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But moderate civil rights leaders think the antiriot bill is likely to deepen pessimism among Negroes. "Too many people," said Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, at its annual meeting in Boston last week, "want to make the Negro 'behave' but do not want to give him justice. They think that riot prevention consists of crackdown laws and crackdown police."
Of the bill's author, Florida's Republican Representative William Cramer, Wilkins said with scorn: "He and his colleagues have great wrestlings with their souls and wordy parliamentary debates in considering, trimming, altering or rejecting a civil rights bill. But they have no trouble lining out punishment for alleged rioting. When they refuse to enact legislation such as the civil rights bill of 1967, they are creating the atmosphere in which an outbreak of violence can occur."
Addressing the N.A.A.C.P. convention in a similar vein, Massachusetts' Republican Senator Edward Brooke held that ghetto violence can be traced to the failure at all levels of government to respond to the aspirations of moderates. "More and more Negroes," said Brooke, "have come to believe that progress is possible only through militant action, that moderation has failed to accomplish enough to satisfy the objectives of the civil rights movement. Black Power is a response to white irresponsibility."
Many whites have argued that enough civil rights legislation has been enacted for now, and that the time has come to digest it and try to make it work effectively. Brooke disagrees. "To stand still is to regress," he warned. "The word 'wait' engenders hate. If Congress, out of fear or anger, continues to choose the path of inaction, the lightning of violence will strike again and again."
Long Haunt. A hyperactive Congress is of course no guarantee against the sort of violence that Brooke was talking about. Watts blew sky-high in the midst of the greatest legislative activity on civil rights in a century. City after city has become the scene of rioting after—not before—the enactment of a whole spate of Great Society programs. To a degree, the programs themselves are to blame: they have awakened the Negro to what is available in America's opulent society and whetted his appetite for more. And, as Charles Silberman noted in his Crisis in Black and White: "The Negroes' impatience, bitterness, and anger are likely to increase the closer they come to full equality." In his desire for "more," the Negro has joined the rest of the crowd. But in his realization that he has a terribly long way to go before he will have as much as most whites —in jobs, in homes and in schooling he has become social tinder, easily kindled.
Last week the spark just happened to alight on Newark, for reasons that were not fully foreseeable beforehand nor easily explicable afterward. The city had seemed to be coping reasonably well with its problems. No objective analysis would have justified a prediction that Newark would be the scene of one of the biggest, bloodiest race riots of U.S. history. The event will—and should—haunt Newark, New Jersey, and the United States for a long time to come.