Speech challenging the American character, 1984

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If the years before, the Kennedy, Johnson and Carter years, taught us any kind of lesson at all, it ought to have been that government, under militant and concerted pressure, would move, slowly and rather ponderously, all too often with all deliberate lace^k of speed, to become a limited partner of sorts with the American underclass in their struggle to do better for themselves.

The last few years have canged all that. The government's policy toward the poor has changed from benign concern to mi^alignant neglect.

In the decade of the sixties, the number of people living in poverty in America was reduced by nearly one third. It's not at all unreasonable to ascribe some of these gains to the great society and new frontier programs of that era. Yet despite these victories, the curel and callous castrators moved with cold calculation to kill, freeze, and wind down urban renewal, model cities, community action, public service employment, student loans, public housing, federal impact funds for education, and to impose a sixty percent national pullback in social services.

If we are to believe with Thomas Jefferson that the common man is "the most precious portion of the state, "we find that ^{precious resource in real danger of economic extinction today}

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[illegible]

A constituency of the comfortable, the callous and the smug was recruited to form solid ranks against the forgotten.

For four years we've suffered under a form of triage economics that has produced the first increase in American infant mortality rates in twenty years, and pushed ^{thousands of} poor and working poor, thousands of American families deeper and deeper into poverty.

This ^{This administration} constitutes a clear and present danger to the hopes and dreams of black Americans, and to the dream that Martin Luther King spoke of so movingly just a few short years ago.

By August of 1984, the Census Bureau reported that the number of people living in poverty had increased over the past four years by 9 million, the largest increase since these statistics were first collected over 20 years ago. [illegible] Three million children have been [illegible] ^moved off the school lunch line. 3000 children a day have fallen into poverty. Today, the poorest two-fifths of our polulation receives a smaller share of our national income, and the richest two-fifths a larger share than at any other time since 1947.

More black people are poor today - one of every three or 35.7% - than four years ago, more than at any time in the last twenty years. Nearly half - 46.7% - of all black children are poor. We are 12% of the national population, but 22% of those who slipped below the poverty line because of the President's policies.

While the wealthiest 4% of American families were gaining $35

Just this week, the National Urban League reported that income levels for Black families was down while poverty levels are up.

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billion dollars in after-tax income over the last four years, all black families, from the poorest to the richest, were being hurt, [large X in margin] and the gap between black and white income grew larger.

After four more such years of economic recovery, black Americans [large X in margin] may well have cease to exist.

Equally evident is the danger all Americans face from escalated arms race and increased American interference into the lives [large X in margin] of our neighbors in this hemisphere and in other countries around the globe.

Invasion in Grenada, subversion and terror in Nicarauga, [large X in margin] encouragement of white supremacy in South Africa, nuclear instability; these are the results of a newly minted American arrogance ratified again at the polls on election day.

What is ^so fightening about the diminshed life chances among black Americans at home, and the heightened chance of loss of all human life worldwide is not that so many our fellow citizens are not aware, but that many are aware and simply do not care.

The movement Martin Luther King lead succeeded because it summoned a large part of [large X in margin] black Americans to group action, and because it enjoyed the endorsement of a large portion of white America as well.

Rebuilding that coalition of conscience ought to be priority for all of us over the next several years.

If Martin Luther King's memory is to be upheld, it will be done best by extending his life's work and making it real.

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One of the gifts that Martin Luther King gave us is seldom remembered today.

We remember his devotion to Ghandian nonviolence, and that in^{how in} his hands how passive resistance became militant - but peaceful - agression against American apartheid.

We remember his insistance that the fruits of his labors would be shared by all Americans, black, brown and white, and his demand that the troops of his army should be integrated too.

But we seem to have forgotten a message he brought us in Montgomery and again in Albany, and in Selma and in Birmingham and in Memphis on the evening before his death.

That message was not original with King, but no leadership figure in the struggle for human rights has expressed it so well before or since.

In our times, it began when a middle-aged department store seamstress, Mrs. Rosa Parks