Speech fragment concerning blacks engaging in a new politics , no date [1967-1968?]

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Over the years between 1960 and 1965, the black college student was the decisive factor in social change for those black people less fortunate than the students themselves.

With the beginnings of the student sit-in movement in February, 1960, the black college student became the primary movers and doers on the racial scene. For nearly five years, black college students lead and directed and helped to man to barricades of a movement, begun on black college campuses, that eventually began to touch the lives of rural black people throughout the states of the old confederacy.

The movement these young people made moved from the Southern black college campus to the Southern fields where academic degrees were useless. The movement against segregated lunch counters moved against segregated voting booths in parts of the South where a college education meant next to nothing.

Now in 1968, the participation of those same young people is limited. Some have withdrawn because things have gotten better, they say. Others never joined, believing it better to somehow prepare themselves for some new tomorrow where racial distinctions would have dissapeared and men would considered one another on merit.

That both of these assumptions is false can be quickly shown. We are told that things are better while we know they are getting worse

We are told things we don't need to hear

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What is needed by from the talented elite of Negro America is the thinking and plotting and planning and training to lead the rest of us into a new and better life.

We need to examine all plans and programs offered by all our leaders and see where each will lead.

Is political participation, the avenue of other immigrant and ethnic groups, to be our way of moving up the ladder?

Or ought we not realize the Watts, Detroit and Newark showed that American Negroes are voting more and enjoying it less. In fact, the events of this past summer ought to show us that the old style of politics, the politics that has made this country what it is today, is incapable of answering the needs of Negro people across the country.

The black college student is indeed a member of an elite. There are only 200,000 of us in college at all, and of that number, 90% attend all-Negro schools. And over the past summer, we have seem those schools subjected to vicious and nearly racists attacks by college professors who ought to know better, including one who teaches at Harvard, a school that featured its own cross burings a few years ago.

The black millions outside that lucky 200,000 thousand live in the same conditions today they lived in 5 nd 10 years ago.

Clark wrote in his Dark Ghetto: "The dark ghettos are social, political, educational and - above all - economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject people, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt and fear of their masters."

Just as the events of the past seven years have caused members of the elite represented by the black college student to escape from the ghetto Clark described, the rest of us, most of us, all of the Negroes who are not fortunate enough to become members of of the Great Society, lost ground relative to white people. To quote our President, Lyndon Baines Johnson:

President Johnson 7

In 1930, the rate of unemployment for Negroes and white was about the same. 35 years later, the Negro rate is twice as high. In 1948, the 8 per cent unemployment rate for Negro teen-age boys was less than that for whites. By 1964, the rate had grown to 23 per cent, twice that for white teen agers. Between 1949 and 1959, the income of Negro men relative to white men declined in every section of the country. From 1952 to 1963, the median income of Negro families compared to white actually dropped 4%.

Since 1947, the numver of white families living in poverty has decreased 27% while the number of poor non-white families has decreased inly 3%. In infant mortality of nonwhites in 1940 was 70% greater than whites. 22 years later it was 90 per cent greater. (And I might add it is greater today in central Harlem than it is in Saigon, a figure which may give some indication of where our national values are placed.)

Those are the problems that the black college student must address himself to. And he ought to seek aid and assistance from his white colleagues, but it must be just that, aid and assistance, and not direction. The blacl student must rid himself of the notion that his degree from words deleted Morehouse or from Harlem Harvard will solve his problems or the problems of his race, for not even Ralph Bunche' degrees and status could get his little black son into the Forrest Hills Tennis Club.

The dliimena for the black student is exactly that - to play Ralph Bunche or to play Frederick Douglas, to play Booker T. Washington, or to play W. E. B. DuBois, to play Edward Brooke, or to play Henry McNeal Turner, the Negro who preceded me into the Geprgia House of Representatives, and who left that body 99 years ago with these words:

"We are told that if black men want to speak, they must speak through white trumpets; if black men want their sentiments expressed, they must be adulterated and sent through white messengers, who will quibble, and equivocate and evade as rapidly as the pendulum of a clock. Well let me say this to the colored

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men of Georgia (and let me say it to the colored men of Cincinnati) The Black man cannot protect a country if the country doesn't protect him; and if tomorrow a war should arise, I would not raise afinger t musket to defend a country where my manhood is denied. I will say this much to the colored men of Georgia. Never lift a finger or raise a hand in defense of Georgia, unless Georgia ackowledges that you are men and invests you with the right pertainng to manhood."

And the responsibility of the black college students today is to reject the Lyndon Johnson notion of America and adopt, instead, the Frederick Douglass vision. Douglass was asked over 100 years ago what American holidays meant to American Negroes and he answered:

What to the American slave is your fourth of July. I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all the other days of the year the grand gross injustice and cruelty to which he is constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, and unholy liscence, your national greatness, swelling vanity, your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless, your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence, your prayers and hymns sermons and thanksgivings with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception impiety and hypocrisy - a thin velie to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is anot a nation of earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than arent are the people of the United States at this very hour."