Civil Rights Summer '66

Because what they are saying is, if ten years after the Supreme Court decision, everything is worse, then when the young is abroad, because he's told me he's working to make things better, they say Martin King's non-violence is a lot of bull, because it's not made things better. They say, A. Philip Randolph is old and we don't want to discuss him. He's done so many good things. But that guy who hangs out with him, Rustin, who used ten years ago to tell us things were going to get better, he's another one of these phonies, babe. And they're not nearly as radical as mine. Your generation thinks they are. Those kids are moving. We stand back and say they're trying to change the world and they're changing the world. They are tired and this gives me an opportunity to say that we were talking

about this yesterday and grew with us from Los Angeles about the civil rights movement and about the movements to get rid of poverty. People who live these things have some brilliant answers for it. And if we stop criticizing them long enough to listen to what they're saying, generally they can come up with some of the answers if we allow them to. Now, the conditions of the middle-class Negro America in this country are pretty good. And their families are one here, if anything, a little toostable, a little toostable. But they live like anybody lives, they live better or worse, but they do it their way, they can control their circumstances. The people at the bottom, the people in Watts are helpless in the face of all that disadvantage. Too many things are against them. You know, you've got to have a rat. In Harlem, we didn't get money until we had a rat. We had no money

in Watts until we were a rat. You have no money even for a stop sign at an intersection and that says a rat, or at least accidents. Now, I would hope by now that this country would recognize you can have a rat in Rochester or in Los Angeles, not just in Mississippi, and that by now it has gotten the message, and that it will give the money. If it doesn't, I think we're in for a terrible siege. The National Educational Television Network presents Civil Rights Summer 66, a discussion of the next steps in the Civil Rights Movement as viewed by four delegates to the White House Conference to fulfill these rights, the first White House Conference ever to be devoted exclusively to civil rights. The guests are Whitney Young, Jr., Executive Director of the National Urban League and Member of the Planning Council of the Conference, Bayard Rustin, Executive Director

of the A. Philip Randolph Foundation, Daniel P. Moynihan, Director Designit of the Joint Center for Urban Studies of Harvard and MIT, and author of the report The Negro Family, and Mrs. Mary Henry, a Member of the Community Representatives Advisory Council of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the host Paul Nevin. After a decade of vast achievement in many fields, the American Civil Rights Movement finds itself disturbed and disunited in the summer of 1966. Old concepts and in some cases, online organizations and leaders are being challenged. New voices are being heard, the voices of younger men, more militant, less patient. The movement no longer has a consensus even on basic ends, much less on means. This critical moment happened to coincide with the two-day White House Conference on Civil Rights, which was just concluded. It was called

by President Johnson in his celebrated Howard University speech a year ago. Then Mr. Johnson was bold, restrictive, confident. The time had come, he declared, to help the American Negro move beyond opportunity to achievement. Now a year later, addressing this conference, the Chief Executive was more cautious. He was preoccupied with Vietnam, perhaps, and inhibited by the threat of inflation. At any rate, he outlined no specific measures in pursuit of his charted goal, and he asked Negro Americans an effect to bear with him, not to expect miracles overnight. Action to the speech was, in fact, rather mixed. Some of the 2,500 delegates were asking the same questions posed by the pickets outside the meeting halls. Was this conference really necessary? Was there really that much that we didn't already know about discrimination and poverty and the pathology of the ghetto? Did we really need to bring 2,500 people to Washington, D.C. to redefine problems which have been studied

and re-studied for years now? In other words, could this conference do any good? And now that it's over, did it do any good? Mr. Young? I think it has done some good. It brought together, for the first time in history, people from industry, from education, the real hierarchy of these groups, face-to-face with Negro citizens across the board who were representatives of all the socio-economic groups, who said what their concerns were. And I think for many of these people, it was the first opportunity they had to meet with Negroes who felt this way. There are some people that I have come in contact with here, with here, who have a sense of dedication from the lips, you see. And they've come involved, and they've rubbed shoulders with people who are really doing things because they care about people you see. And I've seen a number of people today, and yesterday, who will be going back home

