 In America, he said, it's different. In the old country on Easter, the police get all licked up and come riding into the ghettos, get the Christ killers, they'd say, and swing their leather whips and run the animals right into us. When police do that, he said, there's no one you can turn to. I asked him what a ghetto was. He said it was the oldest, poorest part of town, where the Jews were forced to work and live. His parents died in that ghetto. But first, they sent him to America. He was just a kid, 11. 11? He was luckier than my great-grandfather. He was 27. He had to work quite a few years busting rocks at his farm in Galway to pay for the passage over here. His probe was so strong that everyone used to make fun of him. And he began to talk less and less. He had to get a job busting rocks on the railroad because it was the only thing he knew how to do. He died working for the railroad. Well, Mike, I can understand that your grandfather had a tough time here, but so did my ancestors. They came from China on a boat, stuffed in like cattle for 40 days. Most of the time here, they were afraid the Irish were going to be or shoot them, since they were trying to also protect their jobs. Everyone who came here had it tough. And everybody who came here picked on somebody else. You called us mixed. We called you coollies. Everyone who wanted to make it here had to have a gimmick. My grandfather didn't do what his father did on the tracks. He hustled for the Democratic Party and never once looked to discharge him or in his life. He was the chairman of the Democratic Party clubhouse on our old district. My grandfather got my dad a job on the police force after the war. I thought it was a real big deal then. But now my dad's got it tough. He's got to walk a beat in the ghetto. Oh, Harry, you're breaking my heart. Imagine that, walking a beat among all those colored folks, too. Don't put him on, Spencer. Being a cop in a ghetto is tough. Even if you're a black cop, it's tough. Listen, Schroeder. A cop's a cop. Black, white, Puerto Rican, it doesn't make any difference. He's the man. In the ghetto, as you call it, you think of cops sort of the same way that Levi's grandfather used to think of the police in Russia. And we have a reason to feel that way. Oh, don't be so sensitive, Carol. Nobody's putting blacks down by saying it's tough to be a cop in the ghetto. What's wrong with the things that make a ghetto? Believe me, I know it because we lived there until I was almost nine. My grandparents still live there. But my father wanted out. He thought the neighborhood was getting too rough for him to raise his kids in. The same year he bought his first truck, he moved his cross town. Don't be so sensitive, Carol. Don't you know Baralotti here? Used to live in your neighborhood. Used to live on your block. Remember, Carol? Way back when. It was a neighborhood and not ghetto. When you didn't have to step over winos on curbs and junkies in halls. Schroeder here. Levy, Fawn, and O'Hara. They live on blocks, don't they? But they're not like ours. So tell me, sensitive sister, is that why you're so sensitive? Because in Newspree country, you made that neighborhood up. Carol? The homeless in neighborhood, in a free country. Come and get them. It's a tough question. And there's some other tough things, too. Like, how free is a free country when you're black like Carol? And how come Spencer's so angry? How come cops mean something different to Levy and O'Hara than they do to Spencer and Carol? Tough question. And the answer is just as tough. The Statue of Liberty has been lighting the wave for strangers at our gate since 1884. And before her, this harbor was the welcoming community. It's seen them all, Serbs, Scots, Danes, Turks, betting their lives that it would be better here. But notice the lady here. She faces the sea. Behind her, over there, are a lot of folks she never welcomed. Carol's grandfather, and Spencer's, and mine, they arrived a little further down the coast, places like Savannah and Charleston. And they didn't want to come here at all. Bears was no trip to the promised land. It was held with brandings and beatings and filth and starvation. No one knows how many dragged their chains over the side, drowning, rather than submit to a life of slavery. Well, we're the descendants of the survivors, the immigrants from America. From 1619, when 20 of us were sold by a Dutch ship to the English colony in Jamestown, Virginia, 14 million blacks came and changed to this land of the free. We were the black gold that made fantastic fortunes for those who ran the slave trade. Demands for labor grew with the invention of the cotton gin. Slaves were needed to man the sprawling plantations. But as slavery spread across the land, so too did a spirit of black resistance. Rebellions of Denmark, Visi, Gabriel, and Nat Turner revealed that there were men, not animals, in the slave court. Henry Highland Garnett, a black prophet, cried, rather die free men than live as slaves. Let your motto be resistance, resistance, resistance. Many resisted, and many died. But for the waves of white immigrants who began to arrive, America was a golden dream. Transforming the dream into reality was to test every group that came. Each shared the disease, dislocation, and poverty that was the mark of the newcomer. Many perished who came. Most who would survive did so