(Draft) Speech about the upcoming presidential election, in [New Orleans, Louisiana?], 1972 October 5 (Doc 1 of 4)

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Carsewell and Haynesworth & "benign neglect"

Their political allegiances are not tied to party or principal but to pennies, not to devotion to race and pride in self but to devotion to dollars and the race for power; not to the Beauty in Blackness but to the bigness of their bank books.

They praise the president as the greatest savior since Jesus Christ, they applaud the wizard of the wiretap, the architect of law and order, the former attorney general, they attend a formal dinner for the old Dixicrat himself. Strom Thurmond.

And after all that, they have the temerity to go before Black audiences and tell us, "don't be taken for granted, give the man just

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one more chance."

If one more chance means four more years of the same, I'd rather be taken for granted than just plain taken.

It is a choice of Nixon-nomic and MItchell's mixups, of continuation of ciminal war abroad and a war against poor people at home, of benign neglect and mediocre justice, of vetoes of day care center for the poor and dodges for the rich of the unholy colaition of big business, yesterday's South and an 18th Century foreign policy on the one hand, and a candidate and a platfom written to support the demands of the underclass, American underclass

not an exact text

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Julian Bond

The lesson of the last twelve years of Black struggle ought to give us some useful knowledge for today.

From the days of the early '60's when Black people in the South began an epic movement that soon spread throughout the land until today in 1972 some profound changes have been won.

From the struggle to sit in the front of the bus, to the struggle to sit down at lunch counters, to the struggle to sit in in an integrated school room, to the final struggle to stand up in the polling places of the states of the old confederacy. These diverse battles have each had something in common.

In each, there were fully and clearly defined goals supported by nearly the entire Black community.

In each, there was mass participation in the Black community, from bar-fly to bourgeosie, from doctor to domestic, from preacher to pimp, from student to striver.

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Some joined in reluctantly, because it meant breaking the habits and accomodations of lifetime. Others had - as too many of us have today - a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. But when the lunch counters integrated or jobs became available, everyone was there.

^But in the sixities, on the picket line, we picketed together. Today, ^{more often than not} we picket each other. In the sixties in the movement, we shared and raised our own money. Today, we shake each other down.

In the sixites, you ^could demonstrated your commitment through your action; today, you ^can demonstrate your Blackness through the length of you hair,and the trickiness of your handshake, the cut of your dashiki, or the revot revolutionary romanticism of your rhetoric.

In the sixties, our young people were in the vanguard; today, too many bounce between Bid Whist, the Bougaloo and Boone's Farm.

In the sixtites, we had great ^{moralistic and chairismatic} leaders - in the seventies, we ^{tend to} have only ourselves.

This change occurred through several factors. We in the South

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discovered that ^simply putting a pair of pants with empty pockets on a lunch counter stool was a beautiful - but empty - gesture.

We found that the ^{front or rear} location of your bus seat was meaningless when the bus only took you from the feudal economic system of the South to mechanized high rise poverty in ^of theNnorth.

And ^even voting ^could baecome useless too when the ^{choice of} candidates were ^{was between} Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

But the sixities should that change would when there were two connected factors; a united and aggressive Black community and a national will toward progress.

Today's Black community is still aggressive, perhaps a trifle less united, but the national will is gone.

It began to vanish when Blacks in Hough and Watts and Newark and Detroit decided that freedom now meant them too. It began to vanish when aggressive war against brown people in Asia became more important than