 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the second day's session of the Civil Rights Imposition. Our first speaker this morning is the son of a sharecropper who became a distinguished sociologist. Robin Murphy Williams Jr. was born in rural North Carolina. He started early in his life to make a serious study of intergroup relations, inequality, and injustice. To that end, he has contributed many noted publications. His textbook, American Society, is recognized as one of the most sensitive and widely used volumes in the discipline of sociology. He has been a member of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council and a consultant to the National Institute of Mental Health. He has served with the National Science Foundation and as president of the American Sociological Association. He is Henry Scarborough Professor of Social Sciences at Cornell University. His scholarship on the subjects of justice and equality has consistently maintained the scientific integrity which eminently qualifies him to discuss with us today equal opportunity as a social problem. It is a pleasure to welcome him to this podium, Dr. Williams. Mr. Chairman, Chief Justice Warren, Mrs. Warren, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. It is a pleasure to be called upon to speak to this distinguished gathering on this historic occasion. I claim the further privilege, however, of altering the scientific somewhat by expanding it a little. My title is equal opportunity as a social problem. I should like to indicate to begin with that equal opportunity involves the entire field of civil and political rights. Secondly, I want to make a distinction between social problems and societal problems. A social problem is a social condition which someone regards as undesirable. Alcoholism is a social problem. Societal problems are those that represent serious threats to the effectiveness and viability of our society as a whole. And they arise from the basic functioning of main institutions of that society. Environmental pollution is a societal problem. So is a major economic depression or the disintegration of the central cities. Individualized prejudice is a social problem. Institutionalized discrimination and segregation is a societal problem, a problem of the survival of the whole society. Today then we are speaking of equality of opportunity as a part of the generic societal problem of the basic allocations of rights and responsibilities in a complex national society. This will be an optimistic address. But at first you may not regard it as at all optimistic. I will merely remind us in the beginning that enduring optimism is likely to be achieved only by first passing through that initial pessimism that may be induced by a hard look at the recalcitrance of the real world. Let us first examine the basic elements in the societal problem of equality of opportunity. Some of the numerous diverse rights and claims of the members of a community necessarily come into direct contradiction or opposition at some time. And some of these oppositions are continuous or chronic. This is an unavoidable characteristic of human society. Namely, not all rights or claims can be maximized at the same time. The claim of right by a parent to authority over his child in our society does not validly extend to depriving the child of access to education. Local control of public schools can never mean total and indefinite rights to do just anything whatsoever with those schools. It was said the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. We may legitimately broaden this classic summary. The price of a viable society likewise is eternal vigilance and eternal attention to the boundaries of liberty, the limits of equality and inequality, the appropriate occasions for compromises, and the needs for judgments in equity as well as judgments in principle. Equality of opportunity does not exist unless individuals can effectively exercise the basic civil liberties. Over the centuries, the ideas of civil liberties and rights have gradually come to include positive rights to do as well as to be protected from and the protection against private individuals and groups as well as against governments. In the United States, we have seen a fluctuating but resisting struggle from the beginning of the nation to secure and extend such protections from the original notion of a political elite made up of white, male, adult, native born, property owning and self-chosen guardians of the Republic. We have seen the extension of civil rights and civic participation to non-whites, women, the young, aliens, and the property lists. The point is, and I think probably ladies and gentlemen, this is the most important point of the whole talk. The point is that the categorical exclusion of anyone on an arbitrary or inscribed basis more and more has come to be regarded as incompatible with the basic kinds of our society. It was in this context that institutionalized racial discrimination and segregation began to be successfully challenged anew in the 1930s and thereafter. Beginning with decisions regarding higher education, Murray in 36, Gaines in 38, the Supreme Court steadily broadened the equal protection of the laws. We know that history, I won't recapitulate it. Meanwhile, the executive and the legislative branches of the federal government under the stimulus of articulate and organized pressure from the NAACP, the March on Washington, and other groups had made