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A working-class father who may have sacrificed for years in order to send his son to college cannot remotely comprehend why middle-class youths cry that "the system" is rotten. To him, they are all spoiled brats, profane, obnoxious, unwashed, promiscuous, to whom everything has been offered and from whom nothing has been demanded. To the more affluent, youthful rebellion represents a rejection of principles that have stood the test for generations. The fact that student discontent is an international phenomenon and has been more violent elsewhere—Ja pan, France and currently Mexico, for instance—is cold comfort.
The U.S. was born in revolution, but it was a revolution of Whigs against the Crown rather than one of Jacobins against the establishment. Tom Paine did not remain a national hero in the young Republic, and what is thought of as democracy today was some time in coming after independence. The radical has always offended most Americans, even if many of his ideas were eventually accepted.
The Black Militants
Disconcerting though the hippies and yippies may be, their contribution to the present malaise is minor compared with Negro militance and ghetto riots. From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, most Americans believed that justice was being done to the Negroes, that perhaps the American dilemma was soluble after all. Through presidential orders, civil rights acts and court decisions, the Negro was being propelled upward in legal status. Through generally rising prosperity and later the antipoverty program, the Negro appeared to be making economic progress as well. There were more black faces over white collars, more Negroes going to college, more owning their homes, more being admitted to clubs and fraternities and the ranks of government.
If to the blacks the more still seemed to be very few, it was reasonable to assume that evolution would take care of that. If the white man's income was still rising faster than the black's, Negroes were counseled to have patience. (In 1947, the gap between white and black median family income was $2,174; 19 years later, on the basis of constant dollars, the difference had grown to $3,036.) When brutal opposition to Negro progress persisted in the persons of the Bull Connors, and black children we're dynamited to death in church, most Americans were shocked that such things could still happen. But they trusted Martin Luther King to keep his folks nonviolent. When blacks sang We Shall Overcome, the last word of the refrain was "someday."
Yet, for all the symbols of progress, the economic and social pathology of urban ghettos worsened. "Someday" became "Freedom Now." Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael decided that the Negro should no longer obey The Man's timetable or believe in his good will. They echoed Isaiah: "What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces and grind the faces of the poor?"
One by one, the ghettos exploded. These spasms of violence were accompanied by ever more urgent demands upon the white community from such moderate Negro leaders as King, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph, who needed concrete accomplishments