The Lost Massey Lectures (22 page)

Even when a Negro manages to grasp a foothold on the economic ladder, discrimination remains to push him off after he has ascended a few rungs. It hounds him at every level to stultify his initiative and insult his being. For the pitiful few who climb into economic security it persists and closes different doors to them.

Intimately related to discrimination is one of its worst consequences—unemployment. The United States teetered on the edge of revolution in the 1930s when unemployment ranged up to 25%. To-day in the midst of historic prosperity unemployment for Negro youth, according to government figures, runs as high as 30 to 40% in many cities. With most of their lives yet to live, the slamming of doors in their faces can be expected to induce rage and rebellion.

The fourth cause is the war in Vietnam. Negroes are conscripted in double measure for combat. They constitute more than 20% of
the front line troops in a war of unprecedented savagery although their proportion in the population is 10%. They are marching under slogans of democracy, to defend a Saigon government that scorns democracy. At home they know there is no genuine democracy for their people and on their return they will be restored to a grim life as second-class citizens even if they are bedecked with heroes' medals.

Finally, a complex of causes are found in the degenerating conditions of urban life. The cities are gasping in polluted air and enduring contaminated water; public facilities are outworn and inadequate; financial disaster is an annual crisis. Within this chaos of neglect Negroes are stifled at the very bottom in slums so squalid their equal is not to be found in any other industrial nation of the world.

Most of the largest cities are victims of the large migration of Negroes. Although it was well known that millions of Negroes would be forced off the land in the south by the contraction of agricultural employment during the past two decades, no national planning was done to provide remedies. When white immigrants arrived in the United States in the late 19th century a beneficent government gave them free land and credit to build a useful independent life.

In contrast, when the Negro migrated he was left to his own resources. He crowded the cities and was herded into ghettos, left in unemployment, or subjected to gross exploitation within a context of searing discrimination. Though other minorities had encountered obstacles, none was so brutally scorned or so consistently denied opportunity and hope as was the Negro.

All of these conditions were the fuel for violence and riots. As the social psychologist Kenneth Clark has said, it is a surprise only that outbreaks were not experienced earlier. There are many thoughtful social scientists who are now acknowledging that the
elements of social catastrophe have accumulated in such vast array that no remedies may be available.

I am not sanguine but I am not ready to accept defeat. I believe there are several programs that can reverse the tide of social disintegration and beyond that I believe that destructive as the riots may be they have been analyzed substantially in a one-sided fashion.

There is a striking aspect to the violence of riots that has stimulated little comment and even less analysis. In all of the riots, taken together, the property damage reached colossal proportions (exceeding a billion dollars). Yet the physical injury inflicted by Negroes upon white people was inconsequential by comparison. The bruising edge of the weapon of violence in Negro hands was employed almost exclusively against property—not persons.

It is noteworthy that many distinguished periodicals and leaders of the white community, even while the conflict raged, in clear terms accepted the responsibility for neglect, evasion, and centuries of injustice. They did not quibble nor did they seek to fasten exclusive culpability on the Negro. They asked for action and a facing-up to the need for drastic social reformation. It is true that not all were motivated by morality. The crisis of Negro aspirations intersects with the urban crisis. Some white leaders may not be moved by humanity to save Negroes but they are moved by self interest to save their cities. But even their moral and selfish motives which merge toward a constructive end have not yet made government act. It is preoccupied with war and is determined to husband every resource for military adventures rather than for social reconstruction.

Negroes must therefore not only formulate a program but they must fashion new tactics which do not count on government good will but instead serve to compel unwilling authorities to yield to the mandates of justice.

We are demanding an emergency program to provide employment for everyone in need of a job or, if a work program is impracticable, a guaranteed annual income at levels that sustain life in decent circumstances. It is now incontestable that the wealth and resources of the United States make the elimination of poverty perfectly practicable.

A second feature of our program is the demolition of slums and rebuilding by the population that live in them.

There is scarcely any division among Negroes for these measures. Divisions arise only around methods for their achievement.

I am still convinced that a solution of non-violence remains possible. However, non-violence must be adapted to urban conditions and urban moods. The effectiveness of street marches in cities is limited because the normal turbulence of city life absorbs them as mere transitory drama quite common in the ordinary movement of masses. In the south, a march was a social earthquake; in the north, it is a faint, brief exclamation of protest.

