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minorities.
They intend to erase the laws and programs written in blood and sweat in the 20 years since Martin Luther King was the premier figure in black America, and black America seemed single-minded in pursuit of it freedom.
We have done more than change the name of the occupant of the oval office, the face in the photograph on the post office wall. The election began the process of marching America backward into the 18th Century, and surrendered our Foreign policy to men who believe that all national struggles for self-determination are directed from Moscow and that nuclear war is a viable option.
At home -- and abroad -- they have suurendered the general good to the corporate will. They intend to radically alter the relationship between America and Africa, to substitute mineral rights for human rights, and have already begun to embrace and endorse the most horrific government of the face of the planet Earth.
Their favored allies and models in the world community are clients and tyrants.
They prefer the hardware of war to the handiworks of peace.
They are the first American government in two decades to use food as an aggressive weapon, to add starvation to the American arsenal.
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They support workers' movements in Warsaw and crush them in Washington.
They intend, in fact, to use the power of government to further consolidate wealth in the minority of our population, to redistribute income from the bottom to the top, to undermine the Bill of Rights, to re-introduce big brother to the American scene.
The Reagan Administration has begun an aggresive campaign to dismantle and dissolve the civil rights protections written into law over the past 25 years.
To the President and Attorney General, the Constitution is a document of almost infinate elasticity, to be cut and snipped to suit the fashion of the moment.
They intend, in fact, to turn back the Civil Rights clock until it becomes a sundial.
For the Reagan administration, equal opportunity means a better than even chance for minorities and women to be unemployed.
It means an unequal chance at the welfare rolls, a head start in hopelessness, and affirmation of the opportunity America has always guaranteed blacks to be last hired and first fired.
This assault on Civil Rights is coupled with an all-out attack
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on the yet unfulfilled right of every American to be free of want and economic worry.
Millions of families, poor and working poor, are being herded further into poverty as they slip through a safety net so fragile a minnow would escape, so porous it could not contain Moby Dick.
A study conducted by a former Nixon administration official for the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Welfare Policy concluded:
"The effects of the Reagan proposals will be to drive many low-income families deeper into poverty while inflation continues to deplete the value of their diminishing incomes, and to shift significant fiscal administrative and political burdens onto states and localities whose budgets are already in the red. The President claims that he will leave a 'safety net' intact to protect low-income Americans. This is simply not so."
The President cut through the safety net like a hot knife through warm butter.
The fact that one-third of all American families will be negatively affected by the Reagan cuts is a clear reminder of the necessity for a continuing struggle to end economic discrimination in the United States; that disproportionate numbers of these families are black or brown is an unnecessary reminder that white supremacy remains an
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essential feature of the culture of mainstream America and may be permanently rooted in the American character.
The President's policies, in sum, are anti-family and anti-black.
The promise that each American would bear an equal burden is as empty ad the pockets of our ten million unemployed.
As the destruction of the social safety net has moved forward, and as the human infrastructure of America begins to collapse under a deliberate design of calculated neglect, the greedy appetite of the military machine grows more voracious every day.
The administration is beating our plowshares into swords and our pruning hooks unto spears.
The choice they put before us is greater than guns versus butter, it is soup kitchens and surplus cheese versus expensive airplanes and malfunctioning tanks.
Between the day he took the oath of office and 1988, President Reagan is asking you to spend $1.966 trillion dollars on defense.
This is enough money ---
-- As if you had spent $1 billion dollars a year since Jesus was born.
-- To give every American alive today $7,000.000
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-- To finance World War II and two years of the social security program, or
-- To build a stack of $1,000 bills 134 miles high.
We may all agree then, that our situation desparate, and that Ronald Reagan's continuation in office five minutes past the expiration of his present term would be catastrophic for black people. To run, or not to run; that is the question.
Before any final conclusions are reached, it may be well to have the facts before us, to examine closely the history of past attempts to put a black face in the White House or on a party ticket, to see whether or not the complicated arithmatic and rules of the Democratic party's delegate selection process make such an attempt likely to return real benefits to all of black America.
That last point is absolutely essential -- what is under discussion in most places today is an assault on the Democratic party's nomination for the Presidency of the United States, and not an independent race for the White House.
Nonetheless, a June 5 gallup pool tells us that an independent race for president in 1984 by the Reverend Jesse Jackson against expected Republican nominee Ronal Reagan and possible Democratic nominee Walter Mondale would certainly and easily guarantee a Reagan victory.