BLACK AND WHITE BALANCE SHEET

No part of the American situation today is so full of contradictions as that which concerns the Negro. In terms of statistics and cold facts, the gains of the eight Democratic years have been spectacular. Negro median family income is up 53%; the unemployment rate is down 34%. The gap between black income and white income has narrowed substantially. Slightly more than a quarter (27%) of all Negroes are below the poverty line, compared with 55% in 1960. A far greater percentage of Negroes are finishing high school and going to college. Today, a Negro college graduate often has a better chance of landing a good job than his white classmate.

Eight years ago, the black man could not set foot inside many U.S. restaurants or hotels--except as a servant. Now, almost the last vestige of segregation has been wiped off the law books. A Negro votes in the Senate; another sits on the Supreme Court; until this week, a third sat in the President's Cabinet. Black mayors govern Cleveland and Gary, Ind., while in the South, nearly 400 serve in all kinds of elective offices. Black faces are now common in TV commercials and magazine ads; some corporations prize black executives as highly as computers. Proportionally, there are far more blacks in good jobs today than there were eight years ago. By almost any statistical index, the U.S. would seem to be headed in the right direction.

The classes of Toms. Yet black-white relations are not improving. In comparison with today, 1960 looks like the era of good feeling. Since 1964, each year has seen black riots in the ghettos--although there is a feeling, if nothing more, that the worst phase of the riots is over; 1968, for instance, was quieter than 1967. Since the time when blacks and whites marched together on Washington in 1963, the dream of integration has seemed increasingly less relevant. Black students on many campuses now want their own segregated dormitories; the rhetoric of black militants has grown increasingly virulent, as last fall's New York school controversy and the continuing battle at San Francisco State College demonstrate. Moderates are often either embarrassed or afraid to be seen with whites. Dr. Joseph Wilber, a white physician who has brought Atlanta Negroes and whites together in discussion groups, explains that "they're afraid of being labeled as one of the classes of Uncle Toms--the Tom, the Uncle Tom, or the Super Uncle Tom." A Stokely Carmichael or a Rap Brown can talk of honkies --just as white bigots talk of niggers--and an Eldridge Cleaver can shout that "We shall have our manhood. We shall have it, or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it."

The anger is not difficult to explain. The dream of equality has been deferred too long, and Americans, both white and black, are paying in the late '60s for the omissions of the past. For there is another side to the glowing figures of black advancement. Negroes are still three times as likely as whites to die in childbirth and infancy; they are three times as likely to be in poverty; they are twice as Likely to be unemployed. While they are gaining more in terms of income than whites, they are not likely to catch up at the present rate for decades. Everything else being equal, an ordinary Negro worker is less likely to find good employment than a white. A new dialogue. What do Negroes want? According to a survey for the Kerner Commission, most Negroes reject the blandishments of black separatists. A FORTUNE survey determined last year, in fact, that about three-quarters thought conditions were better than they had been in the early and mid '60s. Even more had hope for the future. They want the same things whites want: decent housing, decent jobs, decent education and the respect that is due any human being. In his basic hopes and fears, the black American is no different at all from the white American. Thus it seems particularly tragic that the idealism that brought whites and blacks together in the early '60s has evaporated. Yet perhaps it was, as the militants now say, a false idealism based on the notion that whites could lift blacks with well-meaning, but destructive paternalism. That idea, at least, is now dead, and a new kind of dialogue is developing in which whites help, but do not command the black advance.

The race dilemma will be the President's toughest problem. Aside from various economic measures that may improve the lot of blacks, he could begin by using the Government's powers to further desegregation in deliberately segregated schools and employment. He could bring highly qualified Negroes into the highest ranks of his Administration. And he could, through word and deed, put the prestige of the presidency behind the Negro's cause.

There is no need to wait for new Government reports or the weighty deliberations of a presidential commission. Mrs. Shirley Chisholm, the Brooklyn Representative who this month became the first black woman to sit in Congress, sums up the Negro's status very succinctly: "The black people are no longer interested in a lot of conferences and meetings, or surveys and graphs and study commissions. We've been analyzed and graphed and surveyed for too long. We need action now. We want to give white America the chance to show that there is such a thing as equality of opportunity, regardless of race, creed, or color."

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