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 …
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, …
A document such as the 1961 Draft Program of the CPSU serves so many different purposes that at first sight it may appear pointless to try to classify it with reference to the tradition it purports to incarnate. It is …
HONORED JOSEPH VISSARIONOVITCH: One who has been condemned to the supreme punishment—the writer of this letter—appeals to you for commutation of his punishment. My name is no doubt known to you. For me, a writer, to be deprived of the …
UTOPIAN ESSAYS AND PRACTICAL PROPOSALS, by Paul Goodman. Random House. 289 pp. 1962. Some of the “practical proposals” in Paul Goodman’s collection of essays are: Solve the traffic problem by banning private cars from Manhattan; rebuild a few of America’s …
THE OTHER AMERICA, by Michael Harrington. Macmillan, 1962. 191 pages. WEALTH AND POWER IN AMERICA, by Gabriel Kolko. Frederick A. Praeger, 1962. 178 pages. Those who have been preoccupied by the marvels of American affluence often forget that beneath it …
POLITICAL JUSTICE. THE USE OF LEGAL PROCEDURE FOR POLITI CAL ENDS, by Otto Kirchheimer. Princeton University Press, 1961, 452 pp. At the outset, Dr. Kirchheimer explains that his title refers not to “the search for an ideal order” but to …
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 …
