WHAT CAN I DO?

'THE conscience of the white man has always been the Negro's potential ally. Even before the Abolitionists' underground railroad spirited runaway Southern slaves to comparative sanctuary in the North, there were white Americans willing to denounce, and even to oppose, a system that infringed the cardinal tenet of democracy. But white conscience has been too passive, too diffuse, too reticent a force, in part because the power of the individual conscience is difficult to pool, and in part because the cause of equal rights is such a massive undertaking. Now there is widespread evidence that the white American conscience is, more insistently than ever, asking: "What can I do?"

The search for answers proceeds, however guiltily or imperfectly, with new resolve. Since the murder of Martin Luther King, says Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, civil rights has stopped being a "spectator sport." Like no other single event in the history of U.S. race relations, the assassination of King, a man who staked his life on his country's conscience, drove home the need for personal commitment to a cause that can easily be lost by default. "The vast untapped resources of the silent, decent people have been awakened," wrote Young in his syndicated newspaper column. "In this tragic period, they offer the nation hope."

Remove the Sore

In hundreds of localities and in thousands of concerned hearts, bridge building between the races is under way. Often the instrument is one human spirit, galvanized by an intolerable burden of contrition or shame. "I came to the conclusion that our country is very far from what we say it is in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution," says Alan S. Traugott, 44, of Glen Ellyn, Ill., a white suburb west of Chicago. In March, this conviction led Traugott to resign his five-figure income and position as manager of the Sears, Roebuck store in Englewood, a Chicago neighborhood that is predominantly black. Now jobless, he intends to dedicate himself full time, in any way he can, to brotherhood between the black and white communities.

Such total commitment is rare, but there are many examples of effective effort. In Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley last summer, Dr. Curtis Stevens, a white psychologist, opened his backyard swimming pool to Negro children, and was soon playing host to two shifts a day, five days a week. By the end of summer, as Stevens' example spread, 2,000 Negro youngsters were regularly and happily splashing in 22 private pools. With the help of volunteers, both black and white, Cleveland Adman Frank T. McDonough, 64, re-sodded lawns in a seven-block area in Hough, the city's ghetto. He has since marked 40 more blocks for the same treatment. "Some day I knew I was going to see my Maker," said McDonough, a devout Roman Catholic, "and he would say: 'You knew what was going on, what did you do about it?' I knew I'd better have an answer."

Examples of collective action are widespread. At Harlem's only high school, Benjamin Franklin, the College Readiness Program, staffed by white volunteers, has helped 134 students go on to college--and 100 of these to stay there. The program pairs one student and one sponsoring tutor, and it has opened eyes and horizons on both sides of the relationship. Tutoring, which not only helps the young black in a most productive way but also establishes a genuine one-to-one relationship, is widely regarded as a key opportunity for the concerned white. Small discussion groups provide another fruitful area. California's Esalen Institute, an experiment in expanding human communication, has launched what it irreverently calls a "No Crap Project": interracial discussion in which anything goes.

Duke University students in Durham, N.C., recently demonstrated on behalf of the university's maintenance employees, most of them Negro, who struck for the right to bargain collectively. "To see these middleclass, Southern white kids treating semiliterate Negro maids and janitors with dignity and respect, without any condescension, is heartening," says Faculty Member Samuel Cook. "They're not only breaking the color barrier, but the class and educational barriers." In San Francisco, 150 Bay area physicians and health workers have organized as the Medical Committee for Human Rights to mediate between the Black Panthers, one of the more militant Negro movements on the West Coast, and white authority.

These examples, which can be multiplied many times over, demonstrate clearly enough that personal involvement in the civil rights struggle does not lack opportunities for expression. From that observation it is tempting to draw overoptirnistic conclusions: that the conscience of the white is at last effectively engaged, and that the estrangement of the races will thus certainly yield, however long that may take, to the influence of reason and good will. But such conclusions overstate the depth of white participation--and underrate the Negro's new self-assertive mood. At this critical juncture in relations between white and black, true rapprochement may be farther away than ever.