initial efforts to establish fair employment practices. Some states did likewise. The military establishment was rapidly desegregated. By the time of the Brown decision in 1954, they had developed a loose, diverse, and fluid, but very real, and highly dedicated civil rights movement. What were the fundamental values and beliefs upon which the movement was based? My reason for introducing this is that I feel that in the year 1972, it is crucial that we see the clear ethical basis and the clear conceptual rationale in order to preserve and extend the achievements of a civil rights movement, the Warren Court, and the Johnson administration. The urgency of clarification for the 1970s is underscored by some recent tendencies to look upon the idea of equality of opportunity as at best overly limited and outmoded, or at worst as a sham and a diversion. We shall argue to the contrary that further movement towards such equality is crucial for the future and could not be repudiated without grave damage to the body politic. In all democratic societies, people attach a positive value to the principle of equality. And the same is true of the principle of freedom. But the two values are not the same, and under some conditions, an emphasis on equality can lead to diminished freedom and an extreme degree of individual freedom can lead to great inequality. At the same time, institutions and relationships are governed by the contradictory principles of ascription, or birth, and the contrary principle of individual achievement or performance. Under the principle of ascription, an individual's place in society is acquired on the basis of birth by membership in a particular kinship group. Or it is categorically assigned to him as men or women, old or young, members of political parties, occupational classes, racial, ethnic or religious categories, and the like. Now, it seems to me that the main emphasis in American conceptions of equality consistently has centered upon equality of opportunity rather than equality. The idea of equality of opportunity is so powerful and so attractive in our society because it has represented to many people the possibility of tying together harmoniously the notions of equality and of achievement. These partly contradictory principles can be regarded as compatible if social rewards are based on meritorious performance and if the opportunity to compete is equally open to all. And the expression to all comes to have an increasingly inclusive meaning in our society of citizens rather than of subjects of the state. In the broad sweep of history since the voyages of discovery, the industrial and the democratic revolutions have steadily moved toward including everybody as members of a total social public community. In view of this record of historical change, it might seem that the advocates of equality of opportunity in America at this time could be expected to look toward the future with high hope and resolution. But I believe that I have been able to detect since the high water marks of 1964 and 1965 to see some signs of disaffection and discouragement. I do not share that pessimism and to see clearly where we now stand, I think we need to grasp what the legacy of the 1960s means. I unfortunately didn't have all the speeches before me when I wrote this one so this duplicates something. It's already said, I think it's worth saying again. During the civil rights period, determined effort cleared away most of the legal and many of the de facto barriers to full access and participation in the mainstream of American life. After the long period of suppression and enforced inequality from Plessy in 1896 down to practically World War II, surely the changes of the period 1945 to 1965 are remarkable against any kind of realistic historical criteria. Why then is equality of opportunity still a societal problem? There are two commanding reasons. One is a reality, crucial and massive reality of continued inequality of rights. The other lies in aspirations and expectations that extend beyond the limits of what probably could have been accomplished in that period of time. First, the matter of expectations and aspirations. Hope feeds on accomplishment and a partly open door can be more frustrating than one completely locked. The speed of large-scale social change is maddeningly slow to us mortals who live in the here and now. And when actual change is less than expected, dissatisfaction may be intense. Yet I think we have to keep the full picture in view. I think, for example, that we have to decisively repudiate here and now the notion which I've heard from people of impeccable liberal credentials lately that there's no difference between illegal and de facto segregation or at least one's just as bad as the other. I do not believe that for a minute, and I think that American history shows clearly that there are decisive differences. Inegalitarian systems are most resistant to change when they're supported by law because both the influence of legitimation by the law and the effective claim to the binding coercive power of the state are entailed in de jure enforcement. The positive implications also holds true that the abolition of legal disabilities and discriminations facilitates the resolution of conflicts of interest and reduces the level of hostility and conflict in the society. I wrote this particular passage in 1947. Thus far in American history, the establishment of political rights, civil rights and civil