Now that he is dead, we must resist the temptation to idealize Malcolm X, to elevate charisma to greatness. His voice and words were cathartic, channeling into militant verbiage emotions that might otherwise have run a violently self-destructive course. But …
The murder of Malcolm X cannot be reduced to an incident in an underworld conflict over material loot or social spoils. The sophisticated and intelligent ex-con who had been rebaptized Malcolm X by the Black Muslims, was publicly killed for …
Over the ’64 Christmas holidays, 37 Negro high school students from McComb, Mississippi, were brought to New York by private funds raised by two COFO volunteers who had spent the summer teaching in the McComb “Freedom School.” The McComb kids …
LeRoi Jones has already had more attention, more production of plays, more publication, more criticism and news comment than—at any less opportune moment—he could conceivably merit. But one aspect of his work and persona seems worth further analysis, hopefully as …
The breakup of the Communist camp in the 1960s is an event of world historic importance which may well rank with such crucial turning points as the break between the Western and the Eastern Church, the Reformation, or the halting …
The counterattack has started. Purveyors of the conventional wisdom have suddenly launched an all-out assault on all those who over the last few years have called attention to the dark side of automation. Last January, within a few days of …
Dear Sartre: May I take public issue with you for the claims you make in What is Literature? You claim literary importance, even preeminence, for socially committed, or “responsible” writing; you claim also that anyone who happens to be unprejudiced …
Several years ago, a number of students at Southern University in Baton Rouge were expelled for demonstrating against local segregation practices. In his letter of expulsion, President Feltin Clark invoked Rule 16 in the Southern University Student Handbook. The rule …
James Baldwin first came to the notice of the American literary public not through his own fiction but as author of an impassioned criticism of the conventional Negro novel. In 1949 he published in Partisan Review an essay called “Everybody’s …
At the age of nine I had already acquired the reputation of being the worst boy in the neighborhood. And in my neighborhood this was no easy accomplishment. My frequent appearance in juvenile court was beginning to bother the judges. …
We have done all we could to keep alive in our minds the main problems that in the course of centuries have troubled theologians, although today we formulate them in a somewhat different way. Philosophy has never freed itself from …
The problem of disarmament goes to the roots of society. Military force has been the right arm of the nation-state; it is as yet difficult to discern the power bases that will replace it. The social investment that both Russia …
A RADICAL’S AMERICA, by Harvey Swados. Atlantic—Little, Brown, 1962, xvii + 347 pp. In his introduction to this collection of essays, Harvey Swados writes that he has “attempted to maintain a a tension between skepticism and idealism.” The skepticism is, …
THE GENTLEMEN CONSPIRATORS, by John G. Fuller. Grove Press, Inc. In one of his lively discourses on contemporary socioeconomic trends, Professor James Riddle Hoffa, summa cum laude, of the Graduate School of Hard Knocks, declared in 1961 that, “the zillion …
THE PRESS, by A. J. Liebling. Ballantine Books, 1961. From his “Wayward Press” articles in the New Yorker, A. J. Liebling has put together a damning book. But it will hardly surprise his readers who, after all, also read the …
