ABSTRACT

Matthew Holden is a colleague whom I have come to know over the years within the domains of political science, who has offered continuing encouragement, and direction in my intellectual development, and my ideas. My responsibility is to comment on Essay V, “The Next Five Years: I. Morale and Objective Capacity.” Grounded in what he calls “political rationality,” one of the major themes that runs throughout this seminal volume, Holden argues at the outset of Essay IV (see the previous contribution from Michael Preston), that “rational strategy would be aimed,... at saving the opportunity for a decisive break with institutionalized racism” (Holden, 1973: 131). If such a break was to occur however, he tells us “the next five years (1971-1976) constitute the critical zone in which certain strategic measures ought to be initiated or accomplished” (Holden, 1973: 138). It is in Essay V where Holden programmatically addresses what he feels black folk must do to maintain an “integrated polity.”