liberties for portions of the national population formally denied these rights has been based squarely upon a set of values and beliefs that were present in the founding of the Republic. In every major instance, the rights newly established were already being exercised by dominant elements of the political community and were merely extended to a category of people hitherto denied those rights. In every major instance also, the rights were actively sought and demanded against initial resistance by struggling for safety, opportunity, and respect. Minorities in the United States have continually recalled the society politically to the primary principles and the primary dilemmas of value in its basic institutions. I'd like to add lip. We need minorities. We need people fighting for rights, denied them. We need them to win, and then we need to find some more rights to fight for because we need it for the maintenance and reinforcement of the basic values of our society. Now, I'm almost through, Mr. Chairman. The facts are that the increased legal rights and lessened discrimination achieved during the 1960s left many great inequalities and genuine equality of opportunity requires full equality of access to public goods and services. Once a society achieves some approximation to formal equality of opportunity, it has made a great stride toward justice. But it has not necessarily lessened the likelihood of widespread discontent over the substantive inequalities that remain. It's been known for a long time that organized protest comes not from groups that are most deprived and oppressed conditions, but from those who have acquired a sense of common fate, a basis of hope, common aspirations, and a moral claim to redress of grievances. Reviewing these considerations way back in 1964 AD, I said clearly it is an easy prediction that conflicts over segregation and group discrimination are certain to emerge as black people increase their education, income, and occupational status without at the same time securing the removal of barriers to full participation in the society at large, end of quote. I think we all know what happened in the immediately ensuing years in American cities. Since 1965, there have been substantial gains in education, economic opportunity, and political participation. But limited and rendering the remaining differences, if anything, all the more conspicuous. But of all the effects of the civil rights movement, to me the most important has been the marked awakening of black consciousness, civic involvement, rising self-esteem, and group pride. And in spite of all the talk about backlash, the attitudes of the white population over the long pull have grown more accepting and more favorable toward equality of treatment. Thus, in spite of major deficits and failures, the positive entries in the national ledger are many. What is now problematical is the direction of future efforts. Currently, there is an obvious increase in the rhetoric of group claims to categorical rights and privileges. More recently, to the group assertions of the traditional ethnic and racial minorities are being added the new voices of the white ethnic. A quota mentality appears in some quarters. Meritocracy has become a term of reproach in those quarters, rather than a term of approval. How important are these developments? To grant freely the legitimacy and importance of ethnic membership and historic memory does not commit us to approve of ethnocentrism, particularism, chauvinism, or group hatred, no matter how new it is or how popular it may be at some particular time. We are all multi-group people in the modern age, and to lose our inclusive loyalties would be to remove much of the richness of civilized life. But I think we have to remember that the acceptance of universalistic rules applied to individuals rather than to groups will be neither widespread nor stable unless individuals find that their group membership does not expose them to involuntary disadvantage produced by discrimination. If a large proportion of the members of any group within our society feel themselves severely handicapped by discrimination persistently, they will sooner or later reject integration and individual achievement. Therefore, integration depends upon an agreement that the rules of the game are not hopelessly rigged in favor of one group. Recognition of the dignity of ethnic identity and the legitimacy of ethnic claims to justice and respect may be one of the most important enduring lessons of our recent time of troubles. Such recognition and respect are eminently compatible with equality of opportunity, with protection of the disadvantaged, and with collective policies to limit inequality. The contrasting principles of categorical exclusion and categorical allocation of resources as over against genuine equal opportunity are clear. Equality of opportunity does require positive action of whatever kind is feasible and effective in allowing individuals to develop and use their talents. Considering past discrimination and other disadvantages, the needed positive action is where the emphasis must go. Finally, if this is not too general and abstract, all solutions to problems create new problems. We should not be discouraged by that. It's inevitable. The very success of a solution guarantees that it will generate new problems for us. That's why we have history. That's why we're not robots. The mark of great societies as of great men and women is not just