YEAR has elapsed since the

ghetto in Los Angeles,

Watts, erupted. That no
lesson was learned is amply
demonstrated by the fact that
this summer has seen similar
outbursts in Chicago and Cleve-
land, Omaha, Providence, Lan-
Sing, Perth Amboy, Minneapolis,
Townsville and a number of
other ghetto areas.

These areas are tinder-boxes
of long standing resentment. The
Spark that sets them off can be
the refusal to allow the use of
Water hydrants to cool off the
children playing, the brutality
of a cop or some other seeming-
ly small incident.

Take the Hough area in Cleve-
land for example. Last spring
the U.S. Civil Rights Commis-
Sion heard over 100 witnesses
who were victims of police bru-
tality, hunger and rat-infested
homes. Since then nothing was
done to improve the conditions.

_Only two weeks before the’
violence in Hough a group of
150 mothers had marched on
Columbus, the state capital, to
Put their plight before the gov-
€rnor. They demanded an in-
Crease in ‘the relief payments
which are now at only 70 per
Cent of the official government
Poverty minimum.

The governor announced that
the legislature will act on their
needs next year!

A rally called in Cleveland to
Organize mass action to remedy
the grievances was held-as the
tension began to abate. Here
Baxter Hill, chairman of the
Congress of Racial Equality
Pointed to the failure to get any-

thing done as the cause of the
€xplosion.

Hill told of seeing 22 police-
men push, kick and slap Negro
boys and girls. Police harrass-
ment caused one spokesman to
Say, “If only the police will let
the community alone, we will
8et straightened out.”

The Cleveland Chapter of the
Americans for Democratic ACc-
ion declared, “Two bonds of
misery unite the Hough Negroes:
Poverty and segregation. We
Cannot change poor to rich, but
We can raise welfare to a decent
Standard and we can open the
ghetto.”

‘They then asked, “Will this

“Crisis bring forth conventional

Wisdom that seeks out scape-
80ats . . . or will we recognize
the problem and then have the
Courage to get the sort of ser-
Vice our political arms should
Provide?”

Cleveland was conventional.

A grand jury was established to -

Mvestigate the outbursts, which
‘ee now reported that the vio-
ence was “organized, precipi-
lated and exploited by a rela-

tively small group of trained and
disciplined professionals at this
business.”

The jury report said the pro-
fessionals were “aided and abet-
ted, willingly or otherwise, by
misguided people of all ages and
colors, many of whom are avow-
ed believers in violence and ex-
tremism and some of whom also
are members of or officers in the
Communist Party.”

They claim that the leaders
of the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs
arrived in Hough just a few days
before. the ‘disorders’.

Meanwhile Hugh Fowler, ex-

By
Phyllis
Clarke

ecutive secretary of the DuBois
Clubs has denied that his or-
ganization fomented the riots.
“We were in each of the riot
areas, but the only thing we

_tried to do was to keep people

from being hurt.”

Fowler charged that, “the real
responsibility for the rebellions
must be laid on the mayors,
governors and President John-
son.”

“Tt is the sheerest demagogy
on the part of President John-
son,” he said, “to condemn the
use of violence on the part of
the community youth and then
to answer their problems by
sending them to commit mass
murder in Vietnam.”

The search for a “scapegoat”
will not solve the problems that
caused the outburst in Hough
or in other ghettos. It is the
height of folly to think that a
a wave of anti-communism will
get rid of the rats, provide jobs,
feed the hungry. Yet, the danger

is present that the white mem-

bers of the power elite will use
this as a substitute for real
action.

A significant contrast is to be
found in Chicago according to
Claude Lightfoot, Communist
spokesman and candidate for
U.S. Senate in Illinois and James
West of Chicago in an article
in The Worker.

“If Watts was not repeated
on Chicago’s West Side, it is not
because life in this ghetto, or
the South Side ghetto, is better
than it is in Los Angeles. Some
will argue it is worse if any-
thing,” they .say.

“The main reason for the dif-
ference,’ they state, “can be

found only in the fact that a.

powerful, organized and united
civil rights movement—the Chi-

ghettos

cago Freedom Movement led

by Dr. Martin Luther King and

Al Raby, exists here.”

They continue, “And it is not
only that the Chicago Freedom
Movement exists, enjoying great
mass support and prestige—as
evident in the outpouring of
75,000, 30,000 and 50,000 people
at three different CFM demon-
strations in the last two years,
in addition to hundreds of
‘marches, picket lines, church
rallies, etc., but also the fact
that it has already won impor-
tant concessions on a_ whole
number of fronts.”

The article points out that the
Negro people “want in’ on the
total life of the country.

The conclusion is that, “signi-
ficant breakthroughs to the Open
City of full equality requires not
only unity of the Negro com-
munity, and a firm alliance with
labor. A new approach to politi-
cal action is needed, an ap-
proach which seeks to. weld the
power of the civil rights move-
ment and the power of the Jabor

- movement into a mighty fusion

of independent people’s power
for victory on the _ political
front.”

No smokescreen about profes-
sional organizers can obscure
the truth. At a press conference

‘in Chicago, Dr. Martin Luther

King had this to say:

“These phony accusatjons rep-
resent an unwillingness to do
anything more than put the lid
back on the pot and the refusal
to make the fundamental struc-

tural changes to right our racial .

wrongs.
“The South chose Jim Crow
laws and lynchings as its means
of suppression while the North
invented slums and_ ghettos.
These ghettos have become a
kind of colonial area. The colony
is powerless because all-impor-
tant decisions affecting the com-
munity are made from outside.
Many inhabitants have their
lives dominated by the welfare
worker and the policeman.

“Life in a slum is one unabat- ©

ed frustration . . . and frustra-
tion breeds aggression. .. . So-
ciety is concerned only that the
aggression thus generated does
not turn outward. ... The pre-
vious ‘invisible’ occupants of the
slums no longer will stay out
of sipht.2e- 2

Yes, the occupants of the
slums will not stay out of sight.
Today, tomorrow, next week,
there will be another explosion
in another ghetto. You can’t pre-
vent them unless and: until real
action is taken to change the
structure of life.

The onus for further “riots” is
on President Johnson, on Con-
gress, on the state governors,
on the city mayors. Will they act
in time? :

Spacecraft technicians in the United States work in @
“white” room as they work on a moon satellite. The men wear
white coveralls, including hoods over their hair. Surgical-
type gloves keep perspiration off delicate parts and masks
trap the moisture in their breath. The work is being done at
the Godard Space Flight Centre at Greenbelt, Maryland.

£3

Typical of the architecture of the Far East is this beauti-
ful and ornate Temple of Bhatgaon, near Katmandu, capital
of Nepal. ; t

: River transportation is an important factor in the econo-
mic life of the Soviet Union. Cranes at docks along the deep-
flowing Lena River form a picturesque pattern in this photo.

August 26, 1966—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Page 5

e