The Petal paper. [volume] (Petal, Miss.) 1953-19??, 1959-10-22
page EHREn

These are the people who only
three hundred years ago lived
beside one of the largest bodies
of inland water on earth and
never thought of sail, who year
ly had to move by whole villages
and tribes from famine and pes
thence and enemies without once
thinking of the wheel; yet in
three hundred years they have
become skilled artisans n d
craftsmen capable of holding
their own in culture of techno-
cracy.
The people who only three
hundred years ago were eating
the carrion in the tropical jungles
have produced the Phi Beta
Kappas and the Doctor Bunches
and the Carvers and the Booker
Washingtons and the poets and
musicians. They have yet to pro-
duce a Fuchs or Rosenberg or
Gold or Burgess or Maclean or
Hiss, and for every Negro Com
muist or fedllow traveller there
are thousand white ones.
The Bunches and Washingtons
and Carvers and the musicians
and the poets, who were not just
good men and women but good
teachers too, taught him the
Negro - by precept and exam
pie what lot of our white
people have not learned yet: that
to gain equality, one must de-
serve it, and to deserve equality,
one must understand what it is:
that there is no such thing as
equality per Sc, but only equality
to-: equal right and opportunity
to make the best one can of ones
life within ones capacity and
capability, without fear of in
justice or oppression or violence.
If we had given him this equ-
atty ninety or fifty or even ten
years ago, there would have been
no Supreme Court ruling about
segregation in 1854.
But we didn't. We dared not; it
is our Southern white mans
shame that in our present econ
omy the Negro must not have
economic equality; our double
shame that we fear that giving
him more social equality will
jeopardize his present economic
status; our triple shame that even
then, to justify our stand, we
must becloud the issue with the
bugaboo of miscegenation. What
commentary that the one re-
manning place on earth where
the white man can flee and have
his interrupted blood protected
and defended by law, is in Africa
- Africa: the source and origin
of the threat whose present pre-
sence in America will have
driven the white man to flee it..
Soon now all Of us ~ not just
Southerners nor even just Amer
leans, but all people who are still
free and want to remain so -
are going to have to make a
choice, lest the next (and last)
conformation we face will be-
not Communists against anti-
Communists, but simply the re-
naming handful of white people
against the massed myriads Of all
| the people on earth who are not
white. We will have to choose
not between color nor race nor
religion nor between East and
West either, but simply between
being slaves and being free. And
we will have to choose completes
lv and for good; the time Is all
ready past now when we can
/ choose little of each, little OF
both. We can choose state OF
/ slavedom, and if we are power
I full enough to be among the top
two or three or ten, we can have
a certain amount of license -
until someone more powerful
rises and has us machine gunned
against a cellar wall.
But we cannot choose freedom
established on a hierarchy of de-
erees of freedom, on a caste sys-
tenn of equality like military