ustxtxb_obs_1966_08_05_50_00014-00000_000.pdf

a IFTURA PRESS HI 2-8682 HI 2-2426 1714 SO. CONGRESS canopy. The road became squeezed in between the river and the long parallel hill so that when you finally saw the lights of the pavilion up ahead it was like sighting a much-awaited jewel at the end of a long and druidic tunnel. WE WOULD PULL IN beside a row of other cars, get out, stretch, smell the river and the hayfields in all their close and heavy richness, and then walking with that unique and luxuriant slowness of high school freshmen we proceeded out of the darkness toward the red-yellow-andblue glow of the pavilion. \(I have often wondered if it was just the susceptibility of my mere fourteen years, plus the special atmosphere of the Heartor if “Adios” by Glenn Miller is truly one of the most charming and heart-breakingly smooth dance tunes ever recorded. It was popular back then in the ’40’s, and somehow it would always begin playing on the juke box at the precise moment we got out of the car: We could see the dancers begin to rise and float out across the floor, there would be distant talk and laughter coming from the shadowed tables, the mountain would be looming behind the top and those first, bare, muted, slow-ternpoed notes would drift out past us into the summer night. As I walked up that halfdarkened sidewalk toward the rock archway it was almost like proceeding toward an earthly Pearly Gate, where celestial mood music had been especially re-arrangWe would get our cold drinks in the adjoining cafe and come back to the edge of the smooth cement dance floor to stand and observe. For the next couple of hours we passed scrupulous judgment on everyone in sight: the prettiest and the most apsurliest and most contemptible of boys, the already-heavy drinkers and the virtuous abstainers, the well-known steadies and the awkward, first-night tryouts. We tilted and 14 The Texas Observer GARNER & SMITH BOOKSTORE 2116 Guadalupe, Austin, Texas Mail order requests promptly filled Campaign Cards & Placards & Bumperstrip & Brochures & Flyers & Letterheads BE En elopes k Vertical Posters & Buttons & Ribl ons & Badges & Process Color Work & Ar Work & Forms BE Newspapers 8E Political rinting & Books & Silk Screen Work & Mag az t ti 0 TS ds to M AUSTIN al ‘6-8,E Silk Screen Work & Po itical Printing _ Novelties & Mimeograph Supplies & Conveni on Badges & Advertising Campaigns 8E Stati drained our Pepsi Colas and Nehi oranges –and then tilted and drained them some morewithout ever lessening the flow of cross-observation and analysis. \(Fascinated most, perhaps, by the sight of Couples-in-Love who would dance slowly past, oblivious of everyone and everything except each other: the girl, with her head reared back a little so that she could see all of her boy friend’s face as He Spoke, her hand reached up to the back of his neck and clasping it firmly yet delicately, as she might a sculptured vase; seeming almost painfully pliant and adoring. And the young man himself, his arm half-around the girl’s waist in a position of carefully-careless ownership: at seventeen already a ‘chosen onetotally selfassured, attentive, and considerate-up-to-aWe watched the dancing, the flirting, the occasional chin-to-chin confrontations between sweaty, beered-up young men who really had no desire to fight and therefore didn’t. We became surfeited with sounds bursts of laughter, shoes sliding across cement, the clinking of beer bottles, the slamming and re-slamming of the cafe Power Without Color, Pls. The ‘right to self-defense is a natural right. To the extent civil rights people prefer self-defense to non-violence, they express a disagreement that is commonplace among us all, and the shocked responses to statements by civil rights workers in favor of self-defense mock common sense. “Black power,” however, “falls on the ear” \(to use Dr, Martin Luther King’s As Dr. King says, it connotes “black supremacy and an anti-white feeling that does not or should not exist. . . . It also carries implications of Black Nationalism.” We would add that it further suggests the use of aggressive violence; by the symbolic osmosis that goes on without regard to what is fair, “black power” as a slogan has tended to identify the cause of civil rights with the violent riots in the cities. Nor does “black power” as a political goal corn z’ Since 1866 The Place in Austin GOOD FOOD GOOD BEER 1607 San Jacinto OR 7-4171 door as white-jacketed waiters moved back and forth with their high-balanced trays. BY TEN-THIRTY or eleven we were ready to leave. Our stomachs were content and our adolescent demand not be left outto be where things were happeninghad been satisfactorily assuaged. We filed out through the archway while the juke box played “Old Devil Moon” or “Perfidia” or “Moonlight Serenade” and made our way down the lines of dark cars toward our yellow Willis watching the shoulders and heads and arms of shadowed couples loom and shift and occasionally disappear down into the car seats as we passed on by. While the tires of the Willis went noisily over the gravel of the parking area I would usually take one last glance back at the lighted pavilion, as if to fix it somehow in permanence or memory. Then after we pulled onto the highway and went through the tunnel of high trees I would sag a little closer to an open window, content to let the river breeze play across my reflections of the Heart for the remaining miles home. 0 mend itself any more than “white power” has. It is precisely in the work of ending power that is based on color that whites and Negroes are working together in the civil rights movement and will continue to do so. Negroes have full and equal rights to share in political power with whites. The reason that this is so is that power based on color is illegitimate, and those who would seek black power based on race are seeking power just as illegitimate as white power. To understand the grinding poverty and frustration that have caused Negroes to take up the cry of “black power” is minimal, and to help make it clear that our failure to cause real change in the ghettoes is a cause of the riots is necessary. We do not blame any one group or organization for the emergence of the black power motif, and historically speaking we can see that some good results might come from the reactions against it. But the underlying issue is violence versus patience, a question as old as man. Gandhi, King, and those, for instance, who originally founded the Student. Non-Violent Coordinating Committee sought a compromise-in-action between these two courses: assertive, disruptive, but non-violent demonstrations. To abandon racial brotherhood for racism in reverse, non-violence for the use of violence, and the goal of a multiracial democracy for the goal of a segregated stand-offthat would be to consent and approve as a great, hopeful American movement was corrupted from the works and ways of love to those of hate. No. nt Observations