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Friday, November 22, 1968 MAROON TIGER Page 3 The Student Feedback section of the paper will consist of stu dents’ opinions regarding articles published in the Maroon Tiger and to pressing events on the campus. All articles for this sec tion will be welcomed. dipole tend with no sweat at all. Archie Powell Dear Cheerleader: You don’t know me personally nor do I know you, but I feel that I do because I’ve noticed your participation on the Cheer ing Squad. As a member of the Morehouse College student body, let me be the first to extend an apology to you for the harsh and cruel attack on your person in the underground newspaper entitled The Word. I feel that an apolo gy is due because anyone, whether black, yellow, or white, who helps to cheer the Tigers on even when victory is nowhere in sight has true loyalty and school spirit, which is more than what I can say about the “bottled” spirit that my brothers have at the football games. My only hope is that you con tinue with rededicated strength in leading the team on to victories. A concerned student ^Alienation present Freshmen usually don’t voice their opinions about anything that goes on here at the college dur ing their first year. I am a fresh man and I must be heard. Being a city student, I have been a victim of many incon siderations by all factions of col lege life. All too often meetings have been planned solely for the convenience of the campus stu dent, allowing him to casually walk over to the dining hall and take his time to eat, knowing he has plenty of time to make that seven-thirty meeting. The city student, on the other hand, must do one of three things: (1) rush home, speeding through din ner, and fly back (hopefully without picking up a ticket or in digestion in the process); (2) re main on the campus after his last class and eat in the dining hall, go to the library, or visit a friend who resides on campus; (3) go home after his last class and just “hang it all up.” Because many city students prefer to do the latter, one can easily see how this can lead to complacency. These commuting students pay tuition just as their brothers, and therefore have the right to par ticipate in anything that may interest them, so why make it difficult? Let the future bring forth meetings with the city stu dent in mind so that all may at dAtudentd (jet (jund A rather ironic situation exists and is perpetuating itself on the Morehouse campus. The students are buying guns. Guns. Some of the guns are relatively small pis tols; others are more deadly— thirty-eights and forty-fives. The calibre, the make, the quality, these are unimportant data; what is important is WHY? Why does a freshman possess a gun? Why does he buy a gun? These are questions I have asked myself and questions that everyone attending Morehouse should ask himself. In large cities black men are arming themselves for confron tations primarily with white po licemen. Why? Many white po licemen have openly exhibited a willingness to shoot first and ask questions later in dealing with blacks. However, there must be another method to deal with the problem. If this other method is not found or not implemented properly, there will be just cause for fighting fire with fire. This brings me back to my original point, A RATHER IRONIC SIT UATION EXISTS AND IS PER PETUATING ITSELF ON THE MOREHOUSE CAMPUS. We at Morehouse are preparing our selves for confrontations with not only a vague and somewhat un identified group of people, but also a black group of people. Where is our conscience? We have a problem with a black group of children that we have handily labeled “block boys.” We have, many of us, already taken to packing revolvers with which to defend ourselves. We boast of the great effectiveness of our revolvers and, on request, we even show them to our friends. This is usually followed by our telling magnificent stories of how we deal with the terrible fiends, as our chests swell while we boast and brag about what we have done and hope to do. What are we becoming? What kind of fiends are we becom ing? I do not believe that our only alternative is to fight fire with fire. We are supposed to be students training to be think ing, ^ reasoning adults, educated men, future leaders. What are we in fact becoming? Worried Has Religion Become Irrelevant? By Carthur Drake Has your cycle of reasoning led you to become unchurched? Do you feel that you have out grown the existing churches? Perhaps your feeling can be sum med up in this article. —Are you dissatisfied in an orthodox church because the re ligion seems immature, unreason able or spiritually lacking to you? —Have you lost interest in the orthodox religions because sci ence and common sense have made many creeds and doctrines seem unsound to you? —Have you felt that juggling the interpretation of ancient creeds in order to make them fit new facts is not an intellectually honest procedure? —Are you one of the many people who have sought in vain a soul-satisfying religion which can fulfill the ideal of being ac ceptable and welcome to persons of every color, race and class throughout the world? —Do you feel that the church gatherings have become a place for fashion display and gossiping j sessions rather than a place where religious principles are applied to correct social prob lems? —Do you feel that no one church has all the truths of re ligion and therefore cannot prop erly dictate what you shall be lieve in matters of theology? —Finally, do you feel that your church has been used as a ve hicle of prosperity for your re ligious leaders and that you were the direct victim? These are some of the problems that have engulfed the minds of many of the young generation. Perhaps you hold the same con victions. For a solution to the growing number of unchurched Ameri cans, let us look at a major cause which has contributed to this blasphemy among most young people. This major cause can be ascribed to the church itself. Former Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater stated, after concluding a nation-wide j tour of 56 college campuses, that he found young people are “very well informed — and they think.” He stated further, “They’re con cerned. They ask a lot of ques tions.” To describe them further, one might conclude that they are mentally energetic and physically excited. The younger generation would, therefore, require a ra tionally energetic and socially ex cited environment in which they might exercise their beliefs. Here, I feel, is where the reli gious community has failed. It has failed in its task to provide a religious structure which would satisfy the searching minds of the young people. People are not