ready now to move ahead other than just talking so much. And I think it's excellent. Millions of people in the United States now know that the government is concerned to finish the unfinished revolution. Johnson promised many things, some of which he will come through with. But I'm not concerned so much as what he will or will not do, because that depends on what we do that he accommodates to, as much as he said, your government. No other President has ever said this. Your government is concerned to see this revolution through. But no, Mr. Weston, the President, after all, is the man who called this conference. You suggest now that the conference is going to push the President. But of course, the conference is going to push the President. Mr. Johnson must have known this. Can he be pushed? Or you suggest he wants to be pushed, I take it.

Now I'm suggesting that Mr. Johnson is an intelligent, political human being who knows that he does not make progress because he desires to make it. But that he is like a ballet dancer, balancing forces. And that therefore, it is when he gets forces who believe in what we believe, pushing him, that he is able to move. Kennedy pointed this out when he's in 63, presented the civil rights bill of 64. He said, gentlemen, I had not expected to have to ask for legislation. But we've got to do something now to get these niggas out of the streets. This is a paraphrase, but this is what he really said. I think the President indicates to me his sincerity, by the very fact, that he wants us to push him. I really if I agree with Byad, I think this conference gives recognition to the fact. And I think the President is aware of it, that the March on Washington gave us the civil rights bill,

the Selmer confrontations and the dogs biting people gave us the loading bill. But this does really not close the gap, that there are real basic problems. The difficult problem for us today is to dramatize the fact that people are still suffering, even though there are no longer signs and no longer vulgar symbols. There are no longer policies that say, in effect, niggas are excluded. And the fact that we are now here talking about not the old laws that we were talking about, but we're saying that there is still a gap and that America's conscience cannot be resolved simply by passing laws. But how do we equalize life chances? How do we close the gap? And time after time at this conference, we've heard people talk about how, okay, I still cannot get into the hospital. I still cannot

get into school. I still cannot get in federal employment in the South. This conference dramatizes the meat, bread, and potato issues of the real problem. And the fact that both government and private industry must now address itself not to removing symbols, but the real tangible issues that remain first to resolve. And unless we resolve them, we in trouble. Now what I want to see is a recognition of the fact that the niggot now must have factors to make it possible for him to enter, which are societal factors which say, come in. Now that's what we don't have today. And that's what's important. But this doesn't spring from getting people who have prejudice to be nice or to change their attitude and think

because you bring them into a conference, something is going to happen. The author of the Moynihan report has equaled that. No, I agree. The point about that report is simply a statistical count of some of the conditions of life for Negro Americans and their families, just to say that you can talk about a lot of things like housing, employment, income, and that kind of abstract, the unemployment rate. I mean, they're going to ever see an unemployment rate or taste it or touch it. I mean, you can't. But a family is where these things come together. If you're living a pretty successful, if the world's going all right for you and for a lot of people, your families are in pretty good shape. If the conditions of life are just too intolerant to make it possible to live families break up. Anywhere in the world, any time in the world where conditions are intolerable, they break up.

Now, the conditions of the middle class, Negro America, in this country are pretty good. And their families are one here, is if anything, a little to stable, a little to, you know, but they live like anybody lives, they live better or worse, but they do it their way, they can control their circumstances. The people at the bottom, the people in Watts are helpless in the face of all that disadvantage. Too many things are against them. What the report said was, if this is the result of all the combination of forces, you know these forces cannot be overcome by individuals themselves. Social intervention is necessary. By addressing, I don't disagree about a thing, and that's what the President meant when he called this conference that we have to intervene. Well, by addressing that, I think, may disagree to a very slight degree, it is awfully important to have at a conference like this, and you can only have it at the call of the President.