the capacity to solve a problem, but to continually face and solve new problems. The deepest meaning of equality of opportunity in America would be that our society comes to provide the specific and realistic conditions in which all persons can engage in that adventure of continuous confrontation with problems with all that capacities and with the zest that comes to everyone when we know we're performing at our best. Thank you. Yesterday I called attention to the members of the University Committee which planned this symposium. One of those members is Dr. Melvin P. Sykes, Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He will introduce our guest speaker this morning, Dr. Sykes. In their absence, I would like to recognize President and Mrs. Johnson, Chief Justice and Mrs. Warren, Congressman Pickle, and Texas's most beautiful gift to Capitol Hill, Congresswoman-elect Jordan. In a day of what has been called phony patriotism, in a day of seeming anti-intellectualism, in a day of a strange kind of metamorphosis where our national emblem seems to be changing from the eagle to the ostrich, in a day of benign neglect, if not utter disregard, in a day when a landslide for apathy is mistaken for a mandate from the people, in a day when there is oblique support for the resurgence of the Klan and ignoring of this by the FBI, one begins to wonder, is America safe? This question was raised in the 18th century, and a black man was the first person to die to ensure the safety of America at that time. The question was raised again in the 19th century. There is a document in its original form in the Library of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Emancipation Proclamation, that spoke to the question, is America safe? And black men died at that time to ensure its safety. In the middle of the 20th century, at a time when black Americans were trying to prick the conscience of white America by what we call riots, although when it happened earlier during the Revolutionary War we called it a struggle for independence, the question was raised again. I want to go back for a moment to the Civil War period because Abraham Lincoln said, I am concerned about the Union. My total concern is for the safety of the Union. If I can save the Union without freeing one slave, I will do that. If I have to free all slaves to save the Union, I will do that. My concern is the safety of America, so to speak. Of course, I thought he was trying to save just me. Today, the question is raised again, and of course I might say that you probably didn't know that, you probably didn't know about Christmas Addicts, because that wasn't in your history books, and I didn't find in my history books. There is a lot of educational deprivation. I say to you that as long as we have persons like Julian Bond, America will be safe. America will be safe because Julian Bond graduated from a black college, demeaned, underfinanced, poor in many ways, rich in their contributions to America. A reading of your history will recount and talk about the kinds of persons who have graduated from black schools, Morehouse being one of the leading institutions there. America will be safe as long as we continue to graduate some people from black institutions, and while on that subject, I think that maybe our busing and exchange should have started with our college administrators and teachers so that they might have learned what it's like so they could better teach the younger ones and help them to understand busing issues. Julian Bond was the communications director for SNCC. He worked diligently. He had the courage of his convictions. He was the beginner of trouble in Atlanta, and I think the one thing to your credit, Julian, is you went to jail, I heard. He began the, quote, agitation, end quote, in Atlanta. He did more than this. He had the courage to be and to do. He was duly elected because of that courage as a Georgia legislator. Of course, his colleagues, as is often so true of the kinds of distortion that we get, wouldn't seat him because of his views on Vietnam. He dared to think. He dared to think and to live by his convictions. Of course, the Supreme Court reversed this and pointed out the era of the ways of his colleagues, and he was seated, I believe, January 9th, 1967. If that's the wrong date, let's pretend it was so that I can continue to be sharp. We could go on talking about Julian Bond and his contributions, not to black folks because he is black, but to Americans because he is an outstanding American. It is a pleasure. It is a privilege to present at this time an orator, a social critic, and, most of all, a great young man, Julian Bond. Thank you. Thank you a great, great deal. You know, it's usually the custom for most speakers to tell the audience what a great pleasure it is to be wherever you find yourself happening to be, but it is a great pleasure for me to find myself here and to find myself associated, if only in passing, with some of the people who have been here on yesterday and today. It's particularly interesting to me to have an opportunity to meet Justice Warren. Dr. Sykes mentioned in the introduction that I had been involved in litigation before the Supreme Court. It's also interesting to look out into the audience and see the last real attorney general the United States had, Mr. Ramsey Clark. In a very real sense for me, Justice Warren, Attorney General Clark, and Attorney General Clark's father represent, in a very personal way, the