'Freedom Rides'

(The following represents a minority opinion of the Editorial Board on the "reverse Freedom Rides" discussed here yesterday.)

A busload of Negroes leaves the depot in New Orleans and heads North, but the city's Negro problem stays behind. The White Citizens who pay for the migration must know that they are shaking their fists in the winds of change; and they must know, too, that no other gesture could so clearly express the real state of the white man's conscience in the South. The rest of the South is already finding it hard to ignore this circus of shame, these "Freedom Rides."

The North--for its part--must not assume that the rides are anything more than a token of the bankruptcy of the segregationist movement. Set against the tides of migration--poor whites as well as Negroes--already leaving the farms of the South, the New Orleans refugees are insignificant, the tiniest handful of bewildered, defeated men.

In its anger, and because it realizes what lies behind the rides, the North may believe that only evil can come of them. But surely some good is being done: penniless men are finding work. However foully Northern cities treat their Negro population, they still offer them a world of opportunity the South cannot match. And while jobless Negroes in the North will resent the jobs so ostentatiously offered the newcomers from New Orleans, most of the jobs given them so far have been positions which Northern Negroes would not have been permitted to fill. The public stir attending the migrants helps them break into Northern occupations and places which have, up to now, excluded the black man.

Talk about the rides breaking the solidarity of the Southern Negro movement is ignorance talk indeed. There is in fact no Southern Negro movement. What little agitation there is--sit-ins and Freedom Rides--is largely dependent on white opinion in the North and South. The sit-ins were successful bets taken on white opinion--a winning bet, to be sure, but the movement depended on how whites would react. And the Negroes participating in the sit-ins were a narrow group of students and middle class Negroes. Martin Luther King has complained that Negro lower classes--especially tenant farmers and sharecroppers--are apathetic about civil rights and likely to remain so. They are hungry and in need, and getting them out of the South is a service to them. Few of them want to suffer in the name of a cause, and only a heartless ideologue would ask them to.

The terms on which the Negro states his aspirations preclude Negro solidarity. Negro spokesmen and Negro publications talk of acceptance, obliterating the distinctions between oneself and other men, being treated like a man and not a Negro. James Wilson has pointed out in Negro Politics how Negro society in the North is shaped toward reliance on white opinion and white pressure groups. And Gunnar Myrdal has concluded that the Negro problem in America is a white problem; that, for better or worse, the Negro's advancement depends on the values and attitudes of white society, since the Negro shares them completely and without question.

Outraged Northerners might reflect on what these rides mean to the South. They have heard the argument that the Southern Negro is happier than his Northern counterpart, that the Negro doesn't really seek improvement. Now Northerners see the most rabid Southern group publicly confessing that the South cannot satisfy even its most ill-educated, ignorant Negroes, that--and this is a crushing admission--there is a Negro problem in the South. Responsible Southern newspapers have already read this lesson into the rides, and they are absolutely correct. The segregationists are confessing that Southern society is a failure.