Three Students Comment on Role Of Meredith's Studies, Muslims

"The crucial question is whether or not James Meredith will get his education," said Paul S. Cowan '62 yesterday. "Meredith's problem is more relevant to us than all of the psychological and personal questions raised by integration."

Cowan, Archie G. Epps 3G, and John G. Butler '63 spoke at the last of three Cabot Hall living room discussions of race problems in America, entitled "Integration and Separatism." "Both are going on and should go on at the same time," Cowan claimed, "but the fact that students are making it impossible for Meredith to study at Mississippi has got to concern us more than our personal attitudes toward integration that have grown out of our own backgrounds."

Epps earlier said that if America was "surprised" by the appearance of the Black Muslims, it was because of historical ignorance about the Negro tradition of voluntary association. "The nineteenth-century separatist movements contain the basic components of the Black Muslim movement today," he said. "After the failure of the Populist movement and of Reconstruction and the enactment of the Black Codes, the surprises of seeing the 'new Negro' shouldn't be surprises."

Bourgeoisie Not the Source

An analysis of the Black Muslims, said Epps, should go back to the seventeenth century to take account of a "continuity of the Negro personality" that has barely been recognised. Almost all discussions of American Negro progress focus on the situation of an upper-middle class marked out by E. Franklin Frazier in his book "The Black Bourgeoisie" as bearers of the Negro culture. But the genesis of the Black Muslims, according to Epps, is in the other segment of the community, and it is only because this has not been studied that we can be surprised at the growth of the Muslim movement.

Negro associations have worked mostly toward reconciliation with American society, continued Epps, on the assumption that they have taken on the accoutrements of American behavior and so should be accepted. But groups like the NAACP have made real progress only with legal mechanisms; the directness of James Meredith's action and the violence of reaction surprised them as much as anyone else and showed that the assimilation is far from complete.

Harvard Least Surprised

Cowan observed that college campus groups concerned with integration might have been surprised least of all by "white militancy and black militancy." A pluralistic society like Harvard's, he suggested, would reproduce, and thus prepare students for, the tensions of confrontation with race problems outside of college.

Butler said that separatism should be an "increase of race identification" rather than racial isolation; the Negro should transfer his primary allegiance to hierarchies which can improve his status. He supported this brand of separatism because of what he called "failures" of current integration movements. These touch "only twenty per cent" of the Negro community, and the apparent progress represented by, for example, desegregation in public buildings does nothing to change the American's basic attitude toward integration. "Individual inertia remains," Butler said, "in spite of acceptance of the hypothesis and legality of integration."

The non-legal problems are still with us, according to Butler, and likewise the Negro inferiority complex, a legacy of the American society's repression of Negroes. He suggested that Negroes at all levels should have "automatic" membership" in one mass group with the hierarchical leadership needed to assert stronger racial identity.

Negro planners must come to terms with the Black Muslims, Butler warned, and in addition re-educate the whole American community about the Negro contribution to American and world culture.