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Tom Housh SCLC 10/12/70
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As we approach the 1970 election black Americans feel intense confusion about the future of democracy in America.
Exsisting institutions are failing to respond to the realities of our lives. The social values implicit in governmental decisions are no longer in accord with the needs strongly felt by black people.
We are becoming conditioned that if we are to that neither talk nor deeds are responsive to our communities. Increasingly it appears we are first in war, last in peace, and seldom in the hearts of our countrymen.
One cannot discuss what life will be like in the seventies without discussing what appears to be the most prevalent factors in American life: Racism and War.
These factors are very much evident at the present time in the facimiltes of Nixon and Agnew; Twins of confusion and chaos, who have set up shop in Washington. One week one leaves the shop to go abroad, cruising in the Medittarean expousing peace, while observing a mighty nations seventh fleet gun displays. At the same time the other2 roams the countryside enflaming an already extremly polarized homeland with the most pernicious kind of racist facist retoric.
While one soft talks and barely recognizes the publc exsistance of the other, the twins operate from the
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same breast fed Hitlers.
Their presence is a reflection of a conscience either no longer caring or disappeared. It began toward when Northern Black people decided that the right to freedom and liberty meant them too, and it beganending when blacks in South Chicago and the Hough district in Cleveland and Watts in Los Angeles decided that the right to vote or st at lunch counters or sit at lunch counters or peacefully petition the government for a redress of grievances meant nothing to a people who were living a 20th Century version of a colony, a social, educational and economic colony that was as effectively administered and controlled from outside as was the American colony in 1776, or the Vietnamese Colony before the Vietnamese people decided that they could rule themselves better than could any Frenchmen or Japanese or Americans, for that matter.3
Ours is a euphemistic, hypocritical society, consequently little or nothing is done in its own name. Schools are segregated, not to keep blacks seperate but to "preserve the neighborhood school." Police are given and exercise excessive power in the ghetto not because blacks must be controlled at all costs but to stop "crime in the streets" For every conceivable act to justify the Nixon-Agnew thinking, there exists a euphemism to disquise it.
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There seems to be something in our laws and institution peculiarly adapted to the Anglo-Saxon American race and [illegible] the fight, under which they will thrive and prosper, but under which all others wilt and die.
Racism was officially discovered by the former Governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner - and the commission he headed in 1968. The startling "discovery" of racism was in keeping with a long tradition in American history begun in 1492 when Christopher Columbus "discovered" America. To think of Columbus discovering America is comparable to thinking of Sitting Bull as discovering Washington. In view of the fact that the4 nation had successfully ignored, discredited and condemned those blacks (and the very few whites) who had previously labeled the United States racist, the seriousness with which the essential white ruling class Kerner Commissioner's charges were taken was itself and interesting reflection of racism. Social problems are not taken seriously in the United States, until sanctified by that segment of the system which creates them in the first place.
Unfortunately, the unwillingness and inability to define or analyze the problem it correctly identifies makes such commissions mystifying and lacking implementation.
For the record, it is necessary to deal briefly here with the myth of "Negro Progress". Despite the highly visible advancement of some black people in recent years, it must be understood that the objective situation of most blacks, relative to whites, has remained unchanged or deteriorated. Infant and
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- maternal death rates for black infants and mothers have deteriated in urban areas not only relative to white death5 rates but also relative to the black rates of the 1940's, 50's and early 60's.
Black unemployment as a percentage of all unemployment is rising, particularly for black youth. Although poverty is being reduced overall, black poverty as an incidence of all poverty has risen steadily since 1959. Economically and occupationally, black people are joining what is known as the middle class yet while the percentage of blacks employed in clerical positions increased from 1.2% in 1940 to 8.3% in 1969, the increase in the percentage of blacks in "household service" went from 22.4% in 1940 to 41.8% in 1969.
The gap in dollar income between whites and blacks has continued to rise since 1959, even when the South was excluded from the data* again excluding the South, the relative median income portion of blacks as compaired to whites has remained unchanged since 1953. In fact, the only improvement6 in relative income portion has been in the South.
As a woman in Atlanta once said, "The food Ralph Bunche eats doesn't fill my stomach".
*Data received from Fortune Magazine
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Wealth and power Racism has indeed in simple terms set man against man, nation against nation a have taken. Many of insisting that one group subordinate their wishes and desires to that of another, on gathering material wealth at the expense of his fellows and his environment.
W.E.B. DuBois in 1953 reflecting on upon half a century of experience and thought correctly summed up the crisis that currently engulfs occuppies our struggle at home and abroad. He said, "I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellowman; that to maintain this priviledge7 men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for the war continues largely to be color and race."
The reordering
In those words he has given us the insight to see that today we can put our finger on the enemy warmakers. He is the white male wealthy white male who through [?] domination of his manhood and