Dark Anniversary

Last week, 324 years after the coming of the first Negroes in Virginia,/- the strings of U.S. racial tension were taut and throbbing across the land. In jam-packed Detroit, where for 24 hours riot had raged (TIME, June 28), pent-up ill feeling between whites and Negroes was a silence more ominous than sound.

On dirty, swarming, vice-infested Hastings Street a Negro shot a white man. Ugly words were passed on streetcars and busses. Hoodlums of both races, part of the human flotsam tossed up by war, got into brawls and fist fights. Plainclothesmen and uniformed police nightly raided Negro nightclubs, legitimate and otherwise, frisking patrons for concealed weapons.

Whose Fault? Against this background, which was not too dissimilar from that of other war-crowded cities, Michigan's Governor Harry F. Kelly last week issued the report of a committee he had set up to determine the causes of Detroit's riot. Said the report, in a broad whitewash of the city's bumbling, do-nothing administration and incompetent police force.

> The riot was not planned; was not inspired by enemy agents; resulted from smoldering racial tension. It was touched off by a rumor that a Negro woman and her child had been killed. "Irresponsible" white and Negro youths caused most of the casualties and property damage.

To this recitation of the most obvious facts, the report added a harsh indictment: prime responsibility for the riot lay at the door of the Negro leaders and the Negro press. Said the report: "Perhaps tension in Detroit is the positive exhortation by many so-called Negro leaders to be militant in the struggle for racial equality. . . . [Negro] newspapers repeatedly charge that there is no more democracy here than in Hitler's Europe or in Japan . . . the obvious purpose of which is to drive home to Negro readers the alleged fact of their servitude and to arouse a belligerent reaction."

The Negro press does indeed exploit sensational race stories but these strictures merely made a bad situation worse. Editorialized the Detroit Free Press: "Wholly inadequate. . . . Every race and every minority group has its false leaders. This merely shakes the tree instead of getting at the roots." Said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "The country has been informed of certain factors that Governor Kelly's committee hasn't deigned to mention: that the old, discredited Ku Klux Klan is operating in Detroit; that wartime industry has brought to the city numerous white workers from the South who have deep racial feelings; that housing conditions are bad; that Detroit is a fertile field for crackpots and agitators of all kinds, like the sinister Gerald L. K. Smith . . . that new employment opportunities, as well as the general ferment of ideas caused by the war, have given the Negroes greater economic power and greater ambitions. ... It would have been far more wholesome if the committee . . . had addressed itself to the need for better housing, to an examination of Klan activities and to a study of the methods and purposes of agitators of the Gerald Smith type."

Whose Darkness? To the Negro, in & out of Detroit, the causes of present interracial conflict were clear. The Negro wants political and economic equality. These demands he now puts in the form of

1) equal opportunity in war jobs;

2) equal treatment in the armed forces;

3) equal legal and civic rights. Harlem's Roi Ottley, seven years a reporter for the Amsterdam News, summed up in his recently published New World A-Coming: "In a word, the Negro wants democracy." But nowhere was the way the Negro hopes to reach his goal clearly stated. Author Ottley, who shares most Negroes' belief that leadership must come from Franklin Roosevelt, confessed to a large uncertainty about the Negro's future.

That future was important to the future of all Americans. On the 324th anniversary of perhaps the most tragic event in American history, only the good will and good sense of both whites and Negroes, working together, could check the danger that threatened them. All Americans might well remember some of the wisest words ever written on the problem before them:

"But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes"

/- To Jamestown, in August 1619.

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