go ing to base their lives on shaky doctrines and traditional habits which do not conform to a chang ing society. Old habits are not the solution to new problems. And this impious attitude will continue to increase until the ex isting churches realize that doc trines are like cloth and that they should be adjusted and tailored to fit the people they serve. Dke Qietto WJL Wait C^ome 2^ own By Frederick Longsdale & Philip James Boykin The Civil Rights Commission, in a new report based on the testi mony of numerous residents of big-city ghettos, has destroyed three cliches about Negroes that have gained much currency and done considerable damage. The first of those cliches is that Negroes are only another in the long series of minority groups—the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, numerous Eastern Eu ropeans—that have migrated to the United States and ultimately fought their way out of the slums and into an accepted place in American life. The second is that if Negroes would try as hard as those other minority groups did, they too could move out to the suburbs and up to the middle-income brackets. And the third is that, while con ditions in the ghetto may be bad, it would be wrong and unwise to “reward violence” by doing something about these conditions in the wake of the past summer’s riots. The first of these cliches is the hardest to deal with. Not only is it standard liberal doctrine that Negroes are like other human beings, only with black skins; but to assert that Negroes are differ ent from Poles and Italians is to invite the charge of racism. Nevertheless, the Civil Rights Commission points out, the analo gy to other minority groups is “misleading and dangerous.” Ne groes, for one thing, are not in vading migrants, but have been Americans. Unlike the Europeans who once flocked to the U. S., Ne groes are not fleeing the repres sion of tyrannical foreign govern ments of bad economic conditions; their problem is the attitude to ward them of the society to which they rightfully belong, and the economy in which they seek a living. Within that society, and in vir tually every segment of it, “the- legacy of slavery continues in the form of racial segregation, dis crimination and prejudice.” Even so, Negroes might climb over these invisible walls if the traditional means—education and work—were as available to them as they once were even to dis advantaged Irish and Italian immigrants. But they are not. Their schools and teachers are generally inferior, and in the city ghetto de facto segregation is vir tually the rule, whatever the state and federal law. And even in the rare instances when the unusual ghetto school or the exceptional ghetto pupil re sults in a human being capable of playing a useful role in a tech nological society, he may find the job market closed to Negroes. Or he may find advantageous em ployment available only in non ghetto communities where dis criminatory housing practices pre vent his migration. This practical imprisonment of the Negro in the ghetto, this lin gering and subtle racial segrega tion, is at the root of the riots. A San Francisco Negro is quot ed in the report of the Civil Rights Commission as saying: “Now, what black nationalist groups are telling them is, ‘Look, baby, nobody is going to help you but yourself, and what you had better do, you had bet ter realize that with all the lib erals in the world, that you still have these conditions that you had when you met these liberals, and until you can do something about it for yourself they will be here.’ ” That is why the most damaging and shortsighted cliche of all is an insistence that violence must not be rewarded. These destructive, fruitless, hopeless uprisings themselves are telling us that the Negro is de termined to tear down the condi tions that surround him, the walls that contain him, and as one black militant testified, if the demo cratic processes fail, “then we will have to do whatever is necessary to make these changes.” To attack these conditions from the outside, to make that attack the nation’s “first priority,” as the Civil Rights Commission rec ommends, is not rewarding vio lence. It is preventing violence, and nothing else will do it. Too often black people exalt those who yell the loudest and curse the most, and who, when they cannot open the door, threaten to kick it in. Some have the nerve to call such people “black leaders.” I prefer to call them multi mouthed pseudo leaders, for they would have us believe our doubts and doubt our beliefs; they call us “brothers” to our face and “bastards” to our back; and they tell us to “get together” Think Before You Act while they radically and success fully pull us apart. These pseudo leaders articulate beliefs that would disgrace a nation of sav ages. Some black brothers have ask ed me why I care about the way they think. “If an individual’s beliefs are his personal posses sion,” they argue, “then why should anyone be concerned with the beliefs of others?” My an swer to this question is not orig inal; nonetheless, it is my answer. “No belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so grad ually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may some day explode into overt ac tion, and leave a stamp on our character forever.” (W. K. Clif ford) An ultra-militant brother told me, “In our revolution the masses of black people must not be al lowed to question, to evaluate or to analyze the beliefs of our rebel leaders, for it does not matter what a brother believes as long as he acts.” THIS I REJECT! History has proven that the seeds of decay begin to sprout the min ute an individual or group acts without thinking, without evalu ating and analyzing the conse quences which inevitably follow action. To nothing so much as the abandonment of reason does humanity owe its sorrows. Think before you act, because once an act is done it is right or wrong forever. So I reject the idea of blind followership compulsory or com placent, the faith that is swal lowed like pills, whole and at once, with no questions asked. Now is the time to question. In the words of Robespierre, “It is time to distinguish clearly the aim of the Revolution and the term to which we would arrive. It is time for us to render ac count to ourselves, both of the obstacles which still keep us from that aim and the means which we ought to take to attain it.” Let us review our aims as a people, always remembering that self-assessment is not self-defeat ing. When the Black Revolution is over, I pray that history will look on the actions of black people and record the words of Mose: “Ain’t I the damndest thing you’ve ever seen? I’ve been treat ed like a mule and turned out to be a human being.”