662 ADDRESSES AND STATE PAPERS

the race issue. Are there any things that a state can do to help us
through these next 15 or 20 years of rather rough sailing?

A. Well, we were very fortunate last year in Baltimore because we
were fortunate enough to have people in government, the Mayor of
Baltimore City, McKeldin, who recently left office, and people at the
State level who were responsive to these problems. Now, the big is-
sues that come about relate around the inability to continue to project
an attitude of sympathy and understanding and problem solving, be-
cause among the general, private sector there are people who con-
stantly try to slow down efforts to solve the problem and there are
also people among the so-called militants who don't exercise a proper
degree of restraint and responsibility. Just because a person is a
militant doesn't mean that he doesn't have the intelligence to reach
for adequate solutions to the problem. I talked to a very militant
gentleman in my office yesterday, and I got a tremendous amount of
good out of the conversation. But there are other types who simply
want to unload their emotions, and the unloading of emotions only
compounds this problem, it doesn't solve it.

Q. Unfortunately, in the effort to combat crime, when we talk now
about crime in the streets, immediately many Negro leaders say this
is an anti-Negro slogan. But yet crime is a problem and has to be
recognized as such. How can we bring these two together?

A. We're hurt constantly by careless statements in this area. I can
think of one that happened here in the Washington area recently
when a judge on the circuit court made a very careless statement, an
overgeneralization, which inflamed the Negro community, and I think
rightly inflamed. However, I don't think that the matter is one that
could not have been put to rest had the man that made the statement
forthrightly admitted that it was an uncircumspect statement and
apologized for it. We get so bound up in our desire to protect our-
selves against ever making a mistake that we can't say we're wrong.
This is the greatest thing that puts racial relations off the track. If the
people who are trying to impede this movement can be relegated to
a position of noninfluence, and if the people who occasionally impede
it by a mistake in judgment in a statement, will frankly admit the
mistake, in other words, if those of us in the middle will stay in the
middle and disavow the ends, the people who are at the extreme re-
jection end and the people who are at the other end of the spectrum —
people who I think are completely unreasonable such as Mr. Brown
and people at the other end like Mr. Wallace who I don't think are
very reasonable either — we can solve the problem. But there has to be