If there ever is to be in the South any significant degree of desegregation in public institutions, let alone any significant degree of integration in society as a whole, it can come effectively in one way only: slowly, cautiously, voluntarily, “some time in the future.” This is the doctrine of “gradualism,” and the Negro’s professional leaders despise it. They insist, with some plausibility, that constitutional rights are personal and immediate rights, capable of being lost irretrievably if they are not exercised at once; and now that new constitutional rights have been created and defined, they ask, why is the realization of these rights coming so slowly? “How long do you expect us to wait?” they demand. “It is almost a hundred years since slavery now.” They do not want to be gradual; they want to be integrated. To these impatient appeals, the South makes a number of responses, none of them pleasing to the militant Negro leadership. But the responses make sense nonetheless. The answers add up to this: The Negro is plunging forward now in a movement that is at once both revolutionary and evolutionary. All of man’s history suggests that while revolutionary changes may be hurried and pushed along by processes of forced growth, the changes that result from evolution can never be hurried at all. They will come at their own speed, and their own speed is glacial. In many areas, the revolution proceeds apace. William G. Carleton, of the University of Florida at Gainesville, acknowledges “great strides” by the Southern Negro since World War II. In 1944, Negroes were virtually barred from participation in Southern politics. In 1960, when he reported in the _Teachers’ College Record_ that Negro rights were making haste slowly, 1,100,000 Negroes were registered to vote in Southern primaries and general elections. The number is considerably higher in 1962, and the United States Civil Rights Commission has conceded that except in a relatively few Black Belt localities in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, Negroes now are not prevented from registering or voting over most of the South. In most areas, it is no longer the intimidation of the white man, but far more often the indolence, indifference, and incapacity of the Negro himself that keeps him from the polls. In some Southern States, Negro registration has climbed to 35 or 40 per cent of the adult Negro population; white registration, in many communities, is seldom much more than half or two-thirds of the adult population. In Florida, Negro registration increased from 8000 in 1944 to 160,000 in 1960. North Carolina and Virginia have witnessed gains almost as notable. To Carleton, a “veritable revolution” is seen in the South: “Had the mass of Southerners in 1950 been told that by 1960 there would be considerable token desegregation in the schools of Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas; even more desegregation on city bus lines; and that segregation at lunch