Armah argued that the issue should not be obscured but made clear; accepted on its own merits. There is no question that he, if anyone, was most qualified to argue the case before the Administration. (Currently, a novel of his is being read by Houghton and Mifflin.) Wiley remembers how Armah could "tease, chide, and coerce within the space of a few minutes. The experience of talking with him left many quite shaken." The question for AAAAS came to be one of "On whose terms will we be recognized?" Armah was unable to communicate the new concept to the Administration.

"Too Hung Up"

In the end the Administration and not Afro, defined the nature of the organization. The idea was too new, Negro student too perplexed, 'too hung up on integration," as Williams puts it, for the concept to be really understood. Williams savs that over now, four years later and after the Black Power controversy, does he really understand the new formulation.

Anochie, angered by arguments which were to him irrevelant, said. "The big club (used by thoughtless whites) to smash such worthy endeavors (such as organizing the Negro potential) is always the same: frantic charges of 'reverse racism,' 'black supremacy,' and 'black paranoia. . . . A sixteenth century English writer (Gerrard Winstanley) once said, 'Everyone talks of freedom, but there are few that act for freedom, and the actors for freedom are oppressed by the talkers and verbal professors of freedom.' However I am confindent that the university and campus will come to realize what a meritorious group the AAAAS is, provided they stop looking at us with a jaundiced eye, and stopped turning everything we do or say from side to side in order to find the monster which we must have concealed somewhere."

Was Anochie right? Today, Dean Monro, a member at the time of the Faculty Committee on Student Activities, asks himself "If I were a Negro student at Harvard would I be a member of AAAAS And the answer is 'Yes.'"

Dean Monro says that AAAAS, today, performs three valuable functions: it provides the Negro student with a place where "he can take off his shoes and be like people." Second, "It's clear that the Negro people have to develop their own institutional strength if they're going to get anywhere. That's the way our society works, and that's the way it will continue to work." And third, it helps, especially through its Journal, to put new concepts and formulations into language, a vital function and one that "must be done from a black point of view."

"Need for Afro"

The last two are perhaps most important: "The white community is a very tough community, inert and satisfied. It simply won't do for a splinter group [such as the Negro] to be dependent upon a highly organized majority. When Negroes develop an institutional strong point, they have a right to make it their own. Five or six years ago, I saw the need for integration but not for the AAAAS. Now I see the need for both," Monro continues.

Second, Monro feels language is of utmost importance: the problem is "more rhetorical than real." Language is at present "too stiff for proper analysis and statement of what is