that it should join in acts which prevent them from obtaining
the substance of freedom.

Nor will they be satisfied by the counsels of patience and the
assurances of kindly men that progress has been made that
eventually, through fair treatment and cooperative effort,
Negroes will in some distant day obtain the rights which the
Constitution itself guarantees to them.

No one who has not stopped seeing and thinking could have
missed the events of the past few years that have drawn to-
gether thirteen million Americans-one tenth of the nation --
into a determined, purposeful unit.

In that time, Negroes have known the bitter humiliation of
seeing their men and women, eager to serve in the nation's
armed forces, excluded from some branches of the service or
often relegated to menial jobs in the branches to which they
have been admitted. They have witnessed the ugly and tragic
results of race hatred and riots. They have known the brief
security of good jobs at decent wages while their help was
needed in order to make the tools of war, only to be filled with
deep anxiety for fear that in the readjustments of peace they
will be shuffled off into unemployment and poverty.

At the same time, from the battlefields of Italy to the gold-
star homes here in America they have learned that there is
nothing more democratic than a bullet or a splinter of steel.
They want now to see some political democracy as well.

Millions of them distrust the Democratic Party which for years
has deprived the Negro of his right to vote in Atlanta while
seeking his vote as the friend of his race in Harlem. But in view
of the economic advances and social gains which have come to
Negroes during the past twelve years, they will not leave that
party for vague assurances of future action expressed in pious
platitudes, or for a 1944 version of the states rights doctrine, or
even for procedures which, however legally correct, in practical
effect indefinitely postpone correction of sore and desperate
abuses.

Negro leaders are alert and educated and sophisticated. They
know that their problem is a part of the world-wide struggle
for human freedom. For their people they ask only their rights

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