NEGRO LEADERS ON VIOLENCE

Leaders of the major civil rights organizations have made nonviolence both a creed and a potent psychological -weapon of their campaign. But few were surprised by last week's eruptions. Many Negro leaders, in fact, had long warned that violence is an inevitable if unwelcome weapon in their struggle. Some of their statements, past and present BAYARD RUSTIN, who planned the 1963 march on Washington: "I think the real cause is that Negro youth--jobless, hopeless--does not feel a part of American society. The major job we have is to find them work, decent housing, education, training, so they can feel a part of the structure. People who feel a part of the structure do not attack it. The job of the Negro leadership is to prevent riots before they start." Martin Luther King, in Miami at week's end: "I strongly deplore the violence. It is absolutely wrong, socially detestable and self-defeating. On the other hand, I equally deplore the continuation of ghetto life that millions of Negroes have to live in. They are in hopeless despair, and they feel they have no stake in society." New Yorker Whitney Young Jr., executive director of the Urban League: "It's not enough to deplore the violence. This is but a symptom." Jesse Gray, leader of the rent strikes in Harlem during 1963: "We need 100 skilled black revolutionaries, dedicated men ready to die. We must make each a platoon captain, and each must get 100 more. New York can be changed by 50,-000 well-organized Negroes. They can determine what will happen to the city." Harlem Politician Percy Sutton: "If you tell the white man you're not going to do him in, you're not going to give us anything to fight the white man with.

N.A.A.C.P.'s Roy Wilkins, Louisville, 1963: "The Negro citizen does not subscribe to violence as a method of securing his rights. But he has come to the point where he is not afraid of violence. He no longer shrinks back. He will assert himself, and if violence comes, so be it." Representative Adam Clayton Powell, at a Black Muslim rally in 1963 in New York: "Anything we get we will have to fight for, to seize for ourselves. We will invade the white man's heaven, the United States." James Foreman, then executive secretary of S.N.C.C., in August 1963: "There's going to be a considerable amount of violence if major changes are not made. I daresay that 85% of the Negro population, if not 95%, does not adhere to nonviolence or does not believe in it." Negro Author Louis Lomax: "The Negro masses are angry and restless, tired of prolonged legal battles that end in paper decrees." Author James Baldwin: "To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time."

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