The fact is that most whites, like most Negroes, still remain outside the civil rights movement, often by choice. The small army of suburbanites that descended on New York City's ghetto districts one recent weekend, brooms and paintbrushes in hand, left most of their neighbors at home in various degrees of disinterest. "Volunteerism is not any great answer," says Columbia University Sociologist Herbert Gans. "The suburbanites who go into the slum have contact, but they probably need it the least. The ones who need it are the ones who stayed home."

Moreover, the Negro in the ghetto is showing a declining gratitude for visitations by white missionaries who sign up for temporary duty only, and who may be more interested in salving their own consciences than in solving a problem that cannot be cured by a coat of paint. The reception given New York's beautifying task force was generally cordial, but there were a few notable exceptions. "Why clean outside?" asked one resident. "All the badness is inside, and that will still be there tomorrow."

The Rising Emotional Cost

This cynicism is now frequently heard in terms so bitter as to convince many well-meaning whites that the Negro does not really want to be helped. "Good people are good for nothing," says the Rev. Samuel Williams, pastor of Atlanta's colored Friendship Baptist Church. "What we need basically is to change this nation's attitude. The situation now is like I had a sore and I went to the doctor and he put some salve and a bandage on it. What I really need is an operation to remove it."

"I don't want anybody coming around to me because they have never seen a Negro," says Mel Miller, publisher of the Bay State Banner in Boston's black ghetto, Roxbury. "I don't know anything about conscience. Come and talk if you have business to do. Stay away if you don't." Says the Rev. Albert Cleage Jr. of Detroit, whose congregation now prays to a black Madonna: "If you're waiting for the white man to love you, to reach down and help you, drop dead. As long as you believe in integration, there is no place for you but on your knees."

Such attitudes signify a crucial--and, to many whites, a profoundly disturbing--change in the relation between black and white. These Negroes have lost faith in the white society's capacity to reform; they are impatient with progress under the machinery of white law. They are challenging both white stewardship of the civil rights movement and its direction, which they sometimes interpret as condescension conferred as a gift. At this stage, the activist Negro is less concerned with winning white help than with asserting black autonomy as an intermediate but indispensable step on the path to true racial equality. The Negro's goal has shifted away from integration to economic and cultural independence from the white majority. He wants to be black, and he intends to emancipate himself.

Thus, at a time when the commitment of conscience may be more critically necessary than ever, the cost of commitment has risen enormously for the white. It now demands a patience, a forbearance, an understanding and a humility sturdy enough to survive ingratitude and even rebuff from the other side. "If a white person is willing to contribute a skill and see it either rejected or used," says Don Benedict, a white man who is executive director of Chicago's Community Renewal Society, "then he might be able to help. But he has to be willing not to participate in policy decisions." The white participant is likely to find himself cast in a role subservient to the black he desires to help--and this turnabout is certain to put a heavy strain on his will.

Negro leaders are assigning the new roles. "The whites must understand that black people are no longer interested in the elimination of discrimination," says Dr. Frank Stanley of the Los Angeles Urban League. "They're after economic improvement. That means a different kind of relationship. It means the end of the do-gooders." The white community can only imagine, since it cannot yet share, the great pride generated among Negroes by the success of Chicago's Operation Breadbasket, a black-run program that in two years, by raising the threat of economic boycott, has forced Chicago firms to hire more than 3,000 Negroes.

White Power

It will not be easy for whites to accept counsel or direction from blacks. But nothing short of that is likely to be successful. On the course toward genuine union with his black brother, the white's first step is perhaps the hardest of all. It is to acknowledge that he and not the Negro must change his attitude. Above all, he must accept his majority share of responsibility for the race problem. If the white is genuinely concerned about forming a useful coalition with the black, he will certainly have to drop his guard--and, beyond that, he will have to accept less than a heroic role. Says Harvard Theologian Harvey Cox: "Individuals must ask: 'Just how serious am I about this? Am I willing to be criticized by my neighbors? Can I pursue my normal career with single-mindedness without trying to do something?' "

For today's white, the question is not, "What can I do?" but "What does the Negro want me to do?" It may stick in many white throats. To ask it is to demand an investment of conscience far beyond the mere missionary zeal to ease the black man's load. One example of this approach is the Committee for the Understanding of Racial Attitudes, formed by students at New York's Union Theological Seminary. CURA's declared purpose is to educate not blacks but whites. "We want to show," says Prudence Milite, "that what happened in the black ghetto is the result of racism embedded in the white community. People make the statement over and over again, T'm not prejudiced,' and it's just not the case. We're all victims of racism."