difference between the era we discuss, some of us with nostalgia, and the era we find ourselves in now. About two months ago in Kansas City, I appeared on the same platform with former Justice Clark and mentioned to him that I had been involved in a Supreme Court case. It was titled Julian Bond vs. Sloppy Floyd. And the issue was whether or not the Georgia House of Representatives had the right to prevent me from taking my seat. And the court, under Justice Warren, decided unanimously in my favor that I was right and they were wrong. And I asked Justice Clark if the same case were to come before the court now if it would be decided in the same fashion. And he just laughed. And I asked him again, what would happen if the course came before the court? And he just laughed again. And I was told later that justices off the bench don't comment on those on the bench. But I thought his laughter was sinister and it frightened me. But in wondering why I was asked to join the distinguished people who have spoken here, I decided that it must have been because I am a politician and I've been asked to speak on the politics of inequality. I want to emphasize that I am a politician, not a statesman. Statesman is a politician who cannot get elected and I am a politician. In political campaigns, I support candidate A or candidate B. In the last election between the two men running, I supported the man who lost. Now trying to get on the good side of the man who won. I probably shouldn't even be here. But I hope he doesn't take unkindly the bad things I and some others said about him during the course of the campaign. I want to be friends with him. I'm trying to learn how to tap dance. We are here on yesterday and today to observe the opening of the repository of the documents of an era of the rather recent American past. Now the record ought to be seen as much more than simply pieces of paper, copies of bills or speeches made. The record in fact is in changes in people's lives, in votes cast for the first time, in elections won, in jobs secured, in education achieved, and in the bittersweet discovery that hamburgers are only hamburgers wherever they are eaten. Now had that era not occurred, life for one-tenth of the nation would be poorer, poorer not in dollars and cents, but in aspirations ended, in hopes dashed, poorer in spirit. That era came to an end four years ago. If four years from now similar gatherings like this one are called to reflect on comparable achievements in the present government, the papers on civil rights would barely fill a good match book, and the meeting could be held in a telephone booth. That has been the result of four lost years and will probably be the result of four years more. Governments change as do the men who run them. The changes of the 60s the papers here reflect as this collection is opened, are daily being closed out by men whose civil rights concerns are limited to their right to say busing, or quotas, or welfare instead of nigger. That was the substance of the election just held. The choice, simply put, was between the past performance of one fallible man and the unproved promises of another. Those who believed Gallup and Harris knew all along that the outcome was never in doubt. We learned that regular Democrats would split over McGovern, that a great deal of organized labor didn't like him, that white Southern voters with George Wallace gone would go to Nixon, that much of the wealthy worried about taxes would do the same, that the middle class saw safer streets under Nixon, that the newly discovered white ethnics wanted to crack down on dissenters and deserters, that college students could not stick to anything over a prolonged period of time, and that almost no single identifiable group could be found, except for black people, to cast votes as a block for George McGovern. The old Democratic coalition, much mourned in recent years, had vanished in presidential politics at any rate. So if the election on November 7th illuminated any political movement at all, it was the movement of the comfortable, the callous, and the smug, closing their ranks and closing their hearts against the claims and calls to conscience put forward by the forgotten and unrepresented elements of American society. Despite all of the talk about Eagleton, the Watergate, the war, welfare quotas, busing taxes, the candidate shifts on policy and platform, the last minute peace initiative, the central issue was always clear. As the Reverend Jesse Lewis Jackson has put it, it wasn't the bus, it was us. There is then something wrong with an American election that sees one candidate receiving nearly all of the black votes cast, the other candidate receiving nearly three quarters of the white votes cast. That does not describe a race between Democrats and Republicans, or even between two men named Nixon and McGovern. This was rather a national referendum on what has more politely been called the social issue. For black people in America then, the election results on November the 7th signal consigning nearly all of our political hopes and dreams to an immediate oblivion from which they may never emerge. It meant reinstalling in power those who believe in privilege for the powerful and neglect of the powerless. It meant giving a four-year free hand to the current occupants of Uncle Strom's cabin, a free hand to men who have demonstrated they have no concern whatsoever for freedom of the press, the privacy of the