Green Power

For the Negro, discrimination begins at home. From the antebellum caste system, under which house slaves were considered superior to field hands, to the lingering feeling that a light-skinned Negro is higher on the social scale than a darker one, Negroes have traditionally suffered from their own, as well as the white man's, prejudices. The isolation of most affluent Negroes from the civil rights struggle has been part of the same pattern.

Last week that pattern was significantly altered. Forty-seven of the country's most successful Negroes formed the National Negro Business and Professional Committee and announced that it will raise $1,000,000 a year to subsidize the N.A.A.C.P. legal-defense and educational fund. Individual Negro contributors will be asked to give $1,000 to help the fund represent any citizen, white or colored, in civil rights suits--mostly to implement civil rights legislation of recent years.

Besides being the most ambitious self-help effort ever undertaken by moneyed Negroes, the fund drive represents a subtle repudiation of such radical activists as Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick, who insist on black-only leadership for the rights movement. Like the N.A.A.C.P. proper, the independent N.A.A.C.P. legal-defense and educational fund has always had an integrated directorship.

Name on the Wall. George Harris, president of the Chicago Metropolitan Mutual Assurance Co. and one of the new drive's organizers,* said of the young radicals: "We've waited almost a year to see them come up with a program. They haven't, and now we have." To Dr. Kenneth Clark, the Negro psychologist, the decision to wield green power rather than shout black power represents "part of our growing up." Prosperous Negroes, of course, have for many years contributed quietly to the N.A.A.C.P., the Urban League and similar groups. "What makes this new move important," says Clark, "is that it takes the wealthy Negro away from the $500 and his name on the wall"--meaning the $500 life membership in the N.A.A.C.P., which gets the donor's name inscribed on a plaque at the organization's national headquarters in New York City.

With their own vehicle for racial advancement, wealthy Negroes will be able to demonstrate, however belatedly, that the road to equality lies through due process of law--not, as Adam Clayton Powell would have it, through defiance of the law.

* Along with Asa Spaulding, president of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Co., and Dr. Percy Julian, a Chicago research chemist.

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