Unless Negroes understand their own history, and actively affirm their own race and their black nationality, they will always be trying unconsciously to deny it, Palmer believes. They will never lose, he says, a sense of shame in being black, a feeling of inferiority.

And, of course, be believes the corollary. He insists that Negroes can be taught to lose that sense of shame.

To aid instruction he has carefully built up a small collection of books behind a storefront-type window on Ridge Avenue in North Philadelphia.

Above the window, two black cardboard hands hold up a cardboard globe. Cut-out letters below identify the building as the "BPUM Freedom Library."

BPUM is the Black Peoples Unity Movement, a catch-all for a number of plans that have been put together in the building since the Northern Student Movement set up shop there two years ago, in the wake of the North Philadelphia riots.

The walls inside are papered with the buff, broad-lined sheets that take any Philadelphian back to his first days in school. The printing on them, broad and labored, is by six and seven-year-olds. "AFRO-AMERICANS ARE BLACK," several of them read. "I AM AN AFRO-AMERICAN. I AM BLACK."

A small number of teachers work there, including a few mothers from the neighborhood and some teenagers. Palmer is happy with the growth of the library, but admits that it isn't yet attracting Negroes in large numbers.

"I think we have mass appeal, especially in our identification with African things. But, let's face it, Roy Wilkins (head of the NAACP) has mass appeal, too. Sure, it's easier to go to Hollywood than to a dirty place on Ridge avenue. We're unglamorous. He's building values which the system has built in."

But what are the values that Palmer is trying to build in? What are the sources of black pride? In large part, it turns out, black pride begins with hostility to what is white. "Look what we've got--jazz, spirituals, the blues," he said. "Name me one original thing that's come from white Protestant culture here, something that doesn't derive from Europe."

After an awkward silence, he clinched it. "The only thing I can think of," he said, "is ice cream."

Palmer adds to his formula for black pride a series of don'ts." He reeled some of them off to a cheering audience in a North Philadelphia church:

"The greatest mistake black people have made is always apologizing and begging and appeasing. There ain't nothing wrong with being black.

"Don't give me a whole lot of remedial programs that don't have nothing to do with closing the gap."

"Don't give me five or ten years of education to make me mediocre. I got no use for it. I'd rather be a drop-out."

But the suspicion of white men and their programs has always been there, Palmer says; he is only voicing it. He says that when he was younger, he did more than suspect white men. He hated them.