Word: payton
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...religious leaders, including Catholics and Jews and a scattering of liberal professors, was in attendance. The key figures were Dr. Robert Spike, Executive Director of the Commission on Religion and Race which had been established in 1963 in the midst of the Birmingham crisis, and Dr. Benjamin F. Payton, a young Negro sociologist and minister, then with the New York Protestant Council, and who a month later succeeded Spike in the national post. The larger purpose of the meeting was to propose that an "Economic Development Budget for Equal Rights in America," to cost $32 billion per year, be placed...
This demand was supported by a paper written by Dr. Payton analyzing the report....Dr. Payton's main assertion was that the report had declared that the employment and income gap between Negroes and whites was closing (where, in fact, the report had said exactly the opposite...
...truth, the Payton paper bordered on the psychopathological. (Although perhaps not: it was broadcast by the hundreds at the time, and achieved its objective brilliantly. But when Rainwater and Yancey recently asked to reproduce it in their book, Payton declined.) Charles M. Silberman, author of Crisis in Black and White, called it "the most blatant distortion that I can remember seeing in a long time." In a letter to a Presbyterian minister he wrote...
...role of unemployment in understanding all of the problems of Negro pathology: he presents one statistical correlation after another, showing that illegitimacy, desertion, and all the other symptoms show an unbelievably high correlation with changes in Negro unemployment: he marshals an enormous amount of evidence demonstrating--completely contrary to Payton's allegations throughout his essay--that Negro unemployment is very much more serious than the unemployment statistics indicate...
...Presidential assistant most directly responsible for civilrights matters, a devout Protestant layman, described Payton's paper as "the apotheosis of a big lie." But somehow a nerve had been touched in Liberal Protsetantism and there was no undoing the effects. Given the national prominence and the position of the persons who convened the Payton Spike meeting, and given the absence of any protest or correction from with in the church community, it had to be taken as the voice of American Protestantism. The issue of the Negro family was dead...