Word: blackly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...national policy through the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the linkup provides a base of 3.6 million members and a podium from which to advance his ideas. Last week he reiterated his call for national health insurance, tax reform and organization of community action groups to speak for the poor and the black. For the Teamsters, the alliance offers a much-needed aura of respectability. The Teamsters' acting president, Frank Fitzsimmons, made clear that his union would give up none of its independence by entering the alliance...
Seizing on these seemingly immutable truths, two itinerant Negro waiters named Dave Greene and Blueboy Harris make themselves rich by setting up a thriving numbers bank in the city's ghetto. Like so many other aspects of the black world, the numbers operation is an inverted form of a white institution, the solid local business community. It, too, boosts the economy and shapes the ghetto's social and political structure. For the author, a former waiter, it further serves as an arena for playing off characters who embody multiple visions of the Negro destiny...
Moral Search. Dave, the numbers king, is a forebear of today's black radicals, a sort of "new Negro" whose drive for power and respectability is born of pride, anger and an awareness of his heritage. At best, his racket can bring him power only at the cost of respectability, and even that power is sharply circumscribed...
...gamy con man, will play whatever role the whites expect of him with a comic and cynical flourish. His mistress, Kelly Sims, a college-educated chemist, bravely but quixotically banks her hopes for Negro progress on intellect. His eventual wife, Lila, a wise but unlettered country girl, has the "black granite" endurance that was once popularly thought to be the essential quality of the Negro race...
...made a terrible mistake," he says on his deathbed. "We forgot that white folks is still here. We forgot we was operating in America." Less totally true than it once was, perhaps, the author's inescapable moral still seems timely enough: crime may sometimes pay, but being black never does...