The kind of opportunity for confrontation between America's businessmen, the top corporation executives of this country, and these people we're talking about, because here to four, most of their experiences with Negroes have been as maids or as caddies or as waiters, and the thing that delighted me today was to be able to see in this conference that we've been through. Negroes who play these roles, but who in this conference stood, I say, I bow to I bow, and said, I'm hurting. What do I want? Not anything revolutionary, but what you have had, as this person said, Ms. Henry, and Watts, when asked by the reporter, what do you want? I said, I want the same thing you left when you came out to ask me this question. I want the kind of job you had, the home, the educational opportunity for your

child, it's as simple as this. And for this reason, I think the conference has been magnificent because it's the first time many of these businessmen, and I've talked with them, and they said, you know, I never really felt and knew how Negroes were suffering. But the report of the council, which came out even before the conference began, will be considered certainly by many members of Congress, extremely radical. It may seem to all of you, obviously, desirable, but then we must understand why it's radical. Now, I want to make it quite clear why it's radical. Any Negro I can take out the Mississippi Georgia and Alabama today is better prepared to make it in the society than Moynihan's ancestors were from Ireland. Any Negro I take out of Mississippi today is better off for making it in this society than the Eastern Jew was who got off that boat in 1910, or any Italian from

Sicily who couldn't speak the language. Any Negro from Mississippi can speak the language. I want to set up a proposition. There was no head start for those people. There was no talk about training them. There was no talk about those rude, uneducated, bullish, white. There was no talk about that. And I'll tell you why. Because this society, despite everything else, was able to give them a boat, a job when they got off that boat, by saying we'll buy your muscle power, giving you an opportunity by saving on that muscle power from money to invest and to improve your children. A good example is that police may think they have to go two by two in Harlem, but the stories from the New York Times of 1870 were that in the Irish neighborhood, the police had to go seven by seven. Now, all I am

saying is that the argument that you know that the Italian has to let go and look at the people and kill everybody if you went near there, that how did these people make it? They made it because society was designed to let them make it. When the Negro wants now to make it, even when increasingly numbers of white people say, good, he ought to make it, the marketplace says, stay out. We don't want you to make it. That's what make Whitney's young, young's work important. Therefore, you have to have a unique, a radical, a revolutionary method by which you set up new conditions of society to make it possible for the Negro to make it. You cannot depend on the old methods which were utilized for all the other immigrants. Fired Russell, let me ask you one question on a point of word, but it's important

point of word. You said that the people who came early and made it did so because society was designed to enable it to make it. Now, I would suggest that the word design is important there because it wasn't designed. It just turned out that way. It evolved that way. Well, well, that's an important word, you see, because if things just naturally had come about to that point, that's one thing. No one had to say, I want this to happen. It just was happening. Right. Now, if at this point, we say the way society has evolved, these other things aren't happening. Now we have to intervene. We have to design now, but that means you do something new and different. You're beginning to design. That's right. That's the new point in your life. Well, it wasn't designed before. It was designed. It was designed. The origin of God design. No, no, no, no, no. The people running around here have gone. The original, the original building of subdivisions in this country,

in this country, said very clearly right here in Chicago, for example. They said, no negros allowed. The school districts, the school districts, they said no negros, no negros. The country has filled with problems that are designed to hurt negros. Yeah. Oh, sure. To hurt. I mean, it was calculated. They're down to things that are designed to help them. Yeah. But what I'm saying is that the present, quite loose around our urban setting didn't just happen. It was designed. You're right. They said, no negros allowed restricted neighborhood, homogeneous neighborhood. And so Ralph Bunch could stand in Chicago with his five-baited cappuccine, his Nobel Prize, his PhD. And he couldn't move to Cicero, but alcohol and good. Because he was white and any white prostitute could prostitute good. It is designed.

