Negroes 'Essentially Conservative,' Most Prefer King, Moynihan Says

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, director of the Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies and one of the nation's leading experts on civil rights, said last night that Martin Luther King had far more support among Negro Americans than advocates of "Black Power," such as Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Moynihan said that King's nonviolent approach was "much more in keeping with the political and moral traditions of the American Negro." These traditions, he argued on a nationwide television program, have been essentially conservative. The only area where the Negro has been "radical," Moynihan said, is civil rights ,and "if he [King] isn't radical on that, who is?"

Moynihan was interviewed by CBS News in an hour-long program on 'Black Power-White Backlash."

He said that events of the past summer had resulted in a large "withdrawal of sentiment" by whites from the civil rights movement.

This withdrawal, he contended, has already resulted in the defeat of President Johnson's 1966 civil rights bill. "The most powerful Democratic liberal majority [of the century] did not do what it ought to have done," he declared.

For many Americans, the riots and disturbances in northern cities this summer have made it appear that Negroes are "aggressors," Moynihan said. Violence terrifies organized communities--middle-class communities.