"I hear we should go to taverns and nightclubs to get the masses," a former aide to Martin Luther King told an Urban League convention in Philadelphia this summer. His audience, black and white alike, roared with laughter.

"Why should we?" he continued. "The people who are marching come from our great churches and our organizations. We should work with them, then out to the community." The audience applauded.

Some 20 blocks away from the Sheraton Hotel where the former King aide spoke is one of the taverns he referred to. Its doors are usually fastened back. The voices and the jukebox mingle with the noise outside. The bar's dark interior seems just an extension of the sidewalk, a part of the neighborhood.

Walter Palmer, a 31-year-old medical technician, knows most of the men who frequent the tavern. When Palmer walked in one Saturday in August, a reporter waiting for him across the street could see, through the doorways, the reception he got. A handful of men rushed over and surrounded him with talk and laughter. Others took their beers with them and listened.

There was too much excitement for the bar to contain. Small knots of people talked their way to the doorsteps and the curbs. Men walking by, even one man driving by, stopped to be part of it.

Looking for Excitement

To Palmer, the only hope for the Negro is not the churches, not the organizations, and certainly not the Urban League, but that excitement --that response he gets when he talks about what it is like to be black in this country and what it should be like.

"Everything we've been taught about this system is wrong, inaccurate," Palmer says, so he and a number of others in Philadelphia have begun providing their own instruction to their community.

Palmer (who feels the term "Negro" is degrading and uses "Afro-American" or "black" instead) did much of the planning for three "Afro-American rallies" during the summer. At the rallies, there was dancing, poetry, speeches, all equally inflammatory. The last one drew 2,000 people. It was supposed to be held in a church, but there wasn't enough room, so everyone moved out to the only place in North Philadelphia where there was enough -- the street. The rally took five hours and traffic was detoured around it.

Also, in fewer numbers and less conspicuously, Palmer recruited teachers, mothers and teen-agers to do his sort of work -- day-in, day-out work in the Negro community. Palmer and other workers teach that there is a black community to which black men and women can be proud to belong. The way Palmer presents it, most of the lesson is history. He recited a typical lecture as he sat hunched over his hospital office, his chin on his hands so that they formed a parentheses for his goatee:

"George Washington had slaves. His life was saved once by a little black girl. Thomas Jefferson, though he drafted the Declaration of Independence, had slaves. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation from economic motives..."

It went on, sometimes penetrating, sometimes petty, sometimes ridiculous. But it was impressive for the purpose behind it: to write a history for a history-less community, and to give it a sense of place and a sense of dignity.

When We Were Kings

And behind the history of the black man in America was the sketchier but far more glorious history in Africa, "when we were kings."

"When I am told that the 30 to 35 million blacks in America are a minority," Palmer told a rally early in the summer, "I think of our ties to 310 million Africans. Then I ask, who's the minority?"