He frequently published in Playboy Magazine during the same time period (1962) he wrote this piece about Black Americans.
In those years he was a vocal, mainstream Leftist on most issues, but I don't recall that he was ever anti-Israel, or that he ever attacked free enterprise or great wealth.
Hentoff started to publicly move to the Right on several issues around 1980. Very late in life, he actually went to work for the Cato Institute, and he even wrote a weekly column for World Net Daily at one point in time.
In those heady days, Negroes were THE minority group. O yeah, there were others, Indians, Chinese, etc. But by and large it was a Black and White world. Now both Black and White are BOTH minority groups.
Unfortunately, IMNVHO, African-Americans are stuck with outdated racial metaphors from the days when they perceived themselves as one-half of the Black/White equation. Now that "Latinos," "Hispanics," etc. are approaching fully one-third of the overall population, the Integration/Civil Rights rhetoric of the 50s and 60s is somewhat irrelevant.
Asians, Middle Eastern and African Muslims, Afro-Caribbeans, and of course, Hispanics, are swamping the country. Narurally, each group has its own racial identity and are united in repugnance at what they see as the "African-American Lifestyle." IMNVHO, "White People," that is Americans of some sort of Western Christian European heritage, are much more tolerant of Negroes than the new Americans, who have apparently not even appeared on the Negro Community's radar, politically represented as they are by the Democrat Party, which is content to keep the Negro underclass as beggars rather than true citizens.
White people are not the Negro's major problem at the moment. The way the country's demographic has changed is everyone's problem. Soon, the Negro component of the population will fall to around 10%. There's no way that half of anything will be "given" to the Negroes. That, that is going to mean trouble.