by building a method of escape. It was a ladder, a ladder that could scale the walls of the new world. Only four wrongs to this ladder. But often it took more than one generation for each newcomer to reach just the first wrong. But without each wrong, it was almost impossible to reach the next. For most, the first wrong was education. Education was intended for everybody. It was to be the real passport by which the new American could compete for better jobs. American education intended that each child be more skilled than its father. See, skills meant money. Money one could save. Money one could invest in things that made more money. And this, we call with capital, the immigrant began to have status in his community. Now to protect this position, he began to get involved in politics. And in the affairs that were affecting the things that went on around him and within his community, this is power. And with political power, the immigrant was able to shape his community or move out. And with this ladder, this four wrong ladder, he was able to scale the walls that bound him in. OK, if my father used it, how come the same matter wasn't used by then? For the black immigrant from the south, for Spencer's grandfather, for Carroll's father, for mine, no ladder existed. And the walls of bound men were much too high to leap. To understand why no ladder existed, you have to understand the particular way that black men and women were viewed in America. To Washington, Patrick Henry, and Jefferson, we were things, not people. They were not considered evil men because they owned slaves. They were simply men of property. And blacks were regarded in their society as animal labor. Why the Constitution considered a slave to be three-fifths of a free man. We were not even conceited to have the same rights as others until the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to that Constitution. The 13th Amendment of 1865 said slavery shall not exist. And for a brief moment, we dared to dream that our chains were finally gone. During the radical reconstruction, we saw a few schools and orphanages and hospitals finally being built for us. We saw radicals in the state legislatures of the South open the ballot box and the jury box to include us. But then we saw it all die. A northern brother, Rutherford Hayes, said that absolute justice for the Negro could be got best by trusting the honorable and influential Southern white. So much for the 13th Amendment. We remained enslaved to lives of ignorance and poverty. The 14th Amendment in 1868 said all men born in the United States were citizens entitled to equal protection under the law. There is no equal protection under the law. When 1,200 black men could be murdered by mobs between 1890 and 1900, and not one white murderer be brought to justice. The 15th Amendment of 1870 said that the right to vote could not be denied because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. But for almost 100 years till the passage of the voting rights bill in 1965, we were systematically cheated in that right. Listen to Senator Ben Tillman of South Carolina. In 1900, he declared in the halls of Congress, we have done our level best. We have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last of the Negro voters. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We're not ashamed of it. Finally, mechanization of the southern plantation and persecution began to drive us from the land to the towns. But even there, the segregated life meant hunger and white violence. To us, the North meant opportunity. World War I had cut off the flood of European immigrant labor. Workers were needed in Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland and New York. By 1922, million of us had left the plantations. But we found a different America than had the other immigrants who preceded us to the northern city. No longer was there a need for the masses of unskilled labor to build the new cities and the new industry. It was an America that said all men are equal. Life men are more equal than others. It took us a long time to understand that. To realize that if there were any changes to be made, we would have to make them. Because when we came north, we found no magic ladder to scale our walls. No, sir, no magic ladder and no first rung called education. That meant very much. From slavery, when a man could have his hand cut off if he were caught riding, they told us that writing and reading was white man's business. Our business was sewing and reaping and harvesting. If you're going to scratch enough to feed your family, the whole family has to be out in the fields. There's not much time for reading and writing when you're fighting starvation. And yet, we've always had a hunger for education. At the end of the Civil War, when the federal government opened schools for freed men, 250,000 of them flocked to learn. But when President Hayes removed the Union troops, it was over for us. From then on, it was separate but unequal southern education, mathematics and languages for the whites, industrial training for the blacks. Let us learn to do common things in an uncommon manner, said Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee, and was applauded by a white society that needed maids and cheap labor. When we came north, we eagerly enrolled our children in the unsegregated schools. Then this dream too