The last decade has done more for racial consciousness among black people than anything else. It makes it easier for us to be a mental nation, a nation within a nation. We're a nation, separate and apart in our problems and have to be dealt with separate and apart. And we have to deal with ourselves differently, think of ourselves as different from the whole.

JACKSON: Black nationalism is blacks seeingourselves as a nation of people and knowing that we are brothers and sisters, based upon our experience and not based upon our skin color, that we are brothers and sisters in spite of our philosophical and ideological and intellectual differences because our essence as a people is determined by what we are subjected to and not by what we believe in.

We understand the brotherhood and appreciate the diversity and the heterogeneity within the black community without having contempt for blacks whom we disagree with. We must see ourselves moving as a nation on national enemies like discriminating major companies, headquartered in New York with sweat shops in North Carolina or Mississippi and a consumer market in California.

In 1954 I passed three schools going to my school each morning. These schools had chemistry labs, green grass, the whole bit. The black school had none of this. We read about chemistry, but we had no chemistry lab. We said we wanted desegregation, that is, we pay public taxes, give us an equal chance in the public arena.

We didn't care whether or not we sat beside white children. You don't learn anything by osmosis because you sit next to whites. But, given the reality of American racism, white children are magnets for capital in education-capital in improvement.

My school has had windows out of it ever since I went to it fifteen years ago. When they sent the white kids to it a couple of weeks ago, they approved funds to repair windows, broaden out the streets, put in street lights, slow signs, emergency care, plowed up the football field.

YOUNG: One of the positive changes in recent years has been a new acceptance of blacks as being black. A new sense of pride, of dignity, and a sense of personal worth is very healthy and very necessary in order to really believe that you can keep in the mainstream. This means you have to accept what you are, but that what you are places no limitations on what you can be in terms of intellectual attainment, excellence, etc.

I think when pride, dignity, and self-determination degenerate into calls for separatism then it becomes self-defeating and plays right into the hands of the enemy, who would like nothing better than to have us separated. I oppose separatism on both practical and philosophical grounds.

On practical grounds, any time you segregate human beings, the opportunity to discriminate is present. Up to now, the majority has never been able in any society to resist that temptation. But if we are integrated, we cannot be discriminated against. We buy the same bad meat and are taught by the same bad teachers. What is bad for me is bad for you.

I am opposed to it on philosophical grounds because the kind of world we live in-its pluralism, diversity, and closeness-demands an end to ethnic and cultural incest, an excuse for the insecure who don't feel they can make it in a multi-society.

SEALE: You don't fight racism with racism. The best way to fight racism is with solidarity. This takes many years. Anything that is good for the ruling class circus has got to be bad for us. It always has been. For 400 years. When you talk of black separation it is not a point of whether we dig black separation. The fact of the matter is that now we are already separated. So what we come up with is we're not concerned with abstract, false notions of integration. Nor are we concerned with abstract, false notions of separation. We are concerned with the political, economic, social evils and injustices.

I wouldn't stoop to the level of a low-lifed pig, a racist or a fascist or a sadistic Ku Klux Klansman or a criminal pig agent to brutalize and kill and murder a person just because of the color of his skin.

TERRY: What would you do if you were the mayor of a city with a large black population?

BOND: I would disperse public housing around the city so that low-income people would have a chance to live in decent neighborhoods with trees and grass and adequate playground facilities. I would urge the courts to be much more rigid in integrating the public school system. I would disperse black children among all the schools, where white schools are undercrowded and black schools are overcrowded. I would urge the industries around my city to increase the black percentage of workers.

JACKSON: I would call out the National Guard to bring food for the poor and set up emergency medical care centers for the needy, black and white. For once, at the bottom of society, we could use the National Guard as friends, coming to heal, not to kill.