Reprint: All-Black Economy Idea Rejected

              Reprint: All-Black Economy Idea Rejected

In a commencement address Monday, Andrew Brimmer, a Federal Reserve Board member and a Negro, rejected the notion of an all-black economy on carefully reasoned economic grounds. He argued persuasively and realistically that a separate black community can provide neither full employment for its members nor all the goods and services they want to buy. Brimmer urged the graduates of Clark College, Georgia, to use their option to take Jobs in the wider world.
They key word in his analysis is "option. For too long, most Negro college graduates haven't had any choice outside their own community. Today they are often unaware of or unwilling to take advantage of such broader opportunities that they do have. Unfortunately, this will remain the case for some time. Moreover, of course, many Negroes have few if any meaningful Job options at all.
It  is easy to conclude on such evidence that the Negro must seek his future outside the mainstream of America. Marcus Garvey's back-to-Afrlca movement has a present-day counterpart: The proposal to carve out a separate black nation within America. But neither program nor any other along the same lines represents a practical alternative. Rather, the American dream must become a reality for our twenty million American Negroes.
It is important that Brimmer and others who have won the prizes of the wider world hammer home to Negro college graduates that they, too, can make good. But it is at least equally vital that spokesmen acceptable to Negro high school dropouts and hardcore unemployment come forward to tell it to them like it really Is. Until they do, Negro separatism will continue to have wide appeal In the urban ghettos, with all of the problems which this involves.
The Washington Evening Star