individual, or for the constitutionally guaranteed civil rights and civil liberties we should all like to believe are taken for granted by those who govern us. So the President has now got his four more years. Four more years to put his men on the Supreme Court, to turn it back into the progressive social force it used to be, or to continue its current trend toward repression. He will continue to set the budgets, to name the directors, set the policies for the Department of Health Education and Welfare, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Intimidation. He will continue to decide whether stocks go up or down, whether money is loose or tight, whether our weekly paychecks buy more or less, or indeed, whether we will have any paychecks at all. He has now got in fact four more years in which to shape America to his mold, to recruit from the frightened a constituency against the forgotten. Now a short while ago, the National Urban Coalition tried to spell out what was wrong in the United States and what it took to set it right. America's illness, they said, which all of us ought to feel in one way or another, has its roots in the distance between national ideal and national reality. The ideal, of course, is a country where everyone gets an equal chance to perform, where jobs exist for everyone who wants one, where health care and personal safety are assured, where we live in harmony with each other, where everyone has a decent place to live. The American reality, of course, is something very different from that. All of us know that most American cities are in trouble, that poverty continues in the middle of wealth, that unemployment is high, that malnutrition is widespread, that injustice does exist, that tensions do endure. In short, we know that our society does not function the way it might. But if we solve the greatest of our ills, the Urban Coalition says, and they define the greatest American ill as our paralysis of spirit and will, we can narrow the distance between what we have and what we want. Now, in their view, there are several general goals that the country ought to try to pursue. We have to try to achieve full employment with a high level of economic growth, try to provide all citizens with an equal opportunity to participate in American society, and in the shaping of the governmental decisions which affect their lives, we guarantee that no American goes without the basic necessities, those being food, shelter, health care, a healthy environment, personal safety, and an adequate income, and we have to try to meet our obligation to assist in the economic development of the world's lesser developed nations. But in addition to their major goals, in addition to their definition of the paralysis of will and the major American ill, there is another goal much more desirable and another ill much more horrible. That ill is racism, the goal is containment and eradication. Everyone ought to know that there is one consuming problem that makes life in New York's Harlem, in Cleveland's Huff, in Los Angeles' Watts, or Atlanta's Vine City, or in any of America's other urban Atticas, where some men are held in bondage by some other men, both intolerable and insufferable. That single problem is race. It is race that elected our present president in 1968. It is race that made some Americans serve and die more readily than others in Vietnam. It is race that makes some children more educated than others. It is race that colors all of our lives. But over the past several years, solutions to the problem of race and to the pathologies of society that spring from it have been more than abundant. There are several solutions, generally part of the standard American liberal agenda that, if implemented, would begin to make this country a proper place for men and women to live and work, a healthy place for children to play and to grow and to learn. Of course, none of these utopian things are likely to occur. Our Congress, overwhelmingly Democratic, is atrophied, cautious, and frightened of the president. The much heralded New South seems depressingly like too much of the old. And for four more years, we will have leadership in the White House that believes that the American people are children after all who must be bullied and protected by the great White Godfather. Black Americans traditionally look to the Congress, to the courts, and for a few short years, to the White House for our political salvation. For nearly half a country on Election Day, the possibility of an exchange of presidents meant nothing more than an exchange of photographs on the post office wall or on a dormitory wall dartboard. For black people, the election was a referendum on us, on whether we would progress, run in place, or continue sliding backward as we have been doing since 1968. Since the president took office, we have spent billions more on war over two million more Americans have been added to the ranks of the unemployed. Six million more are on ever-mounting relief rolls. Inflation has reduced our standard of living. Elitist, sexist, and racist practices run rampant, unchecked through public and private American life. None of these practices will be ended by any cataclysmic revolution anytime soon. They can be dented, however, by hard work, by concerted political and social action if that action can gather together the best of what is left of the old coalition. That has been the history of our lives and politics in America. Constant pressure