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bring only terror,hardship, and death, and most of that to Negroes. Fortunately we have seen this argument be- fore and know something of its validity. Workers in this country were once told that only violent revolution will accomplish real gains, that the ruling class in America would not willingly give up enough to allow for a decent wage and decent working conditions. As we know, this was false, fac the conelees fannd « meane of etruggle which OTF Uae WOTKRCTsS 1UUTG og AsIVaGhe Va Shave Fresswes enabled them to apply pressure and still attract allies in church and government. The labor movernent would be in better state today if it Midoveorrcmie SN a ee ee ed ~——S had been more principled in its devotion to brotherhood and nonviolence, but even so workers accomplished a lot of what believers in violence said was impossible. More important than the reasons for the impracticality of armed defense, though, is the way a man looks at himself. Does he want to bring into a moral revolution the use of immoral means? Does he want personally to fall into the trap of saying "That man is not my brother, is not even a human being, is worthy of my contempt and my bullet'’?: The surest way of encouraging evil to spread is to let it engulf your own heart. 118 Appendix A: Bibliographical Notes The Negro in America has undergone centuries of oppression. He has been robbed of his manhood, and he has also been robbed of his history. It is important, in order to restore the self-worth of an individual, that he have some sense of who he is, and of his past. Continuing ignorance of Negro history on the high school and college level contributes to maintaining prejudiced views of Negroes by whites, and undermines the Negro's self-esteem. As the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits points out in his excellent The Myth of the Negro Past (Beacon, 1958), "the American Negro, in discovering that he has a past, has added assurance that he will have a future,'' Workers therefore owe it to themselves to become familiar with Negro history, and to transmit what they learn to both whites and Negro The purpose of this appendix is to suggest some good sources on this neglected subject. The history of Negro protest is old. On the West African slave ship, West Indies and pre- Civil war South period, see Herskovits (cited above) and Herbert Aptheker's Negro Slave 119