How It Feels

As the seven students from the University of California's Berkeley campus began their program in the big A.F.L. Labor Temple in Oakland, a baldheaded truck driver in the audience snorted: "College kids. Bet they tell us how to save the world. I wish I'd stayed home and watched TV."

The truck driver was probably not alone in his wish, for the program of the evening was anything but light entertainment. Each of the seven students belonged to what the group calls a "minority"--and each had come to describe, in a highly personal way, how it feels to be a member of a minority.

"My name," said one 20-year-old junior, "is Harry Brock. I'm a Catholic." Then he went on to describe his conversion and what it had meant to him ("It's a wonderful feeling when I go to Mass every Sunday to know that 400 million other people are worshiping as I am--united as one body, worshiping one God"). After him came Sophomore Judy Sklar. who bluntly announced: "I am an American and a Jew and I am very proud to be both." "What does the Negro want?" asked Negro Graduate Student Nathan Huggins. "If there is any single answer I think it lies in the definition of the word dignity." And so it went through other speeches and an hour-long question period afterward. Much to his own surprise, the baldheaded truck driver stayed the evening out.

A Good World. This year, students on campuses all over the U.S. have put on such shows. Though nominally under a national organization called Panel of Americans, they operate autonomously within their own colleges or universities. Since the first panel started at U.C.L.A. in 1942, the movement has spread to a score of campuses, is now a permanent part of the academic scene. Its purpose, says Los Angeles' Adaline ("Gramma") Guenther, who founded the first group, is not so much to-- preach as to inspire. "We merely offer something for the audience to think about. We appeal to their conscience. We say in effect, 'This is a good world, but you must make it so.' "

In the last seven years the panel at the University of Cincinnati has made more than 80 appearances, spoken to well over 80,000 people. When it began, the city was still seething with tension between its Negroes and the new wartime population of Southern workers. The various panels have spoken at clubs, plants and schools, but some of their best work has been done at the university itself. When this year's chairman, Roman Catholic Ann Grieme, first arrived at Cincinnati and unpacked her statue of the Virgin, a classmate mocked: "What are you trying to do, make a church out of this place?" Chairman Grieme hears no more such talk at the university.

Crime & Wolf Whistles. The Western Reserve panelists have faced the usual questions: "Why is so much crime committed by Negroes?", "Why don't Negroes fix up their homes?" and thousands of others. In Detroit, the Wayne University panelists have made 338 appearances, have been kept on stage answering questions for as long as four hours. The Purdue panel has grown to 40 members, has done everything on its programs from singing a Jewish hymn to describing how it feels for a Negro to cross the Mason-Dixon line and suddenly have to shift to the back of the bus. The panels' accomplishments, however, cannot be boiled down to statistics; they are really nothing more than the accumulation of individual scenes. From U.C.L.A., for instance, a group of girls once had to face an audience of steelworkers. As Adaline Guenther tells the story:

"I was worried at first. The men were in a party mood and there were plenty of wolf whistles when the girls went on the platform. But the girls were so effective that, at the end of the meeting, the men rose to applaud. The head of the group said he had never seen the steelworkers rise for anybody but Philip Murray. But the best came when one of the Negro union members came up to one of the girls and said, 'This is the first time I've ever felt like Joe Smith, American.' "

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