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After Brown dismissed recent civil rights laws as efforts to "placate, just keep the niggers cool," he and Dunmeyer suggested instead more direct action: wiping the ghetto dweller's criminal record clean so that he might apply the mathematical skills he uses in the numbers racket to operating a computer, or apply the business acumen developed in dope peddling to running "Goldberg's Haberdashery." Negroes, said Brown, "really are not as dumb as we look." When Ribicoff protested that nobody had impugned Negro intelligence, Brown assured him: "Senator, this was not aimed at you, because I think you are beautiful, baby."
Crisis of Optimism. Another witness calling for a more direct approach to ghetto problems was the Rev. Henry J. Browne, 47, a white Roman Catholic priest and community leader on New York's racially mixed West Side, who urged Government leaders to listen to the "vibrant people off the streets"—people like Dunmeyer—instead of being bound by impersonal statistical surveys, a practice that he likened to "contemplating your own navel and trying to come up with the condition of your appendix." Also testifying, Negro Author Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), 52, seemed to be speaking for another generation when he wistfully described Harlem as an exciting, often elegant neighborhood where "the body of Negro myth and legend thrives." But Ellison was very much to the point in saying that many Negroes want to "transform the Harlems of their country" rather than move to the suburbs. Because the transformation is not taking place fast enough, however, a "crisis of optimism" has resulted. After all, said Ellison, cultural pressures that make other Americans "restless, mobile, daring," have the same effect on Negroes: "You see little Negro Batmen flying around Harlem just as you see white ones flying around Sutton Place."
Graphic Despair. Before the subcommittee adjourned until next year, it a1 so heard Eugene Hill, an anti-poverty worker in Albuquerque, utter the most unsettling words of the hearings. In testimony that involved not Negroes but Mexican-Americans, Hill told of an embittered, unemployed Mexican-American who, upon learning of John F. Kennedy's assassination, exclaimed: "Good! When do they get Johnson and the rest of 'em?" When the man's wife protested, he replied: "What have they ever done for me or you or our kids?" The episode showed, more graphically than any other, the despair, the helplessness and the hatred that the poor sometimes feel for the society that keeps them that way.