(COPYRIGHT, 1970, BY THE HARVARD CRIMSON)

(This is the second in a two-part scries featuring recent interviews with four prominent black leaders-Julian Bond, Jesse Jackson, Bobby Scale, and Whitney Young. The four were asked to answer an identical set of questions on the future of the Black Revolution in America.)

TERRY: Is a second Civil War, or a race war between blacks and whites in America, a possibility or an inevitability?

BOND: I don't think it's inevitable. It is a possibility. This great mass of white middle America is getting more and more uptight. They are prone to violence. The black community is getting more uptight. And it is prone to answer violence. But I don't see a full-scale civil war in the sense of two clearly defined groups opposing each other violently. I think the black group is so small is so small that it would render itself almost impotent. I just don't think we could carry it off.

Now I can imagine the ghettos becoming real concentration camps, if the black community gets more defined and more dependent.

JACKSON: Our experience with the hot war is that it is a bit futile, given the Man's military superiority. And even he is better prepared now. There is no more shock value in the riots. He's ready for that, too. So our technique and our sophistication will have to change.

YOUNG: Nationally, it's completely out of the question. To have war you've got to have some reasonable balance in the forces. Otherwise, you have a massacre. We're back with Nat Turner again. That's not a war, that's suicide. You're going to have individual cases of violence. You're going to have the rhetoric. You're going to have sensational-secking media who will play up those incidents and that rhetoric and exaggerate them and make it seem like they represent more people than it really represents.

It's like separatism. A handful of black people say something about separatism, and the white community will play it up like it represents three-fourths of the black people. This doesn't mean the black people are not angry, bitter, and enraged, and wouldn't like to kill some white people. But in terms of organized war, it's completely out of the question.

Now I do think we are in the midst of a second Post-Reconstruction period. There was then a compromise with the South and racism as there is now. The parallel is frightening.

SEALE: I don't think there's going to be a race war. Here in the streets, in what many prisoners refer to as the so-called free world out here, we can see that young white middle class people are opposing the establishment in the manner that black people have.

TERRY: In achieving his goals, what path should the black American take between extremism and gradualism?

BOND: You must be open to flexibility, willing to try anything at any given moment. In construction industry demonstrations, for example, if more radical action is necessary, the community ought to be ready to take it. It could escalate from simple demonstrations, like carrying picket signs to people blocking building sites. I could even imagine some kind of destruction of the construction site. But I don't think you should commit yourself to a strategy until you know what the situation is.

JACKSON: No man who is not hurting can tell a man who is hurting how to holler. He may tell him that in addition to being mad you've got to get smart, and you've got to have method to your madness. The business of trying to decry people because of the way they complain of injustice is past and gone.

YOUNG: I believe in a diversification of strategies, and division of labor. You don't fight a war with just an air force. You have the navy, the infantry, the intelligence, and the marines. I think the same thing is true in the war against racism and poverty. You need at all times the potential of diversity in approaches.

But you don't send the navy home and disband it once you've crossed the English Channel. You hold it in readiness until it's needed again. So I think we should, as other ethnic groups, recognize that the boycott is an appropriate tool at certain points, that the demonstrations are appropriate, that confrontations of all types, short of violence, are appropriate.