Reconciliation Through Anger

For the first time since the '30s, Negro field hands are striking on the cotton plantations of western Mississippi, where the pay is $3 a day and the hours are dawn to dusk. Ardently promoting the strike and helping to organize a union of the fieldworkers is the Delta Ministry, set up by the National Council of Churches last September to work for social and economic justice for Negroes and achieve a "reconciliation" of the races in Mississippi.

So far, the reconciling process has led only to bitter antagonism--at least in Greenville, center of the strike. There, a ministry preacher tells field hands that "the white man is your enemy," and the Delta Project has managed to alienate not merely unswervable segregationists but white and Negro moderates as well.

Class Struggle? "These professionals do not want change through reform," says Hodding Carter's Delta Democrat-Times. "They want revolutionary change of a kind which goes far beyond the question of an equal chance for all men." Middle-class Negroes, many of them veteran members of the N.A.A.C.P., charge that the ministry and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), are conspiring to oust them from leadership of the civil rights movement.

Both whites and Negro leaders feel that ministry officials have shown little interest in working with the community toward their common goals. This spring, the ministry derided a pledge, signed by a number of white and Negro civic leaders, to provide equal job opportunities. A note of class-struggle belligerency has crept into the ministry's words as the strike has spread. Baptist Minister Laurice Walker, a staff member of the project, whips up plantation workers by denouncing "the man in the big white house taking food out of your wife's and your children's mouths and the clothes off your back."

"The Vital First Step." Delta Ministry officials argue that no reconciliation is possible until the Negroes have the means to take charge of their own destiny. "We are not a conduit between the Negro and the white communities," says Rev. Arthur C. Thomas, director of the ministry. "We are trying to enable the two groups to come together with dignity and respect for one another. What's needed now is the vital first step--building up the Negro community so that the two can come together in this manner."

The ministry's efforts to build up the Negro community include other projects that stir up less heat--and have sometimes been set up with the blessing of Mississippi whites. Operating on an annual budget of $260,000, about one-fifth provided by the World Council of Churches, the ministry's nine full-time employees have organized relief, health and educational programs in several Mississippi towns, including a civil rights training center in Edwards, and is helping to set up preschool programs for poor children in four communities under Project Head Start (see EDUCATION).

The ministry workers in Greenville are prepared to carry on without the help of white moderates, who, they charge, have done nothing to prevent plantation owners from evicting strikers from their homes. They also dismiss the middle-class Negroes, who, they say, are primarily interested in their own privileges. Ministry officials talk with something of a martyr's air. "It's sort of the history of the Christian church," says Thomas. "Initially it was a group that met in caves and had members thrown to lions. We've forgotten the purpose of the church, which is to be God's people serving those in need."

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