Youth Will Be Served

As the Negro congregation streamed 800 strong from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery one day last week and marched toward Alabama's Capitol, 5,000 whites waited in the street. A race riot was inches away. Seething in the crowd was anger built up in the past fortnight by a Negro sit-in at a segregated lunch counter and a protest march and prayer meeting at the Capitol. Four hundred city, county and state police quickly moved between marchers and whites, dispersed them by threatening to turn on fire hoses. Violence was averted--for the moment. From tense and angry Montgomery, a deeply troubled city in the very heart of the deeply troubled South, TIME Correspondent Spencer Davidson last week reported the brand-new look of the passive resistance movement spearheaded by Negro youth in 48 cities in eleven Southern states: The young Negro, particularly the young college Negro, is now leading the battle for equal rights. And unless he is tossed into jail and onto a road gang, he is going to lead the battle for a long time to come. There are many reasons.

For one, the times are in his favor; the Administration is battling for his rights (and his vote) energetically and he knows it. But he intends to do something about it himself, and he can because he has some important new qualifications. Among them:

Lack of Fear. "Today's young Negro is a far cry from his grandfather and father," says a white resident of Montgomery, born in New York and educated in the South. "The older Negro people in the South were brought up in rural areas, lived there all their lives and soon learned that the white man had absolute control over them. They were afraid to do anything. Today's students have never had a chance to learn that fear. They have been raised in bigger towns and cities, have traveled more, have had more contact with the world. They aren't afraid any more."

Independence. The college Negro is generally away from home, safe from a situation in which retribution for his sins would be visited on his family. He has economic freedom. "Adults," say a Montgomery Negro leader, "have a debt on their house. They need their paycheck. It isn't easy for them to agitate for freedom. But it is for these college boys and girls."

Education. Says Bernard Lee, 24, one of nine Negro students expelled from Montgomery's Alabama State College for Negroes for participating in a sit-in (37 of his classmates were arrested for picketing in protest): "My grandfather had only prayer to help him. I have prayer and education. We have been educated until we cannot adjust to the Southern way of life. We have to move, to work with the white man until we become not a minority but a part of the whole." Adds Leon Rice, another expelled student : "Perhaps we deserve more than our parents did because we have been more educated. As soon as they serve us, and we've finished eating, then we'll go across the street and start on the public library." As in Georgia, Mississippi and Virginia, which hastily passed harsh anti-trespassing laws after the outbreak of sit-ins, Alabama's response to new Negro tactics ultimately comes to heavy-handed justice and last-resort fire hoses. If Negroes should launch an economic boycott of downtown stores, along the lines of their successful boycott of segregated buses four years ago, Montgomery's whites would hit back hard. Yet, short of closing every Negro college, the South cannot crush the challenge posed by young Negro college men and women. The old answers will not silence the new spokesmen.

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