Finds Moderate Attitude of Most Negroes Toward Whites and Jews Generally Unchanged

The moderate attitude of most Negroes towards whites generally and Jews in particular that prevailed several years ago remains basically unchanged, according to a Harvard sociologist whose 1964 study of protest and prejudice in the black community was conducted under a grant from the B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League, But Dr. Gary T. Marx reports that his earlier conclusions that most Negroes favor integration, oppose indiscriminate violence and are not consistently anti-white or anti-Semitic still hold in 1969 but “perhaps not as strongly.” Dr. Marx’s original study was conducted by the University of California’s Research Center under an ADL granted and published in 1967 as a book, “Protest and Prejudice: A Study of Belief in the Black Community.”

Now an assistant professor in the department of social relations at Harvard, Dr. Marx has up-dated his findings. He has based his latest conclusions on 15 studies of Negro opinion made in 1967 and 1968 involving two national and 34 city samples. He observed that the lack of change in mass attitude does not mean that “black anger is insignificant.”

According to Dr. Marx, while moderation still prevails, “five to 20 percent of the black population (from one to four million people) hold attitudes indicating a depth of estrangement and bitterness unique in American history.”