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The Alliance for Progress
Berkeley in February 
The dominant system of society is critically dependent on the schools, especially the universities. Schools provide the brainpower for the scientific technology. They are wistfully expected, beginning with age 3, to bring everybody into the mainstream of economic usefulness; and …
The Student State of Mind
Dispatches From Kiev
Kiev, 24 November 1964 (AUP) Peace descended again this morning on the campus of the University of Kiev following a night of all-out battle between students and the constituted authorities. The events of the night reached a climax when masses …
The Ambiguous Legacy of Malcolm X
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 Apostate Muslim
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 …
“What is Literature?” An Open Letter to Jean-Paul Sartre
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 …
Contra: In Loco Parentis
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 …
Black Boys and Native Sons
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 …
Harlem, My Harlem
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. …
The Priest and the Jester
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 …
Disarmament and the Prospects of American Capitalism
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 …
His Brother’s Keeper
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, …
Reality And Experience: An Analysis Of The Draft Program Of The CPSU
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 …
A Letter To Stalin
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 …
