Perdew Speaks for New Negro Spirit

John W. Perdew '64, free on bail after three months in an Americus, Ga., jail, spoke last night of a "depressing situation" in the South and the "human problems" of integration.

Perdew, told a meeting of the Harvard-Radcliffe Civil Rights Co-ordinating Committee in Lowell Lecture Hall of the "depths of fear" created by "a 300-year history of oppression" of the Negro in the South.

This fear is so complete, he said, that it would be "futile" to seek Southern white support for the civil rights movement. He is, to Americus whites, "a New York atheist Communist Jew."

Civil rights, he said, must come through "a new spirit" among Negroes themselves. He and fellow workers in the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee "want Negroes to be proud of their blackness, to give up servility and complacency, to 'lay their burden down."

The Negro, he said, must become "an integrated person--one for whom the distinction between white and black is not invidious." Only such a Negro, he went on, will take advantage of "formal integration,"--legal rulings in favor of integration. He noted, for example, that most Negroes are still using what had been "black only" facilities in the Albany, Ga., bus terminal, despite an integration order by the I.C.C.

Perdew cited Negro resignation to segregation as a major obstacle in his own work for voter registration. Many Negroes find his message disturbing, and as a result resent him. "Every Negro in Americus knows who I am, where I've been for the past three months, and what I've done," he stated, "but many still greet me, if at all, like a white insurance agent coming to collect money every week."

But the tradition in which Negroes have "suppressed any desire for human dignity" is slowly crumbling. Perdew pointed to an upsurge of voter registrations in Americus and an increase in the number of mass protest meetings as causes for some optimism in the civil rights movement.

Perdew lashed out at Northern newspapers for "merely keeping score" in racial developments, impersonally reporting only major demonstrations. The failure to publicize "police brutality," he said, allows the federal government to ignore it. And unless the federal government takes an interest, "local governments are not going to respond" to integration efforts.

He cited the case of a reporter who checked out a charge of brutality by asking the accused police chief whether the allegation was true