5

3 3 3 3 3

development of agitation and organization of black people in this country through the '60s.

As the early sixties saw the birth in the rural South of a new kind of aggressiveness among the people America had thought were too servile and too subdued to protest against their condition in life, the northern urban poor, living in vertical prisons of concrete and glass, began through tenant organizations, rent strikes, and tenant unions to put flesh on a drive that had been building for many years, the desire of tenants to have something to say about their homes, their rents, their very lives.

Now these two movements - the southern drive which has turned in the late sixties and the beginning of the '70s, toward concerted political action, the movement which gave both ^the direction and ^the directors of the National Movement of Poor and Black People, and the growing