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Negro Militants, Jewish Liberals & the Unions
- Abstract
MUCH OF THE civil rights progress that has been achieved in recent years can be attributed to the effective cooperation of Jewish and Negro anti-discrimination agencies. These groups, together with the support of key trade union officials, are largely responsible for the passage of fair employment legislation in eighteen states. They are the effective force behind the drive for open occupancy in housing; they have backed attempts to implement the U. S. Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision; and they have given their time, money, and moral support to the students involved in the sit-in movement. Yet the fact is that the Negro-Jewish civil rights coalition now faces disruption, a dissolution that seems symptomatic of the worsening relations between white and Negro liberals in general. The winds of change sweeping Africa are also stirring the surfaces of Negro life in America; they are setting events in motion which seem to be taking the American Negro into increasingly militant and uncharted courses of action. What white liberals often regard as “progress,” Negroes increasingly have come to reject as mere “tokenism,” and correspondingly many white liberals have begun to regard Negro militancy as “racist” self-seeking.
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