Non-violent protest must now mature to a new level to correspond to heightened black impatience and stiffened white resistance. This higher level is mass civil disobedience. There must be more than a statement to the larger society; there must be a force that interrupts its functioning at some key point. That interruption must however not be clandestine or surreptitious. It is not necessary to invest it with guerrilla romanticism. It must be open and, above all, conducted by large masses without violence. If the jails are filled to thwart it the meaning will become even clearer.

The Negro will be saying: I am not avoiding penalties for breaking the law—I am willing to endure all your punishment because your society will not be able to endure the stigma of violently and publicly oppressing its minority to preserve injustice.

Mass civil disobedience as a new stage of struggle can transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force.
To dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer lasting, costly to the larger society but not wantonly destructive. Finally it is a device of social action that is more difficult for the government to quell by superior force.

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis but it must be followed by a sense of futility.

Where does the future point? The character of the next period is being determined by the response of white decision-makers to this crisis. It is a harsh indictment, but it is an inescapable conclusion, that Congress is not horrified with the conditions of Negro life but with the product of these conditions—the Negro himself. It could, by a single massive act of concern expressed in a multi-billion-dollar program to modernize and humanize Negro communities, do more to obviate violence than could be done by all the armies at its command. Whether it will summon the wisdom to do it is the question of the hour.

It is a shattering historical irony that the American Revolution of 1776 was the consequence of many of the same conditions that prevail today. King George adamantly refused to share power even in modest degree with the colonies. He provoked violence by scorning and spurning the appeals embodied in non-violent protests such as boycotts, peaceful demonstrations, and petitions. In their resort to violence the colonists were pressed ideologically beyond their original demands and put into question the system of absolute monarchical rule. When they took up arms and searched for the rationale for independence they broke with all traditions of imperial domination and established a unique and unprecedented form of government—the democratic republic.

The Negro revolt is evolving into more than a quest for desegregation and equality. It is a challenge to a system that has created miracles of production and technology to create justice. If humanism is locked outside of the system, Negroes will have revealed its inner core of despotism and a far greater struggle for liberation will unfold. The United States is substantially challenged to demonstrate that it can abolish not only the evils of racism but the scourge of poverty of whites as well as of Negroes and the horrors of war that transcend national borders and involve all of mankind.

The first man to die in the American Revolution was a Negro seaman, Crispus Attucks. Before that fateful struggle ended the institution of absolute monarchy was put on its death bed.

We may now only be in the initial period of an era of change as far-reaching in its consequences as the American Revolution. The developed industrial nations of the world, which include Canada, as much as the United States, cannot remain secure islands of prosperity in a seething sea of poverty. The storm is rising against the privileged minority of the earth, from which there is no shelter in isolation and armament. The storm will not abate until a just distribution of the fruits of the earth enables man everywhere to live in dignity and human decency. The American Negro of 1967, like Crispus Attucks, may be the vanguard in a prolonged struggle that may change the shape of the world, as billions of deprived shake and transform the earth in their quest for life, freedom, and justice.

It is many months now since I found myself obliged by conscience to end my silence and to take a public stand against my country's war in Vietnam. The considerations which led me to that painful decision have not disappeared; indeed they have been magnified by the course of events since then. The war itself is intensified; the impact on my country is even more destructive.

I cannot speak about the great themes of violence and nonviolence, of social change and of hope for the future, without reflecting on the tremendous violence of Vietnam, not even when I am speaking to an audience of Canadians, who are not directly involved in the war.

Since the spring of 1967, when I first made public my opposition to my Government's policy, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my decision. Why
you
, they have said. Peace and civil rights don't mix. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people? And when I hear such questions I have been greatly
saddened, for they mean that the inquirers have never really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, that question suggests that they do not know the world in which they live.

In explaining my position, I have tried to make it clear that I remain perplexed—as I think everyone must be perplexed—by the complexities and ambiguities of Vietnam. I would not wish to underrate the need for a collective solution to this tragic war. I would wish neither to present North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front as paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play and the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give-and-take on both sides.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I had several reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor, so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demoniacal destructive suction tube. And so I was increasingly compelled to see the war not only as a moral outrage but also as an enemy of the poor, and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it
became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die and in extraordinarily higher proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on
TV
screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. We watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, but it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the north over the last three years—especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion, while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But, they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own Government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this Government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.