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Despite innumerable advances in human relations, race remains a powerful stigma in America in 1985.

The most powerful official in the world, America's President, professes not to know that segregated schools still exist, while daily he whittles away civil rights protections for women and minorities. While denying any bias of his own, he has constructed an economic program whose greates victims are black.

His first Secretary of State was a man, who when in the Nixon Administration, used to pound on the table with his palms like tom-toms when African affairs were discussed.

His Attorney Generals, in private practice and public life apologists and defenders of privilege, direct a Department of Justice more hostile to civil rights and civil liberties than any within recent memory.

If the nation's leadership, 200 and more years after our founding as a nation, persist in racist thought and action, can we expect lesser mortals to behave any better?

If we have had a purpose as a nation, it has been to create a society in which life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are guaranteed.

The security of that guarantee cannot be maintained by its destruction. The taking of human life by the state is a worse offense against us all than the individual or mass murders which fill our newspapers.

But no state is committed, in reality, to executing all those who have committed capital crimes.