Black America in 1970 was weary and frustrated. Old targets of its assaults on racial injustice were becoming more elusive and were changing their shapes through disguises. Demonstrations for pure civil rights causes resulted in fewer concessions. Charismatic black leaders, once able to stir the national conscience almost at will, had gone to the mountaintop. Riots had proved ruinous. Rhetoric was boring. The voices of old allies were raised in eulogy of “the movement.”

Cynicism enveloped black America like a fog, so sure were blacks that they had been placed near the bottom of the list of national priorities. For blacks knew that their aspirations remained unfulfilled, and they knew that minority participation in the affairs of the nation was still circumscribed by a variety of hostile forces. Not the least of the latter was the notion in white America that judicial pronouncements and legislation of the sixties had lifted the black man's burden; that it was time to back away from black programs and turn with some urgency to “business as usual.”

In the Winter 1973 PS, a few charts and tables, and four paragraphs of dry prose were passed off as a “Report on the 1972 Annual Meeting.” Since no one who attended the meeting in Washington, D.C. would recognize the week in that report, something more descriptive seems in order.

For instance, the emphasis on program panel statistics ignores the fact that almost half of the meetings are not panels organized by the Program Committee. The Association, through its several committees, sponsored twenty-five meetings; these included the Annual Business Meeting, the Presidential Address by Robert E. Ward, reports of the year's activities of some committees, educational films, panels on political science education, and presentations of federal grant opportunities. Several groups not affiliated with APSA sponsored another some sixty-five meetings. Over twenty of these were cocktail parties. But in addition there were editorial board meetings, special-interest gatherings for political scientists specializing in federal studies, German politics, health politics, international studies, and transactionalism, to mention a few. The Caucus for a New Political Science and the Women's Caucus for Political Science continue to sponsor larger programs of panels and business meetings.