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as those employed against the civil rights bill of last year. Giving in to black demands would give blacks a special status over white people they do not deserve. Having a court order integrate the buses would make blacks wards of the state. Insistence on integration robbed blacks of racial pride. And most importantly, upsetting traditional patterns of white supremacy and black inferiority would alienate whites, destroying an imaginary conception of racial harmony that existed in the segregated world.

It isn't hard to recall hearing versions of those arguments on the floor of the United States Senate and in the White House last year. Recycling old arguments against justice comes naturally in a society that has long embraced the ideal but not the reality of equality.

If there has been a frightening consistency to the arguments made by freedom's opponents, the supporters of justice have been consistent too.

For all of this century, the movement for civil and human rights has followed the program put forth by W.E.B. Dubois in 1905:

"We must complain," he said. "Yes plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong -- this is the ancient unerring way to liberty, and we must follow it ...."

"Next, we propose to work. These are the things that we as Black men must try to do. To press the matter of stopping the curtailment of our political rights; to urge Negroes to vote