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01/27/70
The question for black people in the 1970s are only continuations of the same questions raised in the 1960s, and center around one point: will we as a people survive?
Only when that question is answered can the questions of our poverty, our poor housing and education, our lack of opportunity be answered. And none of these can be approached until we manage - alone or in concert with others - to force the United States to come to grips with its most pressing dilemmas, racism and war.
The latter, presently exhibiting itself in Vietnam, but soon to spread into all of Southeast Asia, is the terrible result of a bankrupt foreign policy that believes that Ward of Liberation must be bad. It is the result of a foreign policy that supports dictators of the right as long as they are mildly friendly to the United States, and it is a policy which has placed the economic interests of American capital above the real human interests of the oppressed peoples of the world.
It is, of course, the current conflict in Vietnam - the terrible war we wage against the people of that country, against international law, against all current international opinion - that has halted America from the few, faltering steps she began to take in the '60s toward making the American nightmare into the American dream.
It doesn't just take our young men, but also takes $30 billions of dollars a year that could be better spent in building cities here than in destroying villages there. There are no guarantees, of course, that if the war stopped tomorrow that $30 billion spent on death would then be spent here on bringing new life.
That guarantee comes only when black people and our allies - if we have any allies left - begin to demand of our elected representatives that Selma takes priority over Saigon, that men on the moon are worth more than men on the earth.
These demands can be made in the proper fashion, as we have attempted to make them in the past, but if they are continually ignored, then one can expect that tension will rise, frustration will increase, and black people will begin to follow the Constitutional injunction to rise up and strike down governments that are oppressive.
That is the prescription for the '70s.
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