Speech challenging the American character, 1984

-4- although th. Mist others Mr Mayor Mr Hughes

Had he lived, he would undoubtedly look at the world about him with some alarm.

For although Black Americans have [Illegible] ^won some considerable accomplishments in the years since Martin Luther King died, the movement he lead appears to be in some dissray and the gains he can claim some credit for achieving seem in some danger of being destroyed.

History may well record that Martin Luther King was the premier figure in the 20th century struggle for economic and political justice for Black people.

He was born into a world nearly when Southern University was founded, our as rigidly segregated by custom and law as is South Africa today.

Most Black people South of the Mason Dixon Line were only two generations [illegible] away from slavery, a paycheck or two away from abject poverty. As a people, ^Southern Blacks were generally politically impotent, educationally impoverished, economically bankrupt.

Among King's contributions were to give eloquent voice to the aspirations of Black America, and to give life to a method of mass participation in the struggle for civil rights so that everyone - student, housewife, minister, every woman ^and every man could become an agent of their own deliverance.

At the beginning of the 20th centru^ury, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois set down a program [illegible] ^the movement ought to follow:

"We must complain. Yes plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong - this is the acient, unerring way to liberty, and we must follow it............

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Next, we propose to work. These are the things that we as Black men must try to do. To press the matter for stopping the curtailment of our political rights; to urge Negroes to vote intelligently and effectively; to push the matter of civil rights; to organize business cooperation; to build schoolhouses and increase the interest in education; to bring Negroes and labor unions into mutual understanding; to study Negro history; to attack crime among us....to do all in our power by word and by deed to increase the efficiency of our race, the enjoyment of its manhood rights, and the performance of its just duties. This is a large program. It cannot be realized in a short time, but now is the critical time."*

DuBois correctly predicted that the classic problem of the twentie century would be the problem of the color line.

[Illegible] ^{The modern movement} of Black Americans has ^{passed through} several climaxes. These have been years of great legal struggles in the courts, complimented by extra-legal struggles in the streets.

We s^won gains at lunch counters and movie theatres and polling places, and the fabric of legal apartheid in the United States began to be destroyed. What had begun as a movement for elemental civil rights has now become a political and economic movement, and Black men and women have won office and power in numbers we only dreamed of before.

But despite an impressive increase in the number of Black people holding office, despite the ability we now have to sit and eat or ride or vote in places that uasd to bar Black faces, in a very real

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way in 1986 we find our condition unchanged.

A quick look at all the statistics that show how well or how poorly a group of people are doing - ^{the kinds of figures that measure} infant mortality, [illegible] median family income, life expectancy - shows that while our general condition has improved a great deal, our relative condition has actually managed to get worse.

It is almost as if we were climbing a mollasses mountain dressed in snowshoes, while everyone else ris^des a rather leisurely ski-lift to the top. Now the ski slopes are more treacherous, the mollasses melting into mud, a Sargasso sea of joblessness for many and hopelessness for many more.

In such a climate, yesterday's aims and methods become suspect. The bus front seat loses meaning for a people whose longest trip may be from the feudal system of the rural South to the more mechanized high-rise poverty of the North.

The right to an integrated education may mean little to children bussed from one ignorant academy to another.

The classic struggles of the 1960s were carried forward against discrimination in housing, employment, education and in government, and succeeded to the extent that they did, both because the victims became their own best champions and because they found a sympathetic ear in the national [illegible] ^body politic.

But as their demands became more insistent, as a foreign war drained our treasury and young manhood, as our best and brightest were beaten down by bullets, a radical shift occurred in the national consciousness.

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For black Americans, our political hopes and aspirations have passed through a series of periods of reconstruction. Each ended with the surrender of national responsibility for the plight of black and poor people to the individual states, to a laisse-faire benevelovence that seemed doomed to condemn us to perpetual half-citizenship.

We are ^now just short years away from the most recent reconstruction, that heady period following the historic 1954 Supreme Court decision, and fewer years away from the rebirth of black activism with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956, the 1960 student sit-ins, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act when black Americans began to believe that Freedom, like the war in Vietnam was just around the corner.

All these beginnings began and ended [illegible], not simply because one man [illegible] ^{died and another was elected preside}. The circumstances of death for the second reconstruction were many and complex, but deeply rooted in the popular notion that America had done too much for those who cannot do for themselves ^{whose stains are dark}.

If these remarks required a title, I should like to call them a tale of two and a half decades. I want to talk primarily about the remainder of the 1980s^{20th century}, and what they have^is in store for us, what they ^it will demand of us. To do that, I must speak with two voices; First, as a contemporary, fellow passenger on what promises to be a tough and frustrating trip toward the twenty-first century; secondly, as a witness and participant to an earlier leg on that journey, a

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a trip that has took us from Selma to Saigon, from Bull Connor to Alan Bakke, from James Earl Ray to Bernhard Goetz, from the old George Wallace to the new Ronald Reagon, from Lincoln Perry to Clarence Pendleton, from the Ku Klux Klan to the Neo-Nazis and the Passe Comitatus, from Brown vs the Board of Education to Grove City College vs Bell, and from a president born in Texas who had the courage to stand up for civil rights, to a president born in the Land of Lincoln who has opposed every piece of civil rights legislation put forward in the last half of the 20th Century.

Going forward any faster may be hazardous to our health.