But now, Mr. Young, is I a member from Mr. Morninghand's books about minorities in New York? The Kennedy's grandfather in Boston used to see signs, no Irishmen need to apply. Surely there was discrimination in both housing and employment against Irishmen and Jews. And that is an important point, and I think we are skewering it because I agree with Morninghand. What we are saying is, and he corrected me and I'm happy for it, the helter-sculptor situation of 1870 to 1920. Essentially meant that it was possible for minorities in that helter-sculptor business to make it. We are saying that the objective situation today cannot be left helter-sculptor and the Negro to make it. There has to be a designed planned business. Now, I don't think any of us disagree with that. Well, I think some positive planning instead of a positive design,

instead of negative design. I agree with you, dear. There was design. The Irishman, the Polish, whoever it was, could change his name. The Jewish person. Oh, man, it did. Many did shorten their names and changed them. I mean, for a while. That was Jewish people who had facial operations. You know, a new chain exists. But the Negro couldn't change his color. And this was, in fact, true. And in America, color made a difference. And for a while, that was deliberate, conscious, exclusion of the Negro. And I think what we're saying is, that if we're honest, you just can't say now, let's eliminate the signs, let's take out all of the phrases that said we don't want except Negroes. Today, we're saying we got to be color conscious, too. We got to go out of our way. Not for Negroes alone, but white people. And this is the thing I really want to get across. White people need integration for a world that's 75%

non-white, as much as not more than Negroes. I feel sorry for the white kids today who're growing up feeling this superior because they're white, who're going up uncomfortable with diversity. In a world like this, it's a reflection of insecurity and maturity. And all of their reflecting is some kind of compounded mediocrity and blandness. I'm suffering for them, really. I'm suffering for them for another reason. And I'm going to throw something about poverty in here right now, and it ties very closely with human rights and civil rights. You know, we've found, most especially in Los Angeles because this is where I am, that it is so unfashionable now to be poor and white, that those poor little kids who live in the outlying areas like Bell Gardens and Bell, California, we get tutors, we get the good missionary complex people, you know, coming to help the natives, running over each other to come into the Negro ghetto to help. They run right,

they drive right through where all these poor little white children live who need tutors, who need some sort of security, who need someone to be interested in them and no one ever stops and even looks at them. So somebody ought to take a look at a situation like this. Mrs. Henry, are the conditions which I'm sure you've been asked this often the last two days, but are the conditions which gave rise to the Watts riots of almost a year ago now still in existence? Have they been mainly rated at all? I think they're still in existence. I don't think that there are any less problems than there were last July. I really, really don't think there are that many less problems. I just talk to a young man downstairs who said that the poverty program was not reaching the people in Watts and there was a woman in this group with him who must have run up four flights of stairs after me to come

down there and defend the poverty program since I'm on this advisory council. The young man was right in a sense. The money wasn't reaching the people that he felt it should be reaching because the money had not been appropriated for a program that he wanted it to have been appropriated for. You see what Mrs. Henry is saying is there have been more studies, more agencies who've indicated an interest. Not more jobs and more housing. In fact, certainly no more answers. But Watts is a very large considerable share of any poverty money probably because of the riots, perhaps rightly. Were there youth training employment programs going? Quite a lot has been attempted. Are you saying it hasn't worked? It hasn't reached. That isn't what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that so much more has to go in there before you can even tell. Before it even makes a dent. This is what I'm saying. Services are fine. The services that they have. They have a lot of things happening there. Head Start, as Mr. Rustin has mentioned. The neighborhood adult participation

project is working there. Why do I have a number of programs that go in there? But it's either feast or famine. You do without for generations and then everybody pours things in there without I think that they're pouring a lot of things into Watts. They're pouring a lot of money in there without pouring enough concern in there with it for the people. Am I making myself clear? Yeah. That it's the same business is happening and there are isolated cases where people care and are giving money and services. But I'm afraid that what we're getting in a number of instances is someone standing back throwing a dollar in there, throwing a training program in there, throwing something in there. But they're not taking anything else in there with it. Are you on the side of the new young militants of truck of organizing the poor so that they can help themselves and bring pressure on the power structure and bring about radical change as against the old traditional paternalistic approach?

