Volume 12, Number 5 · March 13, 1969
Slavery, Race, and the Poor
By J.H. Plumb
Black History: A Reappraisal
edited by Melvin Drimmer
Doubleday, 530 pp., $6.95
American Negro Slavery: A Modern Reader
edited by Allen Weinstein, edited by Frank Otto Gatell
Oxford, 376 pp., $2.95 (paper)
White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812
by Winthrop D. Jordan
University of North Carolina, 672 pp., $12.50
Race Relations
by Michael Banton
Basic Books, 450 pp., $7.95
Often social change is imperceptible to those living in its midst. It is like water oozing through a dam—at first a faint dampness, a trickle, a spurt, the cracks multiply and either the dam crumbles or the pushing waters are sufficiently eased to create a new, if unstable, equilibrium. To the Black Panthers and other groups of activists the change in social attitudes in America toward the Negro is derisory, and when not derisory a conscience-easing fake. To WASPS, conscious or unconscious, or to ethnic groups living near black ghettos or in competition with blacks for jobs, the rushing of the waters is so deafening that they are driven toward panic and hysteria. To the uneasy liberal, the situation borders on the grotesque. He wants to be fair, to make retribution, and yet he cannot easily accept the new black contempt toward the white, and he is also conscious, perhaps over-conscious, of a hatred of white democracy, a growing insistence on authoritarian, almost totalitarian, attitudes within the black community.
Review, 4000 words
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