ABSTRACT
In many ways Russell’s article on “The Increase of American Violence” was a crystalization of his overall view on the United States at this time. Russell believed that America’s internal crisis together with its aggressive international policies was the main threat to world peace. In regard to the ferment within America Russell felt that “the present alignment of Negroes and white men is the most dangerous and explosive particular problem now existing in the United States, and the most difficult to solve.” 1 In his message to the Civil Rights Freedom March in Washington, which took place on 28 August 1963, Russell stated:
The treatment of the American Negro is an atrocity which has a history of three hundred years in what is now the United States of America. The number of Negroes who have died through torture, lonely murder and systematic maltreatment in this period without doubt is in excess of those killed by the Nazis in the course of their unparalleled barbarism in Europe. 2