I am not particularly lary on the side of any young person that is doing anything that is radical because there are those young people in Watts who are brilliant, who care about Watts and they're not nearly as radical as mine. Your generation thinks they are. Those kids are moving. We stand back and say they're trying to change the world and they're changing the world. They are tired and this gives me an opportunity to say that we were talking about this yesterday and grew with us from Los Angeles about the civil rights movement and about the movements to get rid of poverty. People who live these things have some brilliant answers. If we stop criticizing them long enough to listen to what they're saying, generally they can come up with some of the answers if we allow them to. Of course they don't look at things like I do. Of course they are militant. Of course they want to, as Mr. Young says, withdraw.

But they withdraw. Someone is saying to them, what is the difference in you and this fellow here who is not a Negro and they begin to point out the differences and pretty soon they found out that the differences that he has are the same differences that Monahan, for example, might have. And when they end up they have a lot in common with each other. Gentlemen said and Watts just the other day that these kids start out talking as they want to be black nationalists and he said to them, well as black nationalists, what do you want? See we want a good job and we want us a home and we want a good education. And they find out that their goals as black nationalists are the same goals that anybody who wants to have something has. So if we stop criticizing them long enough to listen to them, I think they're saying something. I really do. I just think that that, you know, in a sense it's not what black nationalism is. Black nationalism is. Before you go in front of Mr. Russell, I'm rusting, I want to say to you this, that I think a lot of people who are crying black nationalism don't know what it is. Right. A lot of those who are screaming that they are

black nationalists are saying the things that I say but they don't know what it really is. Now I think you have to go back to the beginning on this. When in the last 12 years, there are more Negroes unemployed than before the Supreme Court decision, 54. When there are more Negroes living in slums, when there are more Negroes in rat-infested slums, when there are more Negroes in segregated classrooms. The average young Negro says to himself, man, there is something wrong with this whole damn thing, if after all this, there can be all this mess. And therefore the hell with that society, it's no good, I don't want it. And the black nationalism which is growing amongst our youngsters ought to be called frustration because that's all it is. They reject the house. Now when Foreman says, if I can't sit down to the table, I'm going to kick

the legs off it. Or when somebody says in Watts, I'm going to burn, baby burn. All he is saying is, please give me a stake in the order, in the society. Because if you don't give me a stake in it, then I don't want to protect it. I agree. You'll be, obviously, trying to downplay this alleged difference among the generations or the two types of civil rights leaders. Yet there's been a spade of magazine articles about the responsible civil rights leaders being gravely worried about developments. I'm sure Mr. Young comes into that category. I suspect you do, though, I'm sure you don't want compliments from the press, but I think they probably, this purpose, consider your responsibility. I can tell you that these young people think they buy at Rustin with the young Martin King, a Philip Randolph, or old Al and stupid. That's the brother you, Mr. Rand. That does not bother me. And does it affect your own attitude? It affects my work. Because what they are saying is,

if 10 years after the Supreme Court decision, everything is worse, then with the young is the fraud. Because he's told me he's working to make things better. They say Martin King's non-violence is a lot of bull. Because it's not made things better. They say, a Philip Randolph is old and we don't want to discuss him. He's done so many good things. But that guy who hangs out with him, Rustin, who used 10 years ago to tell us things were going to get better, he's another one of these phonies, baby. But what do you say to them? I don't bother to discuss it with them in those terms. Because what I know is that until we all, these society, from business men, to government, to the civil rights groups, to the churches, to the labor unions, making a alliance capable of breaking through this old order,

and bringing about new things until we get to this place, nothing is going to happen. Why do you suppose Negroes who have their hairs filled with civil rights are talking about resolutions on Vietnam? You find yourself more frustrated because we have as bad as indicated. We have said, be patient, be philosophical, be non-violent, and all this. On the assumption that's a power structure, and I don't just mean government. I mean private business, I mean education, I mean unions, churches, or at this point in time understand that their whole morality is a state that they're called phonies, unless they come through. Our problem today is that we are not able to produce tangible jobs and housing, when they call me to come to Watts, I said, okay, I'll come to Watts.

