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Some experts see a possible direction for Negro protest in the history of the once brutally violent American labor movement. In the late 19th century, depressions triggered virtual revolutions when employers cut wages, imported scabs, tried to break unions. Strikes were then bitterly repressed by company cops or state militia; federal troops were called in often. The bloody railroad strikes of 1877 killed 150 people; the Rocky Mountain mining wars at the turn of the century killed 198, including a Governor. In Pennsylvania, a secret band of Irish miners called the Molly Maguires assassinated bosses in a Viet Cong-style attempt to win better working conditions. The Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) lauded and used terror tactics and in many areas were in turn murdered and mutilated. All in all, several thousand people died in labor disputes before the movement finally won its point in 1935, when federal law forced employers to recognize unions and engage in collective bargaining—dramatic proof that the U.S. can create a legal system for resolving even the most desperate have-not grievances.
Unfortunately, Negroes lack the organization and specific grievances that make labor disputes negotiable within a framework of rational group conflict. The basic Negro grievance is emotional: the white attitude toward Negroes. King tried to shame whites by nonviolence, by Negro suffering. The tragedy is that his remarkable success also produced white backlash, black militancy and a kind of moral vacuum in which hapless white police are left to cope with mindless ghetto explosions.
One ground for optimism is the remarkable effect of the President's riot commission report, which, ironically if necessarily, taught many police to be nonviolent and hence more effective in handling the post-King riots. Yet this advance also has the very disquieting effect of seeming to condone looters; and violence rewarded would seem to promise more of it, especially among the guilt-free kids who take it as a lark. Even grimmer is the psychological import of the King assassination: his killer, however twisted his mind, clearly felt that he had a mandate for murder. The appalling result suggests that all too many unstable Americans unconsciously identify with a kind of avenging Western hero, and believe that one man with one bullet can and should change history.
Help the Other Fellow Survive
The U.S. must utterly reject this grammar of violence—just as it must urgently enact effective laws against the dangerous, absurdly outdated sale of firearms to all comers. If Americans seriously hope to pacify their own country, they must also do nothing less than abolish ghettos and what they breed: the hopelessness that incites violence. Above all, the U.S. must provide the jobless with the most elemental source of self-respect—meaningful work.
Beyond the ghetto, though, there will probably always be violence—out of anger, greed, insanity—until people are taught as children how to master the art of diverting pent-up aggressions into constructive action. At this stage of human knowledge, every school in the land ought to be teaching psychology as one of its most crucial subjects. Today, every parent who cares about peace ought to be guiding his children to militant enthusiasm for some humane cause, the most beneficent outlet for aggressions.