Rhetoric into Relevance

Black Power is only a slogan, but it is real to great numbers of people--r and it has many different shades of meaning. In its crudest definition, it is the war cry of embittered firebrands who spurn white America and propagate the nightmare of ghetto violence. To others, Black Power is the impractical dream of a separate black state. But the term can also connote the emergence of Negroes as a cohesive political force, the building of black economic muscle, the recognition of an Afro-American cultural identity. To many black leaders, that is the only realistic meaning of the slogan. Last week the National Urban League, long attacked by militants as the button-down, archconservative wing of the civil rights movement, embraced Black Power--in its achievable definition.

Coming Home. "The words," declares Executive Director Whitney M. Young Jr., "have caught the imagination, and they come to convey above all pride and community solidarity--and this is a positive, constructive concept." When Young first bruited his conversion to Black Power at Columbus, Ohio, last month, there were jubilant cheers of "The brother's come home!" from militants who had been ready to shout him down.

Black Power, as Young envisages it, is the power of Negroes to choose: to live in harmony with whites, to live among themselves amid decent surroundings--even to exclude whites if they wish. But Young ruled out black apartheid. "We do not intend to do the racists' job for them by accepting segregation," he insisted, "and we plan no one-way trips to Africa." As a result, Young told 1,800 Urban Leaguers gathered in New Orleans for their 58th annual convention, he is launching a new thrust for what he termed Soul or Ghetto Power, increasing sevenfold the organization's spending in the slums, from $300,000 to $2,000,000 next year. "The Urban League," said Young, "intends to translate the symbols into substance and the rhetoric into relevance."

The league's proposed budget of $6,100,000 is largely contributed by major corporations and white donors. As the most affluent of all civil rights groups, it has the green power to turn words into deeds. Last year its 1,400 full-time workers found jobs for more than 60,000 applicants, upgraded workers in 10,000 jobs, and placed 20,000 more in training programs. Next year league staffers will also tackle merchants who gouge ghetto dwellers with unfair credit terms, bad housing, and the explosive issue of police in the slums.

Meanwhile, the principal challenge to overwhelmingly middle-class Urban Leaguers is to re-establish communications with the ghetto. Blacks from New Orleans slums listened blankly to lectures on their problems from league staffers at workshops organized during the convention. "We've got to realize that we're not middle class at all," confessed Lonnie King of the Health, Education and Welfare staff in Atlanta, "but black."

Deep Commitment. Young and the league's leaders, straining to meet all but the farthest-out extremists halfway, zeroed in on two grievous weaknesses that beset black moderates: the lack of involvement in the slums by middle-class Negroes and deep-seated white racism. To Young, Alabama's Segregationist George Wallace "is as American as cherry pie." Replied Merchant Stanley Marcus, head of the famed Dallas Nieman-Marcus store: "We must have a deep commitment by a vast majority of the white citizens of this country that this is their problem." And when twoscore ghetto youngsters invaded a league meeting, grabbing a microphone, Young hearkened patiently to their demands. "These are people who may not have degrees from college," he explained to shocked delegates. "But they have degrees in being hurt."

Young was supported by the league's white officials. "Of course I'm for Black Power," declared James A. Linen, President of Time Inc. and newly elected national president of the league. "But not for black terrorist power, not for black power for vengeance--but for vindication. Black Power will succeed if black Americans push into the world rather than withdraw from it."

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