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On balance, I think the argument falls in favor of continuing the exploration -- the threat, if you will -- of what could be a momentous step forward for Black America, or another exercise in self-indulgence.
That exploration should be more sophisticated than it has been in the past. It is disconcerting, to say the least, to discover that one of the leading clerical cheerleaders for a Black candidacy is a man who was one of Richard Nixon's biggest Black supporters, and who supported Ronald Reagan in 1980.
We've heard the slogan, "It's about time" a great deal this year.
Let me suggest that if it isn't time to announce that John Smith or Roosevelt Robinson ot Jesse Jackson or Mary Jones will run for president as a Democrat in 1984, it isn't time either to say that no one will run.
We need yet to register those voters who seem reachable only through excitement.
We need still to force more than rhetorical concessions from the white candidates, and from the national and local Democratic parties.
What will be most important as decision date approaches, is that Black voters will want to know who is running on what platform, and for what purpose, utilizing what strategy, with which goal in mind, and chosen by whom.
As we have seen, Black people have had their eyes on the White House for more than 100 years.
We have had our symbolic contests, and we have had some real ones.
Next year, we have a right to demand that white candidates respect and honor our votes.
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Our first black Presidential candidate, Frederick Douglass, described the course of action we must follow over 100 years ago.
He said then:
"Let me give you a word of the history of reform, the whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of ernest struggle, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence, it must do this or nothing. 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 rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has, and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress....
Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they certainly must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do
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[handwritten] Black * Presidential candidate [/handwritten]
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