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Weariness. Reinforced, maybe, by war weariness, or economic -- well, of course, I was going to say, economic depression, but I guess in the ghetto areas economic depression is the way of life, without regard to the war economy.

To answer your question directly -- no, I did not, and I don't think Mamie sensed, a passivity that was specifically related to civil rights problems at that time -- but a more comprehensive kind of passivity.

In discussing civil rights, I was really thinking more specifically of job rights. Didn't blacks lose jobs after the war, during the reconversaion period?

Yes, except that blacks almost accept that as, you know, the way of life in an essentially racist society. That's happening now. You know, in the fiscal crisis and the economic doldrums, the labor unions are asserting and being successful in putting seniority above affirmative action, over the past few years. So that all of the gains which we felt we were making by a more assertive affirmative action program are now being lost by the “last hired, first fired” seniority approach that the power of the unions maintains.

The distunbing thing is that this has been repeated so often, and when we talk about unemployment figures, for example, you know, you talk about 8, 10, 11 percent unemployment as the general national norm, almost everybody, including the President's Economic Advisors who tell the President that a certain amount of unemployment is necessary to control inflation, knows -- everyone knows that this means two to