He also said he liked a plan, first proposed by Carmichael, to ask white merchants to leave heavily Negro North Philadelphia, boycott those who don't, and then have Negroes take over the stores. That, of course, would require considerable capital at the beginning.

Even a major black political party in Philadelphia is not an impossibility, he said (A rather puny one has already been organized at the Freedom Library. Its one candidate this fall, for the State Senate, has no chance of winning.)

Palmer can accept the contradictions because he knows the movement is young. "I tell you black will win out," he said. "It's in the recesses of black people, in their guts, souls, hearts." He is also sure that he and other black radicals are carrying on the work of Malcolm X.

The Rev. Paul Washington, a Negro Episcopalian, talked about Malcolm at one of Palmer's rallies. "He performed a kind of miracle as he spoke," Washington said. "When he spoke of the black man, instead of my being humiliated, I actually felt proud. I felt like I was somebody rather than nobody."

Washington is not only a prominent clergyman, but also a member of the city's Commission on Human Relations and a trustee of its Community College -- the kind of leader Dr. King's former aide praised before the Urban League. Yet here he was admitting that it took Malcolm X and black radicalism to make him feel like somebody.

"I know what black means in this country," he went on. "It means inferiority, it means slums, it means slime. But when this man said black and when I heard him say it, I felt like a man."