Full Text of the Excerpt

JACQUELYN HALL:

What is your feeling, though, about why what seems to be a decline in the Council has happened?

MARION WRIGHT:

It's inevitable. The Southern Regional Council had a reason for being when you were fighting to establish the rights of a minority in this country. People would contribute to it; they took interest in it; you had something you could fight over. Now the rights have been either Congressionally or judicially established. If our sole mission had been to secure those rights, we should quit business at that time. It takes a different temperament and different talent to operate in an area when law has already stepped in. So I think it quite natural that you feel now not that we want to leave everything up to the government, but that the government has done the job, and the government is equipped to carry it on. Why should a private organization continue to exist? That's what it gets down to.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Part of what was going on, though, during George Esser's period was an effort to redirect the Council toward a different approach and different issues and so on, but that didn't seem to work.

MARION WRIGHT:

If I were cynical, as I hope I am not, I would say that for the same reason that I criticize a government agency for seeking to preserve itself after it has accomplished its purpose, I would say that the Southern Regional Council had been attempting to preserve itself after its principal mission was accomplished. You have now the Urban League, which works on employment. The field is pretty well occupied, and our principal mission is ended.