Confused Crusade

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People glumly reported last week that its membership had declined by 15,000 from 390,000 in 1960.

The drop, said Herbert Hill, labor secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., was mostly among unemployed Negroes unable to pay dues ($2 a year). That was certainly one factor--but another at least equally important was a split among leading Negro civil rights groups, with the N.A.A.C.P. cast in a "conservative" role that many young Negroes find increasingly irksome.

"Parade, Protest, Sit-In." Southern Negro college students particularly are fed up with the slow, legalistic approach of the N.A.A.C.P. A segregation law is often declared invalid in the courtroom, after patient argument by the N.A.A.C.P., only to remain in force in practice. To fight segregation in their own way, young Negroes have organized themselves into a federation called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ("Snick'' for short). Snick is led by a Chicagoan, James Forman, 33. It provides the shock troops of the civil rights front, organizes sit-ins, holds demonstrations and boycotts anti-Negro stores.

Prestige among Snick's tough and tenacious young Negroes is often measured by the number of times a member has gone to jail on civil rights charges. In the end it is the N.A.A.C.P. that supports Snick by paying most of its legal fees. But while he praises the courage of Snick's members, N.A.A.C.P. Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins deplores their tactics. "They don't take orders from anybody; they don't consult anybody. They operate in a kind of vacuum; parade, protest, sit-in. How far up the road does that get you? When the headlines are gone, the issues still have to be settled in court."

Man in the Middle. Standing somewhere between the N.A.A.C.P. and Snick is the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., 33. A persuasive, emotional speaker, King won national fame in 1956 as the leader of the successful effort to integrate the buses of Montgomery, Ala. King, an advocate of the Gandhian technique of nonviolence, is head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a diffuse collection of some 65 local civil rights groups in the South.

King was once the idol of young Negroes, but now many are beginning to turn against him. They charge that King is far more interested in making speeches across the U.S. than in head-on action.

King is also accused of status seeking. He recently moved his Southern Conference headquarters into a predominantly white office building in Atlanta, where he puts up with segregated toilets and restaurants; in contrast. Snick's Atlanta headquarters is a windowless cubicle in an all-Negro district. King began to lose status with young Negroes last May when he failed to take a Freedom Ride into Mississippi. He lost even more last month at a civil rights demonstration in Albany, Ga., when he was taken off to jail vowing that he would stay behind bars indefinitely, then meekly posted bond and went home two days later.

In Atlanta, Martin Luther King recently discussed his problems in lofty terms. "I don't want to talk about my personal suffering, but I've been in jail as much as anyone in the movement. I think it would be a big mistake to try--as some civil rights leaders want to--to throw the students out of the movement. The little conflicts are inevitable. They arise as part of a shift of emphasis from the legal area to nonviolent direct action. These students are helping to deliver the rights that have been declared. We must overlook their impatience."

CORE & Crackpots. Adding to the dissidence is the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), primarily a Northern organization of whites and Negroes that makes only occasional forays into the South under the leadership of James Farmer. It organized the first Freedom Ride from Washington to New Orleans, but withdrew after mob violence in Birmingham and let Snick's dedicated campaigners ride on to Jackson, Miss. The group suffers fragmented leadership and a membership described by an N.A.A.C.P. leader as "a bunch of loonybirds and crackpots."

With the dramatic increase in the number of educated Negroes, it is scarcely surprising that more shadings and varieties of "Negro opinion" begin to emerge. The splits are a subject of concern to many of the Negro leaders, but in a sense they are another sign that the U.S. Negro is coming into his own.

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