Integration must start at much lower levels—in kindergarten and Sunday school, in Cub Scouts and Campfire Girls—before idea patterns are fixed and before the matrix of emotion is stuffed with the corruption of intolerance. Integration must be complete and absolutely without “ifs,” “ands” and “buts.” Eventually, of course, from these levels it would proceed to intermarriage. But what harm then? It is not entirely facetious to say that legal intermarriage would only sanction and somewhat equalize the miscegenation that has been going on in this country since 1622 when, it is said, the first child of mixed Negro-white parentage was born in America. And to say that intermarriage between American Negroes and whites would increase the vitality of the American people is biologically sound. Fortunately integration is not a political concept (though it has been made a political issue) and is therefore not identified with the name of a leader. This has the advantage of depriving the opposition of that damaging leverage of vulnerable personality which leadership identification always provides and which can destroy or throw into long-lasting paralysis even the most salutary and easily defended social concepts. If you cannot overthrow the ideas which you fear or hate, then attack the man behind the ideas and thus debase what he stands for. That is the history of the struggle against ideas. But if the concept of integration has this advantage, it has also the disadvantage of being indivisible. There is no decalogue of integration, each item of which can be separately assimilated and practiced. It is not a “one thing at a time” thing, nor a “first things first” thing. It must be assimilated all at once or killed all at once. And it is this fact, I think, that frightens Negroes of the more stable classes. They see in integration a breakdown of certain monopolies in education and the professions and some business enterprises. In my own home town, for instance, where segregation could have been abolished twenty years ago, the Negro owner of the only Negro theater, who was at the same time on the city council, fought every attempt to wipe out the practice of excluding Negroes from white theaters, indoor sporting events, and other places of entertainment. He could get aid and comfort from a Negro school principal and certain Negro teachers who were afraid that the ell would lead to the mile and that their jobs would be thrown into an open nonracial competition which they were not prepared, they felt, to meet.