The need for white commitment is greater at home than in the ghetto, since it is there that racism has put down its deepest roots. No Negro is ever going to change white attitudes by sodding some white suburban lawn--but white society is sensitive and susceptible to pressure from its own kind. "The basic thing the individual should do is start to change the institutions in which he is involved," says Thomas F. Pettigrew, Harvard social psychologist. "You change people's attitudes by changing their behavior first. And you change behavior by changing institutions--the institutions that require us to behave in racist ways."

Pettigrew and others feel that the remedy consists in the deployment of "White Power" at every level of white society, challenging behavior and attitude patterns that have stiffened in place less by prejudice than by habit. A mere handful of shoppers serially stating their concern to a local storekeeper because he hires no Negro help are likely to revolutionize his personnel policy: from this modest sample, in a pattern familiar to psychologists, the proprietor senses the sentiment of the community--or thinks he does. New behavior patterns can change old attitudes. "People will assume that it's right to have all-white clerks if you have all-white clerks," says Pettigrew. "And they will also assume that it's right to have an integrated staff if you have an integrated staff."

The suburban task force that spent a weekend painting in Harlem might have been more effective if it had descended as a political action group on New York Mayor John V. Lindsay in city hall. Neighborhood fair-housing committees, instead of coaxing a Negro family out to suburbia or talking the residents into a quota system, might do better to go to work on the village board. If Washington has lost momentum in the drive for civil rights, part of the reason must be that it has not been kept fully informed of the strength of the public will. That is a job for individual citizenship. Writing one's congressman may seem a humble and undramatic way to serve the cause of equal rights. But if enough citizens do it, it can have dramatic results.

The committed white can also do worse than listen to the Negro minority, which has a far better understanding of him than he does of them. Whites could learn much from reading Negro newspapers and books--perhaps the best way to find out how the Negro feels. "Give us money, and give us total control of our program," says "Scooter," who uses only that nickname in a militant organization of Negro youth in San Francisco. "We don't want to become imitation white people. Maybe, when we're sure of ourselves, then maybe we'll join in a coalition with whites."

From other sectors of the black community have come suggestions that white capital invest in black institutions; that culture, both black and white, provide a valuable interracial bridge; that Negroes and whites join in "black partnership programs" in which an appointed third party--perhaps a church--serves as mediator to cement the partnership and to ensure that it remains equal. The Rev. J. H. Hargett, a Negro minister from Los Angeles' Watts district, has proposed an industrial pageboy system for white industry. "In Washington they hire young people to work in Congress and learn how Government works. Big industry should hire young Negroes so they can experience for themselves the environment of the white business world."

Efforts by Everybody

The opportunities, indeed, are unlimited. But at this sensitive period in the relations between the two communities, white attitudes are at least as important as white deeds. "Whites who try to be free must have the courage to accept the inevitable chaos and confusion of a changing society," writes Negro Educator Kenneth B. Clark in Dark Ghetto. "Above all, one must not retreat in the face of pain. Original innocence, if such a thing has meaning, can never be regained; in contemporary society, no one, Negro or white, can be totally without prejudice. Any genuine relationship between Negro and white must face honestly all of the ambivalences both feel for each other."

For the past 25 years, Mrs. MacDonald Denman, the widow of a San Francisco paper-company executive, has invited Negroes and whites to meet together over dinner or drinks at her home. Mrs. Denman has nothing much more than that in mind, and some of her guests have indicted her assemblies as a superficial attack on the race problem. She accepts the charge. "Of course they are," she says. "But we'll never have anything if we don't begin. There is no big overall effort that can bring the answer--it's a lot of little efforts by lots of people."

If the country's race problem is curable, the cure is likely to be found somewhere at that level: in a lot of little efforts by lots of people. The law is now a powerful force for human rights. But it cannot be truly effective without the strength and staying power of the human spirit.

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