Owen Edwards, ‘Can the Negro Emancipate America’, Sep 06, 1963, Tribune, Vol: 27, Issue 36, p. 6.

Opinion piece reflecting on “March on Washington” and the Civil Rights Movement:

‘The tragedy for Americans is that hitherto they have seen the non-violent leaders as extremists. When the Black Muslim movement has performed a greater service is in burying this theory for good and all. Mr. W. Haywood Burns, a young Negro Harvard, has painted a masterful picture of the alternatives in methods of rebellion that lie before the American Negro in his The Voices of Negro Protest in America (published at 8s. 6d. for the Institute of Race Relations by Oxford University Press), and while paying just tribute to the vital role in the historical process played by the conservative National Association for the Advancement of Coloured Peoples and the present non-violent techniques first brought to a fine art in this theatre by Martin Luther King, he makes it quite clear that a gospel of utter rejection of America as put forward most persuasively by Elijah Muhammed and his followers has also struck a responsive chord in many Negroes whose progress to disillusion with all white men has passed the point of no return. And yet there is still time for white Americans to grasp the hand King and his followers continue to hold out to them, but as the Negroes themselves, from the writer James Baldwin to the Washington 200,000, have indicated, the time is short’.