If I can walk down the streets and say, I've got 5,000 jobs, I've got so much housing committed to give to the people of this town. But they said, we just want you to bring peace and order, and an end to rats, and I said, I'm not coming. And I'm not coming for this. The current responsible, and they grow leadership, I think is true to the swept away. Unless we can produce. But that is not the result. But that Whitney is not the thought of you, or Whitney, or Roy Wilkins, or Martin King. It is the fact that this society will not take seriously the demands which this responsible leadership has made. Well, will they take any more seriously the demands of this new bunch that's coming along, this new group, these are the terms. Because that new group is going to turn, if we are not careful, to violent responses, which can only do one thing. And that is to call forth more violent responses

in the white community. But that's the tragedy. The person who can obviously help you most is the President of the United States. You, Mr. Younger, closer than any other civil rights leader to the President of the United States. However sympathetic he may be toward the aspirations of this conference, is fighting a war, whether for better or for worse. He has inflationary pressures. Do you have, imagine for a moment that he's going to provide the 10, 12, 13 billion dollars a year of this conference, people with this conference want? I'm looking at the alternatives to it. I honestly feel that the best international posture of this country in a world that 75 or 80 percent non-white is to show to the world that the non-white person in this country is not low man on the totem pole. I honestly believe that it's not a question of guns or butter. If we get to the moon in 1980 and 7, 1970, then we get there in 1980. We don't cut back on poor people to support the international effort. I think the

President has articulated this. The problem today is that both businessmen and politicians don't understand what's happening. We literally have 10 out of 11 American citizens today. That within the next 20 years will be more than 50 percent negro. The economic implications, the political implications are terrific. May I ask you again as a practical measure, do you see any chance that Mr. Johnson or any Congress that is now in office or is going to be elected this fall is going to appropriate an additional $10-12 billion a year to cure these conditions together? You know, the tragedy didn't is saying is that the American population has normally and historically responded only to tragedy. You know, you've got to have a ride. In Harlem, we didn't get money until we had a ride. We had no money in watch until a ride. You have no money even for a stop sign at an intersection unless there's a ride or at least accidents. Now, I would hope by now that this country would

recognize you can have a ride in Rochester or in Los Angeles, not just in Mississippi and that by now it has gotten a message and that it will give the money. If it doesn't, I think we're I think we're in for a terrible siege. Whitney, would you let me make one point there which is that I agree with all that and you don't agree about almost anything I think but I would like to make clear that we're here at a conference which was called by President Johnson before there were any riots that the president sort of atmosphere about violence. There was no violence on that campus at Howard University a year ago when he went out to congratulate the graduate getting class and made a great speech and it's called this conference. This came out of America's sense and our president's sense of what we can and should and must be. Not it wasn't a matter of intimidation as a matter of goals and you like to take care of it and you might take care of it and it's

hunter you had and that there I would like to say that there's two things in both point here. I think it's possible to say that for some of the young people they're seeing a problem which is a very they see it very well and they see it in a tough problem which is that the leadership of America clearly wants to resolve this one huge ruin of American history once and for all. We have a problem the system's not working very well. The system is kind of impersonal and changing a system is so much more difficult than changing leaders in some way. But that's the fact. Second thing I like to say is 12 billion dollars sounds like a lot to you because you don't have 12 billion dollars. You may not even have to 12 dollars but America has 12 billion dollars. That's not a lot of money. The revenues of the government and you spent some time during the last three or four years trying to get bills through Congress. Yes sir. If you're in the

administration now do you think you could get through this or the next Congress an increase of 10 or 12 billion dollars a year. Yes sir. You think it could be nice. The revenues of the federal government from the existing tax structure are rising at a rate of 5 billion dollars a year. By 1970 our income from the existing taxes will risen from 120 billion dollars to 170. I don't think that Mr. Young and Mr. Rustin are willing to wait till 1970. They want this increase to start now. Would you be willing to set up a 5 billion dollars a year and then go up to 10 next and then 15 a year? Of course you would. The fact that the matter is that I believe that we are now spending billions of dollars a year erroneously and stupidly. And one of the things we have to do is not only to think of new money but the use of legislation of that money which we are now spending. I think it's a matter of priorities. Now I don't think the American people are as stupid as your question implies. I think the American people recognize and can be led to see that nothing is more

