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

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together like sardines in a can, and it is politics that will enable us to take over some of the cities where we live, and turn them into the kinds of places where everyone wants to live and raise their children.

It is politics that gives our children lead poisoning, and it is politics that has created Socialism for Lockheed Aircraft and Welfare Capitalism for the poor.

It is politics that makes us the last to be hired and the first to be fired; that gives our kids twelve years of school but only six years of education; that has made us our young men first in war on the battlefield, but last in peace, and seldom in the hearts of our countrymen.

It is overly ambitious, however, to talk about electing or helping to choose a president if we can't help choose a city councilman back home. We cannot discuss running one black man, or a black woman, or developing a black political platform or agenda if we aren't able to

Last edit 11 months ago by shashathree
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88 8 8 8 8 8 Deliver political power on the block where we live. You here, because of you activity in the struggle for tenants' rights, are superbly suited to enter into the struggle for political parity for the unrepresented. Many of you have done so, and all of us must begin to see the inevitability of the grounding of each separate struggle for homes, for jobs, for freedom, for control in common political action.

That process begins where you have begun, in your building and on your block. It begins by your organizing your neighbors and friends so that when votes are counted, their needs and desires are counted too. That process multiplied a thousand times by where we happen to be,and how many of us there are can build the basis for change.

The rest of the prescription is spelled out by the southern black caucus, which in mid-summer suggested that black people stay away from all of the candidates for president of the United States. By all the candidates, I mean all of the candidates.

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The face and name of the winner is not nearly as important as what and who the winner is committed to.

Is it the committment going to be public housing in the suburbs, public service employment, increases in wage minimums and in minimum wage coverage, guaranteed social insurance, radically altered public assistance, guaranteed incomes and guaranteed jobs.? Will the issues be national health insurance, radically altered federal housing programs, equal employment both racially and sexually, ending the war now or will it simply be business as usual.? Will we automatically deliver 98% of our votes again to the Democratic Party, as we did in 1964 and 1968, or will we say these votes don't belong automatically to anyone, except to the party and person who will do something for us.

Will the delegates we send to conventions next year be like too many of those in 1968, handpicked by someone else, told how to vote

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by someone else, voting against us for someone else, or will they be people like yourselves.

And if the party that had to come to us for twenty percent of the vote it did get in 1968 refuses to bargain honorably, will we say we've got noplace else to go, or will we by then have designed a strategy to prepare for that contingency.

Whatever you decide to do, make sure it is something decided by you. Don't let some slick talker like me come to your town or your state and set your political priorities for you. Don't let anyone come to you and tell you they represent you - if you didn't choose them or invite them in, they can only represent themselves.

My argument is simple. It is that politics hold some answers for us. It is that these answere will never develop until we develop our own politics. From where you operate, it may be all-black politics

Last edit 11 months ago by shashathree
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or coalition politics or any kind of politics of your choosing, but it must be a politics that you can help control, it must be a politics that represents your interests, and it must be a politics that you will never be ashamed of. Insert #3 It must be a politics that will follow the dictum of Frederick Douglass so many years ago.

Douglass said: "If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want the rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of her mighty waters. The struggle may be a physical one, and it may be a moral one, or it may be both moral and physical, but there must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will . . .."

Last edit 11 months ago by shashathree
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