NEW ORLEANS--These days we youth take over buildings, we evict deans, we do verbal war with our mentors. So it goes. We didn't always play these games in particular. A long time ago before the current era and before the Age of the Hippies and Flower Children there was the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement was the far-flung expedition of northern liberalism (a fine thing in those days). It was, as we all know, the first domino to fall in the chain reaction that led youth to the state of "revolution" we're in now. But there are two things about the Civil Rights Movement. First, it was an experience shared by a very small number of youths. Even at the peak of the movement there couldn't have been over a couple of thousand white northern kids actually living and working in the South. Secondly, that was all a long time ago. The Civil Rights workers were college students then. They've almost all (except for a few press-publicized movement "leaders") grown up and gotten married or something. They've drifted away. Hardly any of the new generation of rabble rousers have ever had anything to do with that meritorious Civil Rights Movement in the South.

As we were driving through the South during the past week, I could taste the glory and respectability of the old civil rights days. Parents, teachers, ministers lauded us for going down there. Life magazine spoke of heroism. When we were murdered by police, the vast majority of adults in this country turned purple with unspeakable outrage. They loved us then. And now? In our latest adventure they brought the police on us themselves, ca va.

The Civil Rights Movement benefited more the northerners involved than it uplifted oppressed Negroes (as they were called). Very little of southern life was changed in return for the vast amount of energy the crusaders put into getting there. Imagine how much money the tens of thousands of people who came down for the Selma march in 1965 spent on gasoline, motel rooms, airplane tickets, restaurants. Millions of dollars, and the cops got the firehoses out as soon as they left.

I, as Fate willed, worked for The Southern Courier, the civil rights newspaper, during its first two summers in '65 and '66. The Southern Courier represented the ultimate effort of white liberal evangelism. Started by some Harvard CRIMSON editors and funded by a lot of liberal people and their organizations in the Northeast, it was an attempt to expose what was wrong with what true with the understood result that the governmental system would then have to correct itself.

The Courier finally folded last November after it had become clear to its editor that it was hopeless to keep on trying for any further political change to stop discrimination. The newspaper wasn't a very effective weapon in pragmatic politics. The Courier, and the Civil Rights Movement, in general, brought about a great new cultural awareness, but didn't change the hands of the power.

One of the reasons Mike Lottman, who was the editor, gave for closing down the over-indebted Courier was that the Federal Government, the organization which should be most responsive, was behind the worst discrimination. Take, for example, Macon Country, an Alabama country which is 85 per cent back. For years whites held all the elected positions. Then, with the coming of the Civil Rights Movement, Negroes started working their way into the system. It was Macon County that elected the first black sheriff ever (or since reconstruction) in the South. (His name was Lucius Amerson. It got lots of New York Times coverage when it happened. It also turned out what he wasn't much better than the white guys, but you'd have to know the South to understand that.)

In Macon County, as in all other farming regions in the South, one of the most decisive government agencies in farmers' lives in the ASCS committee (part of the department of Agriculture, I believe). The ASCS tells farmers the quotas that limit how many acres they can plant with cotton and other crops. With whites controlling the committees, the big white farmers got as large a cotton allotment as they wanted while the Negroes, usually with much smaller farms, had to make it all balance by having their allotments shaved. Often Negroes are tenant farmers on a white man's land; so if they tried to complain, call in surveyors, and that sort of thing, the white man would kick them off his land. Evicted negro farmers would band together and live in "tent cities" with only patchwork canvas for shelter, and they'd slowly starve.

It took the Negroes of Macon County a three-year campaign, which cost $20,000, to finally gain control of the ASCS board in their 85 per cent black county. That was last year. It's the only one like it in the state.

And then there's the more complicated, less conscious evil of the Federal government. The U.S. isn't supposed to do business with companies that discriminate. But they've got contracts up to here with The American Can Company. The American Can Company has its own little company-run town in Bellamy, Alabama. Stores, schools, churches, and neighborhoods are segregated in Bellamy. There's no plumbing in the Negro homes, their streets aren't paved, they get paid less. It's a really tough town. Jim Peppler, the Courier's dare-anything photographer who took pictures of some of the meanest crackers in the state, just drove down the main street of Bellamy shooting his camera from on top the dashboard.

Where the U.S. government does act is in school desegregation. They used to withhold aid from high schools that weren't integrated and now the Federal courts have ordered the Alabama schools to integrate or close down. But Negroes no longer get very excited about going to the white schools. 90 percent of them are still going to all back schools. What the courts will wind up doing is to close down a lot of the really good black schools that just can't get any white kids to come. And the black schools have tried everything to be more attractive to whites. One had this huge statue of Booker T. Washington which they couldn't destroy because it practically held up the whole building; so they plastered it all over.

School desegregation was one of the Civil Rights Movement's greatest targets. Now they don't want it, and it's working against them. Voter registration is another project that used to be really up there.

But that, too, has seen its day. It seems that just about everyone's registered that wants to be. There are over 400 elected Negro officials across the state now (most of these are justices of the peace). But that doesn't seem to change anything. The big hope for the electoral process came in 1966 when Richmond Flowers ran for governor. Negroes put up candidates in more races than they ever have important offices. People don't look to the elections. It was only the most blatant and simple kinds of discrimination that could be undone by such a one-dimensional attack. And it took an unsubtle one-dimensional kind of opposition to convince powers like the U.S. to intervene. Opposition like George Wallace. He was responsible for something no civil rights group could bring about. He got the whole of Alabama under a single statewide school desegregation order from the Federal courts. Everywhere else in the South they have to bring each school to court individually. Wallace, by making his state government the antagonist, simplified everything. Brewer, the new governor, is more sly. And it's very difficult for anything like a "Civil Rights Movement" to get anything done.

I hate the glisteningly white, fat men that waddle through the narrow streets of New Orleans here. They come down from Alabama and Mississippi and upstate Louisiana to do drinking and get in their sin here. They go to strip shows and cackle and burp. They're drunk all the time in an aggressively unfriendly way. They bring their wives some of the time and swap them with their friends. They have Kodaks and stupid shirts and they never smile because they're just incredibly miserable and they come down here to reach new heights in misery. They have short hair, despicably short hair; it makes them look ugly. Sometimes I worry about your friendly suburban northern guys who get caught in the American guys who get caught in the American education system that makes them want to have TV's and stuff. But these guys here as like the evil growling germ itself. They're not the victims, they're the pure essence of unfriendlyness.

A headline from the Meridian Star, Meridian Mississippi:

A GREAT DAY TO BE AN AMERICAN;