and agitation, with or without allies, aimed at improving our position. What has happened to us since the first black people came here the year before the Mayflower arrived is that almost everything and nothing have changed. On the positive side, we are no longer slaves. Next, we can sit at lunch counters, sit downstairs in movie theaters, ride in the front of buses, register, vote, work, and go to school where we once could not. But in a great many ways, we are constantly discovering that things have either not changed at all or in some ways have managed to become much worse. A quick look at all of the facts and figures that measure how well or how poorly a group of people are doing. The kinds of figures that measure infant mortality, unemployment, median family income, life expectancy. A quick look at those figures demonstrates rather clearly that the average black American, while better off by comparison than his father was, is actually worse off when his statistics are measured against similar ones for white people. It is almost as though we are climbing a molasses mountain dressed in snowshoes, while the rest of the country rides a rather leisurely ski lift to the top. It is these figures, the pathology that results from them, that causes so much discontent and depression in black America today. The realization is that over the years, the diverse strategies of Booker T. Washington, of Dr. Du Bois, of Marcus Garvey, of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X separately have not appreciably improved the material lot of the masses of black people. The separate agitations these philosophies gave birth to, a return to mother Africa, a struggle in the courts, a nonviolent thrust into the streets, a violent attempt at doing injury to white America, all these have accustomed a great many white people to believe that black people have not only got everything that we want, but half of what white America has too. But the problem so often erroneously referred to as America's black problem, in reality a massive white problem continues. It continues despite wars on poverty and great societies and new frontiers, and will continue despite the new federalism. The roots of this problem are deep in the fabric of this country. It began with the rape of Africa, the stealing of child from mother, the separation of husband from wife, the imposition of an alien religion on an already religious group of people, the displacement of a whole people in their land and their country, the roots involved the basest kind of prejudice, an economic system which has always believed that property is more important than people, the results have been to place and put black people at the bottom of a ladder, which in this country is supposed to lead to jobs and homes and education and security. It has made us the last to be hired and the first to be fired. It has as any reading of the decades casualty lists from Vietnam will show, made our young men first in war, last in peace, and seldom in the hearts of their countrymen. It has given black children a chance to go to school for 12 years and emerge with a sixth grade education. It has put us on relief where we are called lazy and shiflus, while 6,000 white American farmers are paid $25,000 a year each not to farm. In short, we are in what you might call with some kindness, bad shape. The gains made on yesterday are vanishing today. The victories won in the wars of 1954 and 1960 are being negated by the winner of the battle of 68 and the rout of 72. The question remaining for the future is will it happen again? What is happening now happened once before in American history in the years after reconstruction. In both cases, a president made a cynical deal, not just with the unreconstructed south, but with the national unreconstructed mentality that believe then, as it believes now, that the American social agenda should not include those at the bottom of the ladder. In return for political support, the national government in Washington agreed to let the individual states handle their social issue in their own way. The promises made that we would be included in the social and economic life of the nation were repudiated. The liberal crusaders for social justice and democracy became weary or involved in other concerns. The aspirations by and movement of black people began to be curtailed, not by organized violence and barbarity, but by a series of legal and extra-legal maneuvers designed to make us less than political and economic equals. The hopes and beliefs of black people that racial equality or social justice could be achieved through litigation, legislation, negotiation, occasional direct action, strong alliances with liberal and centrist groups were supplanted by disillusionment, bitterness, and now open anger. The guilt and indignation of northern supporters of the Southern Drive for equality turned into an attitude of first cautious and now more open racism when northern black people began to take seriously the claims for progress and began to look for visible signs in their own backyards. The politics of 1972 has made this process legitimate. The politics of wealth and stealth have replaced the politics of compassion and openness. Reversing this recession of political concern ought to be part of the American agenda for the remainder of the 70s. For black Americans in the future, this will be done increasingly through political action. The recent election did show black