What is it that America has failed to hear? That the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met.

Just as an ambivalent nation freed the slaves a century ago with no plan or program to make their freedom meaningful, the still ambivalent nation in 1954 declared school segregation unconstitutional with no plan or program to make integration real.

It is my great hope that as the Negro plunges deeper into the quest for freedom, he will plunge deeper into the philosophy of non-violence. As a race we must work passionately and unrelentingly for first-class citizenship, but we must never use second class methods to gain it.

It is one thing for a white person of good will in the North to rise up with righteous indignation when a bus is burned in Anniston, Alabama, with freedom riders, or when a nasty mob assembles around a University of Mississippi, and even goes to the point of killing and injuring people to keep one Negro out of the university, or when a Negro is lynched or churches burned in the South; but that same person of good will must rise up with the same righteous indignation when a Negro in his state or in his city cannot live in a particular neighborhood because of the color of his skin, or cannot join a particular academic society or fraternal order or sorority because of the color of his or her skin, or cannot get a particular job in a particular firm because her happens to be a Negro.

Why do white people seem to find it so difficult to understand that the Negro is sick and tired of having reluctantly parceled out to him those rights and privileges which all others receive upon birth or entry in America?

The whole nation has come a long, long way in extending the frontiers of civil rights. If we are true to the facts, we must admit this. Twenty-five years ago, a year hardly passed when numerous Negroes were not brutally lynched by some vicious mob in the South. Today lynchings have about ceased.