important than dealing with the frustration which can tear this country apart long after Vietnam has been forgot. That's the problem. I think it is also true that a part of the problem is that we are trying to make civil rights questions of things which are not in fact civil rights questions. That's the problem. I want an America committed against slums for all people. I want an America committed to work for all people, whites and blacks together. Now this is a commitment which society makes and we get all mixed up in seeing it always as a civil rights problem because it isn't. I will admit to you that whenever it's wrong in America the Negro faces that problem

most grievously but you're not going to get rid of it by mobilizing merely the Negro aspects or the whites who are prepared to go along. We've got to get American business to see that they want every American to have a job because it's good for business. What the name of God is the people in Harlem going to do if we help them through federal agencies and public works to get jobs. They're going to spend that money with me making the people who contribute to the urban league richer and more money for you. What you're really saying is I remember George Bernard Shaw one saying that the American society was probably the only society in history that would move from from from barbarism to decadence without ever going to civilization but what we really are talking about here is how without vast resources education not just to prepare people for industry but for self fulfillment for self development not many care

in order to see that people don't get sick or that they're well to work in industry but because it's a humane decent way to treat people. Without resources this is the way we've got to start thinking. And people are not thinking that way. I said in a session yesterday where they're talking about they're all indignant because mothers of illegitimate children had been put out of a housing project and they're talking about how they're treated with material things but nobody in that whole meeting said anything about anyone reaching that mother's soul and talking to that mother of dignity and of strengths that she might possess. It's not a soul mentioned it. We talk about pathology of the Negro but we don't talk about the strengths. True. That are present.

That in many other groups if they weren't there they would have been destroyed. And one of the strengths is that they have been able to withstand all of this corruption for all these years if that isn't a strength then no strength. I think you're going to put it a different way though that is to say that what would be pathology in Westchester County is not pathology in Harlem. This is because the ability to adjust is you know it's important an illustration in many of the high-rise buildings in Harlem the children select a particular stairway in which to urinate. I consider this not a dirty habit but a magnificently adjustable condition because Pat they will not put toilets on the first floor for these children to use now the children therefore behave imaginative they do not urinate in every stairway they select a

particular one. And they never thought that problem until it was very very rare. To do that in Westchester County would be insane and because they would put the toilets for the children where they could get to. But then they would call it creative if they used just one first floor stairway they call it creative. And we never talked about the pathology of a white society that has produces. We call it immorality when the how illegitimacy rate is reported. But we never talk about the fact that abortions occur you know at a much higher rate among white people. And I assume the initial activity is the same. And they do the same thing with venereal disease in public health place they're a statistic then in another community they go to a private doctor nobody ever he is. Well we didn't get this until we began to associate them. We had none of this venereal disease. Speak out Pat these are front church which makes a contribution. I was fed

by father divine or I would not have got through college. Fifteen cent meals. You know or the jive talk which people think is not imaginative but which is extremely imaginative. Now I think we have to learn that as far as the Negro community we have two things to do. We have to build on the strengths of that many people consider pathological. And at the other end we have to accept the Moynihan thesis. You cannot deal with the problems in the Negro community by cycle analyzing Negroes or anything else. What you have to do is to see that the problem has to be dealt with by social responses. Now this is reason I was very unhappy Pat and I think some of us ought to apologize to you that so many Negroes and other people misunderstood completely what you were trying to say. I don't think we will hold that report. But I do say that

