Black Caucus' series of recommendations to President Nixon, Doc 2 of 2, no date [Fall 1971?]

4 4 4 4 4

desire of the predominantly northern ^{working and non-working} urban poor to have something to say about welfare rights and tenants rights and people's rights - must come together to insure that future presidents who receive future requests to do something about the present and future housing needs of poor and black people will be more receptive than the present president has been.

^{Insert #1}

Before that can be begun, two decisions must be made by all of us. First, we must decide that Richard Nixon and the architects of the ^National Southern Strategy must go.

Having decided that, it is the method and direction of the removal that must then be agreed upon.

The method in the general sense is through political action, but political action for the poor and ^{unrepresented} dispossessed cannot be political action as it operates for other groups of people.

For others, politics may be the art of the possible or the art

^{Insert #}

A good demand for you, now, could be for a There should be a National Rent Board whose members are 50% tenants to control rents long after the freeze is off.

Just as cost-of-living hearings are held, there should be public hearings held for the poor who always pay more and who always get less.

We know that the less you make, the more you pay. We know that rents and rent raises don't just affect people like us, but to middle income apartment dwellers and students, and wage earners and midd people generally.

Rents ought to be tied to services; if their is no service, let there be no rent. The complaint that triggers federal action ought not come from the tenant who has no heat and light, but from the landlord who can't get an increase in rent.

5 5 5 5 5

of compromise: for us, it must be the art of seeing who gets how much of what from whom.

It is interesting also that the great organizations that speak for the poor ^{and struggling} in thics country - ranging from the National Urban League to the National Welfare Rights Organization to the Black Panther Party - have all this year indicated an interest in politics, either through nonpartisan voter registration or through actually forming poor people's caucuses at the political conventions next year.

There can be no denying then that the direction black and poor people must take in the remainder of the 1970s is toward a real and meaningful participation in a new politics.

That is because it is politics that decides, in the end, what kind of life each of us will have, what kind of world we live in, what kind of futures our children will have.

^{Insert #2}

It was politics that decided that many of you came here at all, that even forced Ken Young, the Omaha Housing Director, the single biggest agitator against your rights, to [illegible] sign the check that sent [illegible] ^some of you here.

[circled] insert # 2

6 6 6 6 6

It is politics that sends our sons and brothers and uncles and fathers to southeast Asia, to shoot and kill and be killed by other Mothers' sons in a war made by Politicians; it is politics that will bring them back.

It is politics that decides that unemployment for black people will remain at two and three times the national average, and it is politics that decides that we will live in a permanent depression, and it is politics that can put money in our pockets and give us jobs or a liveable, not laughable, income now.

It is politics that decides that we must live in second and third hand homes that others have discarded or in vertical prisons of concrete and glass designed by some architect who lives in the suburbs. It is politics that made it impossible for so many of us to earn a living down home, and ran us into the cities to be squeezed