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White "Liberals" In Black Organizations: How Much Conflict?

M. A. W.

But here, too, one encounters ambivalence. Mothers for Adequate Welfare (MAW) is a group of Roxbury mothers on welfare. A Mrs. Bland, staff worker for MAW, said that members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), many of them white college students (described by Carmichael as the "kids who go to Europe one summer and to Alabama the next"), were the ones who got MAW started. "I wouldn't trade them for anything in the world," she said. "We don't care whether you're blue, purple, or brown with yellow polka dots, we want you to work with us if you are sincere."

The community indeed seems split. Carl F. Senna, at the Roxbury Community Council, said, for example, that a lot of people don't agree with Carmichael's solution because "Roxbury is integrated--about 65 per cent Negro and 35 per cent white." There is a division, he said, between the Negroes who have lived in Roxbury for about 40 years and who are well established, and those who have just moved into Roxbury during the last decade. The newcomers, according to Senna, are more likely to identify with "Black Power" and groups that exclude whites; the older inhabitants tend to be liberal but not radical in their views--they believe in integration.

Some also say that Negroes do some jobs better, because they are Negroes, and that whites do other jobs better because they are white. Senna mentioned famliy visits as an example "There are just some places where a white would not be as effective as a Negro." On the other hand, Mrs. Anne Briggs, a white staff worker at the American Friends Service Committee, said that she was often able to work better with the "White System" than Negroes. "When you're dealing with a white landlord, he's more apt to give you a sympathetic hearing if you're white. I never heard or had it intimated to me that because I am white my work is neither wanted nor appreciated here."

Whites and Negroes often face strong conflicts when they work with each other. Mrs. Alice Ansara, director of the reading program at the Urban School has advocated that Roxbury high school students make the effort to help themselves by coming out of the ghettos during the summers to take classes at the Urban School's evening study program. This is a controversial move, because many of the more radical leaders feel that students should receive their education in their own neighborhood and from their own people. Carmichael, when he came to lecture at Harvard, said that the brightest Negro students were "selling out" to offers from big name schools and Universities like Harvard when they should be helping to uphold the standards in the Negro schools. What happens only too often, Carmichael believes, is that these bright students go on to serve "the white establishment instead of the Negro ghettos."

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Thus when Mrs. Ansara says that she thinks it is good for Negroes to get out of the ghetto for a while to further their education at an integrated school, she is going against what the more radical members of the movement prescribe.

"The ghetto exists within the larger community, and its problems, however unique, are problems of the total community as well," Mrs. Ansara said. "No individual group can solve the problems of the community."

By over-emphasizing the importance of community work, radical civil rights groups risk isolating the community to the point where it is a self-contained unit which perpetuates some of the worst aspects of the ghetto, Mrs. Ansara said. "I deplore the distorted emphasis which has been put on people 'doing things for themselves;' we must reach out to help each other."

Lee Daniels, a Roxbury resident who attends Boston Latin and who took courses at the Urban School this summer, said that although most of the teachers were white, "it didn't bother me there; it's different from the Boston School System. It doesn't seem to matter whether your teacher is black or white. They're interested in teaching you something," Daniels said. It is also good to get out of Roxbury and see what other places are like, Daniels, who is applying to Harvard, added.

Urban School

Phillips Brooks House, which had a Book Exposure Program last year operating within the Boston School System in Roxbury, faces Daniels' dilemma in reverse. PBH will expand the program again this year and re-name it the Roxbury Education Program. Co-chairmen of REP, Hayden A. Duggan '68 and David B. Palley '68, hope to have about 90 volunteers who will distribute books to school children in the first through sixth grades and work with them one day a week.

While PBH workers have until now been gleaned from the Harvard un- dergraduates, Duggan and Palley plan to find twenty local volunteers to work on REP with them this year.

Carmichael would be the last to approve of their plans. From what he said on his speaking tour of Boston, REP would represent for him the epitome of what Roxbury needs least: a bunch of white college students projecting the wrong image on young Negro students.

Both Duggan and Palley agree. "We want to work ourselves out of a job.

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