you made a social contribution by pointing out that there had to be social and not individual answers to the pathology which is there. But I think that the Moynihan report was helpful. It led to a conference. This conference may not be everything we work. Sir did it produce this conference Mr. Reston the president at the time of the Howard speech sort of indicated that the Negro family was going to be the subject of this conference. I gather it has not been what happened. No, no, no. The problems of family life to the president used to illustrate the problems of the people, the problems of the Americans society. It was the question of the specific question of family policies and most countries have a group of policies that would cluster around the subject of family policy like housing so I like employment you know sort of thing. Those would be considered but never to the explosion of employment of housing. Let me put it in another way education. I am perfectly

willing to debate all the defects of the Negro family. If they are debated within the context and is correct that in the past the Irish, the Italians and everybody else who had family problems got rid of them as economically there was growth for economic independence of the family. Sure, I am perfectly willing to debate. I think what Pat pointed up and dramatized was there is a problem they go found there but it's a problem that can be solved as it has been solved with every family by providing educational opportunities and economic opportunities and cultural opportunities. I think we are indebted to the White House. I think there was a bit of risk that many presidents would not have run in calling this conference at this moment in time that he even agreed to call a conference which in many cases would focus only on White House and government and I think that's been a weakness in his conference that he should have

focused also on the business community and on other institutions. Mr. Young would you concede that having had the courage to call this conference the president has been extremely active especially during the past few days even during the conference itself to see that it didn't do things that would be uncomfortable for the administration. Well I think the president has shown his usual astuteness in this regard. And why shouldn't he? I mean, what's the president going to call him in the trouble? That's right. I maintain that the president is not now the determining factor. Whoever we are. That's absolutely right. As the weather agrees, the white and black, Catholic, Protestant, Jew, businessmen, labor unions and others, intellectuals can force this government to give us some concessions. But Johnson is not that unique. Every president forces. It has to be forced because there are other factors on him. You have to help the president.

You're going to help him. Sure. But I'm the king helped him. But not by that. I really believe that one of the paradoxes, one of the anaries of our time is the fact that we have in the White House today a man who believes more than any other president we ever had in the possibility of educational levels and housing and employment and all this. That may be Whitney, but he's not going to get anywhere if we don't build a political force behind it. This is Henry. I have seen you put the same arguments you and your friends with great eloquence to scale to the Los Angeles Poverty Board. Did they respond? Did you get from them what you wanted? Now for what did I ask? Well, in the particular instance when I saw you were asking for the reinstatement of the director of the neighborhood action. She has been reinstated. But the point is do you and your friends generally get what you want from that Los Angeles Poverty Board? I have the impression you were chronically dissatisfied with it.

I have a lot of sympathies. I'm called the Poverty Board in Los Angeles. I don't think this is true and I think that not enough people do have sympathies for them. Not enough people understand about the total poverty program that it is a program that has never been done before. You see? There are great many members of the Congress of the United States who also have a very limited experience of poverty and ghettos whose constituents have very limited interest in poverty and ghettos in the civil rights. Well, it's just like Byron is saying, if I hadn't gone down there and raised all matters of keen as you heard me do that day, they would not have known how I felt or how a lot of people felt. And it's the same the thing that he's saying now unless we speak out and push and move. What are you going to do? Have another march on Washington or are you going to have a conference on civil rights and Poverty for the Congress of the United States? We have to find ways to help the President achieve these aims which I think the President wants to achieve as Whitney has said. Which means you have

got to find the power so that the President can turn to these congressmen and say, gentlemen, we've got to do something because there is a power here which is compelling me to act. That doesn't mean he may not want to act, but there are counterpressures on him. Mr. Monet. Yes. How can they do it? Well, we're doing it. I think we're doing it. I think we're going to be gone. I think we just keep resting the President and he'll say, I'm sorry. That's what he wants to. Got to. Got to. Well, gentlemen, that brings us to the end of it. Gentlemen and Mrs. Henry, that brings us to the end of tour. Oh, you're right. I think you're all agreed that a great deal needs to be done. I find you surprisingly agreed that chances are good that something more, a great deal more, will be done. Good evening. Thank you.

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