Protest and Prejudice: A Study of Belief in the Black Community

by Gary T. Marx

Foreword by Bayard Rustin

About The Book

A landmark volume, Protest and Prejudice is the first analytic nationwide study of Negro attitudes toward themselves, their condition, and toward whites. Using a carefully weighted sample to reflect the economic, educational, religious, and social backgrounds of America's diverse Negro population, Negro interviewers determined the Negro moods with respect to civil rights progress, integration, the police, black nationalism, violence, and whites.

In New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Birmingham (and random samples of metropolitan areas outside of the South), the interviewees were asked:

• Are things getting better or worse for the Negro?
• Where would you say the greater improvement is taking place, in the North or in the South?
• If our country got into a war today, would you think this country worth fighting for?
• Have civil rights demonstrations helped or hurt the Negro?

The questions measure the Negro's conception of his progress, intellectual sophistication, and self-esteem Militancy is defined and assessed, anti-Semitism among the Negro population is analyzed and evaluated along with anti-white attitudes in general. Often the results are expressed in the respondent's own words, and always the author offers analyses to relate Negro attitudes to American culture.

The results will surprise even those who consider themselves well informed about civil rights questions and will cause them to re-evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the various Negro civil rights and "black power" groups.

This is the third volume in the Patterns of American Prejudice series. Conducted by the Survey Research Center of the University of California at Berkeley, with the help of the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago, and sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. As a rich, well-documented report of Negro attitudes, Protest and Prejudice is being hailed as an important document in the history of public opinion research.

Illustrated with 124 tables.

About The Author

Gary T. Marx received his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught in the Department of Sociology and was a Research Associate at the Survey Research Center. He is presently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University and a Research Associate at the M.I.T.-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.

About The Book Series: Patterns of American Prejudice

Volume Three in a series based on the University of California Five-Year Study of Anti-Semitism in the United States, being conducted by the Survey Research Center Charles Y. Glock, Program Coordinator, under a grant from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith

Protest and Prejudice. Copyright 1967 by Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.

First Edition

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-22531

From The Dedication / Acknowledgement Page

To those oppressed because of their racial, religious, or ethnic identity in the hope that they will become more militant and more tolerant and thus transcend evils so long and cruelly perpetrated by man on man.