Who Needs the Negro?

xvi, 266 pp. An assessment of the continued discrimination against African-Americans, released over fifty years, and yet somehow still indicative of the current reality of entrenched racism and systematic oppression. The excerpt from Staughton Lynd's foreword presented on the back cover reads like a modern news story: "... white America now contends that since the black person is equal before the law his failure to achieve equality in other respects must be his own fault. Discrimination is no longer necessary because automation makes it impossible for the black man to compete... The ghetto [exists] not in spire of America but because of it... the evil of the police in the ghetto is less their brutality than their commitment to preserve a brutally inhuman system."