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It is something resembling this revolutionary mystique that Stokely Carmichael and a few others are trying to impose on the Amerian Negro movement. Mixed with the anarchical slogans of "Burn, baby, burn!" and "Tear down the courthouses," there is a calculated conviction that violence is above all else a language, and that this language, through fear, will persuade white society to give things to the Negro that it would not otherwise give. Says Lester Mc-Kinney, Washington head of S.N.C.C.: "In the minds of the people, history has proved that any meaningful social change has come through a bloody revolution." Many Negro leaders point to the violent tactics of the labor movement in gaining its ends. Even Negro Sociologist Kenneth Clark, no advocate of black power, calls violence "the cutting edge of justice." Social change for Negroes is moving faster than at any time in 100 years; for that very reason, Negroes were able to decide that things were still moving too slowly. The riots, as the President's Crime Commission report puts it, are a way to "let America know."
But the language of violence is crude and dangerous for those who use it. As Hannah Arendt notes, the Western tradition is full of violence and its legend seems to say, "whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide"; yet she also points out that neither wars nor revolutions are "ever completely determined by violence. Where violence rules absolutely, everything and everybody must fall silent." Violence is not power. In the last analysis it is an admission of failure, a desire for a magical shortcut, an act of despair. Shameful though conditions in the Negro ghettos are, violence is not really the only language left in which to appeal for improvement.
Dealing with violence, the U.S. faces several tasks, none easy. One is to provide more intelligent, effective law enforcement and, through legislation, to do away with the dangerous unfettered sale of firearms. Another is nothing less than the elimination of the ghetto and what it stands for: an increasingly disaffected population. Though probably there will always be violence—out of anger or greed, love or madness—large-scale, socially significant violence is usually caused by authentic grievances, and the U.S. should be able to narrow if not eliminate these. But that leaves, finally, the individual flash or explosion of violence; and to deal with this, man must learn more about man—the mystery that can turn creative energy into brute force, a peaceful crowd into a mob, and an ineffectual weakling into a mass murderer.