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in the sense of community between black and white Americans. It was the starting point, the first turn, on the road to the summer of 1967 and the dangers beyond.

This ominous decision was later made a part of the charter of America at the Cnstitutional Convention where Northern delegates gave into Southern threats and wrote slavery into the Constitution. Within a few years, slavery had become a cancer in the heart of the American political system, with incalculable results that are still resounding in the streets of America today.

During the whole of the slave period, black people had no political history, in the narrow sense of the term political. But it is impossible to understand to political history of that period without reference to the black man. Although black men were disfranchised in both the North and South, black people voted in every election, influencing the political process by their presence and by the cause they embodied. Some black people voted with their feet by escaping in the tens of thousands from the South. Others acted on the political process as nonviolent abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garent participated in the founding of the Liberty and Free Soil parties, both of which were forerunners of the Republican party. Still another form of political action fro the 4,000,000 slaves was violence, as evidenced by the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831.

When all these currents linked up with that great American agitator--Yankee self-interest--the stage was set for the Civil WAr, Emancipation and Reconstruction.

It was during this period that black people came onstage and spoke lines in their own name for the first time. And it was during this period that the seeds were sown for political crisis of today.