast. Ignorance of the root causes of discontent, past and present, lack of knowledge as to the quality and quantity of Negro contributions to the American culture, society and economy are factors in the apathy that seems once more to be closing in.

A case in point is the ignorance of most Americans concerning the genius, the gifts, the very identity of DuBois. It is to the discredit of the rest of us that only a miniature leftist youth group bears his name.

Although DuBois was a leader, a scholar and a writer, he should above all be remembered as a prophet. By now his most widely quoted forecast, written while McKinley was President and Victoria reigned, has been proved: “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line—the

relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”

His prophecies that were warnings as well have been incufficiently heeded. In 1903, in a rare confrontation-in-print with Booker T. Washington, he argued the case for higher education for the ’’talented tenth,” but concluded with words still timely: “Men of America, the problem is plain before you. Here is a race transplanted through the criminal foolishness of your fathers. Whether you like it or not the millions are here, and here they will remain. If you do not lift them up, they will pull you down.”

■Little to Lose'

The Presidential Commission that is attempting to answer the question, “Where did we go wrong?” might study the context of the prophecy that concluded DuBois’ masterwork, “Black Reconstruction.” He wrote in 1935 that the Negro’s “frustration cannot indefinitely continue. Some day it may burst in fire and flood. Who will be to blame? And where the greater cost? Black folk, after all, have little to lose, but civilization has all.”

Until the publication of DuBois’ massive re- exemination of the Reconstruction era the almost unanimously accepted version of the history of the period deprecated the architects of the Civil Rights Amendments to the Constitution and their beneficiaries. The conscious or unconscious .purpose and clear effect of that tradition was, as Arnold Rose, co-author of “An American Dilemma,” was the first to point out, precisely like the technique of the dictator depicted in Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty Four,” who controlled the motivations of human beings by manipulating their beliefs about their past. Gradually, since the publication of “Black Reconstruction,” the substance of its author’s critique of the previously dominant academic view has won wide acceptance.

The continent where he died has been more generous to the memory of DuBois than his native land. A confidential State Department survey showed him to be, shortly before his death, the American best known and most popular among African intellectuals. This was not primarily due to his eminence among American Negroes. When Africa was still under colonial rule, it was DuBois who founded the first Pan African Congress in Paris in 1919. Through this group he furnished inspiration for the efforts of African nationalists that came to fruition during the last decade.

In 1945 DuBois was named by President Truman to be one of the group that attended with Ralph Bunche at the San Francisco founding of the United Nations. Had he died shortly afterward he might be honored today with the standard array

NE FÉLJEN A JOHNSON-FÉLE UTAZÁSI ADÓTÓL, MÉG NINCS MEGSZAVAZVA

(Nem eszik a kását olyan forrón, ahogy főzik)

Jöjjön az Amerikai Magyar

Dalárdával

MAGYARORSZÁGRA

1968 aug. 26-tól szept. 16-ig

A teljes utazási költség:

Gleveland-Budapesi és vissza $387.90

New Yorktól—Budapestig és vissza $347.00

Nem szükséges, hogy tagja legyen a Dalárdának írjon a Dalárda címére:

4309 Lorain Avenue, Cleveland, O. 44113

Az utazás vezetői: Mezey Árpád elnök és Leslie Kondorossy karnagy

Csatlakozzon a szép számmal jelentkezőkhöz

Jelentkezés legkésőbb junius 30-ig Telefon: 631-2705 -a--*--*--*--*--*--*--»--*--*--*--*--*--»of centennial tributes. For example, commemorative postage stamps have thrice been granted Booker T. Washington but denied DuBois (yet not withheld from Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jack- son).

The services rendered his country by DuBois are ignored, as if in punitive retribution for the political deviations of his last 15 years. In some cases, erased: In the 1947 edition of “Inside

U.S.A.” John Gunther found DuBois to be a 20th century figure to be compared only to Shaw and Einstein; in the enlarged 1951 edition of the same work that reference was omitted.

The old man’s principal offense was to align himself with the advocates of abolition of atomic war, perhaps not unwisely, but too soon, like the premature antifascists of a decade earlier. Coupled with this was his expression of opposition to our stance in the cold war, another era whose history is even now being reexamined and rewritten. At the age of 83 he was arrested and indicted as an alleged unregistered agent of a foreign principal; the prosecution collapsed when a Federal judge found the case too flimsy to submit to a jury. Embittered and further alienated, he surprised few when he joined the Communist Party at the age of 93. Since the announcement was made at the time the penalties of the MeCarran Act were being invoked, his action may have been more a gesture of defiance of a ruling that was later to be held to be unconstitutional.

The last of the prophecies that we seem fated to ignore was contained in his account of the events that led to his arrest, prosecution and acquittal. “The moral basis of military training and its ethical standards must revolve about murder and destruction and revolve about murder and destruction, and can never normally grasp social uplift and human progress.' For this reason all civilizations of the past have sedulously avoided the rula of soldiers save as a fatal last resort.”

The author, a New York attorney, was a special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. He recently wrote “Colonel of the Black Regiment,” a biography of Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Mi a különbség a “paracoiT és a “prednisone” között?

Ez a kérdés mindazokat érdekli, akik izületi gyulladásban szenvednek

Milliók szenvednek az Egyesült Államokban izületi gyulladás következtében. Milliók szednek fájdalomcsillapító orvosságokat ezzel a betegséggel kapcsolatban. Vannak, akik “meticorten”-t, mások “prednisone”-t, és akadnak olyanok, akik “para- cort”-ot szednek.

Ezeket az orvosságokat a Parke Davis & Co. és a Schering gyógyszervállalatok készitik. Egy bizonyos mennyiségű paracortért $169.98-t számítanak és ugyanazon mennyiségű prednisone-ért $5.90-t.

Wisconsin állam demokrata szenátora, Gaylord Nelson tudni akarta, hogy miként rabolják a gyógy szergyárosok a betegek millióit. Beidézte a fenti két gyár képviselőit és feltette hozzájuk a kérdést: “Mi a különbség a paracort és a prednisone között?”

Harold Burrows, a Parke Davis gyógyszergyár igazgatójának válasza az volt, hogy “tudomásom szerint, SEMMI.”

A kihallgatás után mindkét gyógyszergyár 80 százalékkal leszállította a paracort árát és 40 százalékkal a meticortenét.

“Nyilvánvaló — mondta Nelson szenátor —, hogy miután rámutattunk az orvosságok közti különbség hiányára, az árkülönbséget nem lehetett tovább fenntartani.”

A kormányközegek időközönkénti beavatkozása következtében a gyógyszergyárak kénytelenek egy- egy orvosság árát leszállítani. De a helyzet ma is az, hogy az orvosságok nagy részét méregdrágán adják el a betegeknek.

Helyénvaló volna, ha minden orvosságot a kormány által megszabott áron hoznának forgalomba. Vagy még ennél is jobb volna, ha a betegek díjmentesen kapnák az orvosságokat. ;