shriveled. With despair, we saw our children placed in overcrowded classrooms in the aged buildings of the inner cities. Too often, we saw them treated by white teachers as persons with little potential. Because we've watched it happen, we've struggled to change the educational system. We want our children to hear the whole truth about our history so they can understand the whys of racism and prejudice. We want them to know and value our black contributors to our common culture. And we want them to see kids who are brown, like them, in their textbooks, who live in cities that are not green and clean. And we want teachers, black and white, who value our children. White parent groups have insisted on their role in helping design the education of their children. But community control has been resisted when the community has been predominantly non-white. The children of white unskilled immigrants knew that if they could complete their education, they would have a better chance of reaching that second wrong job opportunity. But the children of black unskilled immigrants have rarely found this to be so for them. Black graduates from high school are hired later than white dropouts and generally receive less money. Both labor and industry for more than a century have denied black workers equal hiring and advancement. Some unions have refused even to open their ranks to blacks. Denied apprentice programs, countless Negroes have been barred from higher income jobs. Without a good job, you can't save capital, rung number three. This was a Dutch neighborhood 300 years ago. Very nice then, kind of small town, very green, some English down the block. When the Irish started to arrive around 1840, they were poor farm people like O'Hara's great grandfather, not really used to town living. When they moved in renting from the Dutch and the English who moved out, talk had it that property values would go down. To hear the natives talk, you'd think that every legitimate child in town was Irish, and every local too. By the time the Italians and the Jews arrived in the neighborhood about 20 years later, a lot of the buildings had been bought by the Irish who were beginning to move up the ladder. Now every truant and criminal in town was automatically Italian. And as for the Jews, how could you trust people that had their Sabbath on Saturday? So the Irish moved. This part of town became Jewish and Italian. Well, by the time we arrived, most of the buildings belonged to people like Verlotti's folks and Levy's. They rented their houses to us and moved across town and out to the suburbs. You see, they were afraid that now that we were moving in, there would be all kinds of trouble. Now we were the bad guys. The absentee landlords broke up their one-family apartments into four or five one-room apartments. When they had installed a sink and a stove, they charged as much for each apartment as they had paid for four or five rooms themselves. The breakup of the old apartments changed this neighborhood to a teeming slum. So the black immigrant has his own section now, inherited from the Poles in Chicago and the Germans in Milwaukee, the Irish in Boston, and the Jews and the Italians in New York. But unlike all the groups who came before him, he alone can't move out. White America, immigrant and native born, won't let it. Their banks, their mortgage companies have denied him access to the white neighborhood. It seems that property values, not human values, have had to be protected. Poor people don't have much influence with public officials. Poor whites don't, and poor blacks sure don't. It's hard to get the city to collect all the garbage. They don't want to come to our side of town that often. It's hard to get the city to send enough cops to protect the block. It's hard to get the city to force our absentee landlords to protect our old houses from fire and our babies from rats. And it's hard not to get so angry that you tear the whole neighborhood up. Hard? Yes. But most blacks now seek to build a political and economic power that can remake our society. The power denied us by the southern politician who told us for 300 years that politics is white man's business. The power denied us by the northern politicians who told us that white city bosses know best. But we no longer ask, will they let us do it? In our neighborhood, we don't ask. We're organizing tenant groups and registering voters. Why now, Carol? I mean, after all these years, how come now you're organizing? A lot of things, I don't know. Well, everything. I mean, watching black nations growing up in Africa and making it. Electing Carl Stokes, Mayor Cleveland. See Martin Luther King get killed. And Stokely Carmichael getting angry. Reading Malcolm X. Fighting rats and roaches in my bathroom. Watching Muhammad Ali jive in with those TV guys. Here in the Supreme. Man, like it's time. It is time. For 300 years, this country has been blinded by a fear. A fear that has spawned violence. The fear of the black newcomer. And it's cost America its peace of mind. Maybe it's sold. It's cheated itself of the talents of its black children. How much more time can it afford? We're a nation of immigrants. Needing each other and not knowing each other. Look at us, said Richard Wright, a black writer. Know us and you know yourself. For we are you. What we want, what we represent, what we endure is what America is.