Breaking Whitey's Vice

African Dashikis and guerrilla-style fatigues set the sartorial tone and tough radicalism dominated the rhetoric last week when 350 delegates to the First National Black Economic Conference met in Detroit. First they ejected white news men. Then they rejected capitalism for a socialist state for Negroes. Within this brave new world, young Negroes would spurn such "dead end" and "status quo" jobs as driving trucks, delivering mail or repairing television sets.

What would take up the slack and yet provide the proper status? Economics Professor Robert Browne of Fairleigh Dickinson University had both a grievance and an ingenious thought. As he and other black militants see it, whitey has dominated vice in the U.S. for too long. Recommending that Negroes get their fair share of that action, he declared: "Racketeering, prostitution and the numbers, if they are to continue, must be put into the hands of the black community." How that might be accomplished without upsetting another militant minority, the Mafia, was left for a subsequent conference to discuss.

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