political activists that there are those in our community who place pennies above principle who believe that bigness in their bank books takes priority over the beauty of their blackness. Those who urge black people to vote against their own interests demonstrate that talent at tap dancing is no substitute for thinking. But politics, as it has existed for us, is changing. Its history is generally a sorry one, a history with one shining bright moment the 10 years of reconstruction, the only 10 American years when democracy began to mean as much in Mississippi as it always has meant in Maine, the only American decade in which an aggressive national government acted with armed might to protect the economic, civil, and political rights of the black population. From the closing of that period of hope just before the beginning of the 20th century, the century whose problems Dr. W. B. Du Bois said would be the problem of the color line, to this point just past the middle of the 20th century, we have seen our fortunes ebb and rise and now ebb again. From the days when Frederick Douglass said that the Republican Party is the ship and all else is the sea, to the days of Franklin Roosevelt, black people have tried first one and now the other national political party. We have been ill-served by politicians whom the late Ralph McGill once described as so grotesque, it seems impossible they could have been influential. But if the reconstruction comparison is correct, history repeats itself anew. Just as that first reconstruction ended with a deal made in a hotel room, the second 1960s one ended that way too. A deal made in a hotel room in Miami Beach in 1968 that gave yesterday's America veto power over Supreme Court nominees, gave the White South hope that the drive to register black voters would stop, gave the White South hope that the slow pace of school integration would move even slower and breathe new life into the national mood of resistance to progress for black people. Those interested in beginning anew must reassess the mistaken assumptions under which an earlier generation marched and picketed to limited and only in retrospect often plastic victories. We must assume that most of America lacks the will, the courage and the intelligence to voluntarily grant black Americans equality. We must assume that people don't discriminate just for the fun of it, the function of prejudice is to defend special interests, those being social, economic, political, psychological and sexual, that appeals to the fair play of prejudice people are like saying prayers to the wind. We have to assume that the old patterns will change, that those in power will relinquish that power, only if they are forced to make a clear-cut choice between continuation of the old relationship and another clear-cut and highly cherished value. We must assume that conflict and struggle and confrontation are often necessary for social change and that the rights and lives of real human beings are at stake and these are in the long run neither balatable or negotiable. But black people's politics above all else must be unified, organized and democratic with a small D. The debate over who will broker power for the black masses is a legitimate one, but no group can broker with presidents if it can't control a precinct back home. In the numbers of black people holding public office we are at a zenith of power but in our ability to swing votes, to reward service, to punish opposition, to elect anyone beside ourselves we are woefully inadequate. The answer, of course, is organization and coalition with the former first for the latter asked the question with whom. The November 7th election answered no one, at least not right now. Today's politics has become the I've got mine variety. The public servant makes the public slave to its own worst instincts. American voters are registering more but voting less. The entire process is suspect, particularly among those who expected the most and received the least. We hear a great deal of talk just after and just before American elections about real majorities and new majorities and silent majorities and noisy ones and about which candidate failed to seize the center and which one was extreme. Past election history demonstrates that the people will care about each other when they are taught to do so, not lectured but taught. A good school teacher like President Johnson knows the difference and good politicians and good people led by good leadership can make a difference between the politics of despair and hopelessness and the politics of hope. We had our fingers on it in this country, not so long ago, and it slipped away. It slipped when bussing stopped being transportation and became integration, when welfare became a badge of laziness instead of a sign of helplessness, when reckless power delivered plums to the privilege and destroyed the programs aimed at the poor, and when there could not be summoned an American majority to cast votes for the future and against the past. The argument has been made and will be made that the president of that era was only the fortunate victim of social forces and a national mood over which he had no control. That may well be true, but when the forces demanded and the mood permitted for once an activist human-hearted man had his hand on the levers of power and division beyond the next election, he was there when we and the nation needed him and by God do I wish he was there now. But the tribe...