NNPA -- Most African Americans are very reluctant to admit that there are basically two groups of Black people in this country. As we enter into a new year, it is time to confront this obvious reality so as to better plan a more productive present and future for our people.

The attitudes of one group, most definitely the largest, is best reflected in quotes by the following:

• George Schuyler, the Father of Black Conservatism – "A Black person learns very early that his color is a disadvantage in a world of white folks. This being an unalterable circumstance, one also learns very early to make the most of it. So the lifetime endeavor of the intelligent Negro is how to be reasonably happy though colored."
• Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas – "If I ever went to work for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or did anything directly connected with Blacks, my career will be irreparably ruined. The monkey would be on my back because I am Black. People meeting me for the first time will automatically dismiss my thinking as second rate."
• Thomas Sowell – "Black students with SAT scores of 1000 should not consider going to any Black college because they will be educationally mismatched."
• Bryant Gumbel – "I have become colorless. I have a clear speech and non-ethnic characteristics."
• Ballerina Janet Collins – "When you get to be an exceptional Black, you don't belong to the whites and you don't belong to the Blacks. You are too good for the Blacks and you will always be too Black to the whites."

The attitudes of the other group are best reflected in quotes by the following:

• Malcolm X – "We must establish all over the country schools of our own to train our children to become scientists and mathematicians. We must realize the need for adult education and for job retraining programs that will emphasize a changing society in which automation plays the key role. We intend to use the tools of education to help raise our people to an unprecedented level of excellence and self-respect through their own efforts."
• Martin Luther King, Jr. – "Black Power is also a call for the pooling of Black financial resources to achieve economic security. ... Through the pooling of such resources and the development of habits of thrift and techniques of wise investment, the Negro will be doing his share to grapple with problems of economic deprivation. If Black Power means the development of this kind of strength within the Negro community, then it is a quest for basic, necessary, legitimate power."
• Mary McLeod Bethune, in her last will and testament – "I leave you the challenge of developing confidence in one another. This kind of confidence will aid the economic rise of the race by bringing together the pennies and dollars of our people and ploughing them into useful channels. I leave you respect for knowledge. Knowledge is the prime need of the hour."
• Lerone Bennett, Jr. – "Given the way we were forced to live in this society, the miracle is not that so many families are broken, but that so many are still together. That so many Black fathers are still at home. That so many Black mothers are still raising good children. It is the incredible toughness and resilience in Black people that gives me hope."

Those guided and influenced by the quotes by Brother Malcolm, Dr. King, Mrs. Bethune and Bennett should not be dismayed that those influenced by the quotes of Schuyler, Thomas, Sowell, Gumble and Collins are in the majority. Serious movement has never been launched by or even supported by the majority. What they must do is to join together with like-minded people in their neighborhoods and thoroughly study, as a call to action, the guidelines offered by Brother Malcolm, Dr. King, Mrs. Bethune and Bennett. It is also critically important to read and organize around the Master Plan offered by Dr. Chancellor Williams in Chapter 15 of his classic, must-read book, Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C to 2000 A.D.

— Journalist/Lecturer A. Peter Bailey, a former associate editor of Ebony, can be reached at apeterb@verizon.net.