The Durable Issue

the company of a journalist who originated in Georgia and inherited his middle name from his great-great-uncle, John C. Calhoun. Under the circumstances, it seemed prudent to arrange for a colored colleague from the local Amsterdam News to convoy us through the thrusting crowd that by day and night responded to Dr. Castro's bearded presence and provided him with emotional sustenance. In mid-passage our escort admonished us: "Look, it's bad enough being here with two white men. For God's sake quit talking in that corn-pone accent!" Later I remarked to a group of Harlem friends upon this and other evidence of what seemed to me a marked change in climate since I had wandered through those precincts a few months before without consciousness that possession of a white skin might constitute a breach of the peace. "Let me," one of them replied, "pass you the latest word. When you got Kasavubu and Mobutu, who needs Amos and Andy?" The anecdote, I think, fairly epitomizes a confused and confusing new element in the American scene: the transfer of leadership in the continuing Negro protest movement from sympathetic white intellectuals to colored activists; the shift of focus from the courtroom to the sidewalk; the mystic identification of American Negroes with the nonwhite and off-white peoples who are in revolt around the globe; and the ideological frustration that derives from the fact that