in Alabama for white boys that unloaded white youngers into the hands of white wolves. That just went on in the Negro prisons. Young Negro boys were put in with the old Negro wolves. The whites took better care of their white truants. We colored didn't count That is why, I later

learned, the Negro sections have so many gal-boys in the streets today. The Southern prisons breed them." (p. 83)

A Negro leader in Nashville, indeed reported that one reason for swift progress on one integration matter, was the confrontation and threatened exposure of a number of white leaders, who had names, dates, and witnesses ready to testify. That city would break wide open, he said, if we exposed prominent white men who had played around with Negro boys in the 1820's and 1930's." Much less so, he added, since World War II.

All of this is well-known in sections of the Negro community in this country. And this freedom-fromexploitation theme therefore has its sexual overtones. The Negro wants freedom before the law, protection by the law, partly to protect Negro boys and girls from white men and boys.

It is therefore ironic, and perhaps inevitable, that another dimension of the problem is arising, and may become more serious than anyone could have expected. It is perhaps only inevitable that the long pent up repression, anger, feelings of injustice of Negroes would to some extent take sexual forms of expression. Why else has the Negro sometimes raped white women? Is this not the ultimate expression of his anger, his desire for revenge against the sexual exploitation of his own people, often members of his own family? As I write this on July 3, 1964, the New York Times reports the anger of the Negro community in Corona, a Long Island

one

community of New York City, at the way white men molest Negro women as they search for Negro prostitutes. A middle class, respectable business man driving along the street with his wife and family resents being approached at a stoplight by a drunken white man asking him "where can I find a woman?" And such families resent their college age daughters being stopped on the way home from school at the subway entrance. Such behavior of the white community breeds resentments that lead educated Negroes to draw up petitions for police protection, and leads less educated Negroes to retaliatory sexual violence.

On one hand, gangs of Negro boys are in many places making life miserable for young whites in the big cities. This is especially manifest in such a place as the Brooklyn youth house, which ex-inmates call sometimes the "big HD" not "house of detention," as most would think but "hell den." I have sought out and interviewed nearly a hundred boys who have served time in this institution during the last year, and the evidence is over-whelming: Negro boys are raping the white boys to an almost unbelievable extent. The staff cannot segregate whites and Negroes. The whole pressure for integration in the society around would never allow it. Aware of the vast amount of homosexual activity which goes on in the institution, the staff has carefully screened and isolated all "gay boys" putting them on the 10th floor. The result as one recent inmate said bitterly: "They take away all those who would like it or who would be willing, with the result that any white boy who is young, or is frail, or is without powerful friends or who is especially good looking gets raped before he is there twenty-four hours."

Some of the boys reported that they thought the staff was doing all they could to prevent it; a larger majority