The Week

• The nation passed its last weekend in May, the Memorial Day weekend, on waves of shock rolling in from Vietnam. There were five suicides in three days, four of them by women and girls. Thich Thien Minh, aide to Thich Tri Quang, ordered an end to the suicides but the arson and sacking of U.S. installations went on. In his address at Arlington, the President contrasted Buddhist “acts of desperation” to the “sacrifice of thousands of lives that have already been made for the cause of independence and political hope in South Vietnam.” He could have been referring, for example, to the U.S. mortality figures for the week of May 21: 146 dead, 820 wounded—the highest ever in the history of the war. But to some Americans all the sacrifices were made by the Buddhists. At the University of Chicago, American clergymen showed ecumenical solidarity by sharing a Memorial Day service for peace in Vietnam with a Buddhist monk from Saigon, who praised the motives of those who had burned themselves to death. In a Chicago hotel, 35 wounded Vietnam veterans, some in casts and on crutches, were refused seats at an ice show, allegedly because their presence would disturb the paying customers. The letter of apology was from Conrad Hilton.

• At the crossroads where the civil rights movement has lingered becalmed since the passing of the last voting rights bill, things are starting to accelerate once more in several directions, mostly downhill. Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the razziest and inmost of the civil rights groups, set the pace by ousting founding fathers John Lewis and James Foreman in favor of Stokely Carmichael (of Alabama’s all-Negro “Black Panther” Party) and Ruby Smith Robinson. Already deep in the wildwoods of race-pacifism (Vietnam, according to Carmichael, is a “war on colored people”), SNCC has set its course on blotting out the thin grey line that has always separated anti-white from pro-black in official policy statements. This distressed professional integrationist Martin Luther King who, from the Chicago headquarters of his new and studiously un- razzy Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, deplored the blackness of some panthers (but deplored even more the “whole structure of our society” that caused his friends and former allies to do like they do). Dick Gregory joined SNCC in boy-cotting the White House Civil Rights Conference, the in thing to do, but King, like Gregory a Vietnik, declined to stray too far from White House patronage. So did Floyd McKissick of CORE, who, however, arrived at the Conference table armed with sufficient charges of bad faith to blow it up. McKissick’s stridency was one token of CORE’s break-up and decline, which set in when LBJ absorbed its former director, James Farmer, into government programs. While McKissick was objecting, CORE’s Harlem chapter was lighting out after SNCC on the Vietnam trail, and another chapter, in Mount Vernon, N.Y., was getting itself expelled in a controversy over anti- Semitism. On the White House’s preliminary agenda were projects for aid and education totalling $10 billion over the next ten years, according to Dr. King, whose organization needs a bundle as much as the next man’s; but with the poverty militia backing up McKissick in lung-force there seemed little chance of agreement about anything, except maybe the whole structure of our society.

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Martin Luther King Jr

• The nation passed its last weekend in May, the Memorial Day weekend, on waves of shock rolling in from Vietnam. There were five suicides in three days, four of them by women and girls. Thich Thien Minh, aide to Thich Tri Quang, ordered an end to the suicides but the arson and sacking of U.S. installations went on. In his address at Arlington, the President contrasted Buddhist “acts of desperation” to the “sacrifice of thousands of lives that have already been made for the cause of independence and political hope in South Vietnam.” He could have been referring, for example, to the U.S. mortality figures for the week of May 21: 146 dead, 820 wounded—the highest ever in the history of the war. But to some Americans all the sacrifices were made by the Buddhists. At the University of Chicago, American clergymen showed ecumenical solidarity by sharing a Memorial Day service for peace in Vietnam with a Buddhist monk from Saigon, who praised the motives of those who had burned themselves to death. In a Chicago hotel, 35 wounded Vietnam veterans, some in casts and on crutches, were refused seats at an ice show, allegedly because their presence would disturb the paying customers. The letter of apology was from Conrad Hilton.

• At the crossroads where the civil rights movement has lingered becalmed since the passing of the last voting rights bill, things are starting to accelerate once more in several directions, mostly downhill. Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the razziest and inmost of the civil rights groups, set the pace by ousting founding fathers John Lewis and James Foreman in favor of Stokely Carmichael (of Alabama’s all-Negro “Black Panther” Party) and Ruby Smith Robinson. Already deep in the wildwoods of race-pacifism (Vietnam, according to Carmichael, is a “war on colored people”), SNCC has set its course on blotting out the thin grey line that has always separated anti-white from pro-black in official policy statements. This distressed professional integrationist Martin Luther King who, from the Chicago headquarters of his new and studiously un- razzy Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, deplored the blackness of some panthers (but deplored even more the “whole structure of our society” that caused his friends and former allies to do like they do). Dick Gregory joined SNCC in boy-cotting the White House Civil Rights Conference, the in thing to do, but King, like Gregory a Vietnik, declined to stray too far from White House patronage. So did Floyd McKissick of CORE, who, however, arrived at the Conference table armed with sufficient charges of bad faith to blow it up. McKissick’s stridency was one token of CORE’s break-up and decline, which set in when LBJ absorbed its former director, James Farmer, into government programs. While McKissick was objecting, CORE’s Harlem chapter was lighting out after SNCC on the Vietnam trail, and another chapter, in Mount Vernon, N.Y., was getting itself expelled in a controversy over anti- Semitism. On the White House’s preliminary agenda were projects for aid and education totalling $10 billion over the next ten years, according to Dr. King, whose organization needs a bundle as much as the next man’s; but with the poverty militia backing up McKissick in lung-force there seemed little chance of agreement about anything, except maybe the whole structure of our society.