In Black America; The Honorable C. Delores Tucker

We'll see you next time. And so, when Frederick Douglass gave that lesson of the hour in the 1880s, a young man, black man, who didn't just put up his fist as I tell our young people, putting up that fist and saying black power, and then opening up that fist and nothing's in it, he didn't do that. This was a black man who could put up his fist with a Ph.D. unit from Harvard. The honorable C. Dolores Tucker is the first black woman to hold a cabinet level position

in the nation's third largest state. From 1971 to 1977, Ms. Tucker was the Secretary of State of Pennsylvania. She is also responsible for the appointment of the first woman boxing judge in Pennsylvania. For more than six years, C. Dolores Tucker was Pennsylvania's top election and registration officer. This week, the honorable C. Dolores Tucker in Black America. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is in Black America, Discussions of the Black Experience and Contemporary Society. With this week's program, here's your producer and host, John Henson. The honorable C. Dolores Tucker was the Secretary of State of Pennsylvania from 1971 to 1977. She was the first woman to hold that post and to hold a cabinet level position in the

nation's third largest state. On September 24, 1977, Ms. Tucker was fired because she refused to hire and fire subordinates on the basis of political loyalty to state administration. For more than six years, Ms. Tucker was Pennsylvania's top election and registration officer. She initiated the first voter registration by mail and also was the first to authorize polling places on college campuses to facilitate voting by young Americans. As chief officer of the Corporation Bureau of Pennsylvania, she installed the first computer business record retrieval system, a 24-hour service that eliminated a 31,000 unit backlog. Ms. Tucker was vice chairperson of the Pennsylvania Democratic State Committee. She is also vice president and chairperson of the National Federation of Democratic Women. For many years, Ms. Tucker has been in constant demand as a public speaker and outside the United States. I talk with Ms. Tucker at one such speaking engagement.

I remember the words of Frederick Douglass who stated that in order to make change possible, we must be a part of the change making process. And in America, I learned through the 60s and the late 50s marching with Dr. King and in my involvement in the struggle, I found that always that our feet started from the church and then we ended up before the political kingdoms telling the pharaohs to let our people go. I remember marching from Selman to Montgomery and ending up before the political kingdom in Montgomery, Alabama saying Pharaoh Wallace let our people go. I remember marching to Washington before the capital, marching in Harrisburg in the capital of Pennsylvania, marching down the city hall, but always our feet left the church and ended up before these political kingdoms. And so that was the change making process. And I said it's time for us to get behind those doors and sit in those seats of power, rather than always standing outside, asking them to give us

something. Let's go inside so we can control the powers and the levers and bring freedom and justice to our people. Why did you decide to run for a Secretary of State of Pennsylvania? Well, in Pennsylvania, the Secretary of State's position is appointed, you know, appointed by the governor. And so I was appointed by the governor because I had helped this friend of humanity to become governor and he asked me to serve in our capacity and as such that was the highest ranking position of a black woman in America and the first black to serve a Secretary of State in America. So I have served in that position, but I also ran for lieutenant governor. And that was the first time a black woman had ever run and I came in third out of 14 white other persons running. But I believe that in order for us to be free, we've got to get our hands on the two powers that run the world. And that's political power and economic power. Economic power is a little harder to achieve because we can't

measure in our vaults the same dollars that a Rockefeller or many other persons of means have. But before the ballot box, we're all equal. Everyone has one vote whether they're Rockefeller or whether they're no fella. We all have one vote. And if we use it, then as other minority groups have done, we can achieve a great movements of progress if we follow the Irish, if we follow the Jewish and Italian communities, that's how most of them came to power first by the ballot and then they use that ballot to help them to get the books. Was it any added pressures of you being the first black appointed official in Pennsylvania and then when you ran for lieutenant governor, being a black person and also being a black woman or two foot? Yes, there was some pressures because coming out of the civil rights movement

I was committed to making certain that government once I was inside was responsive to the needs of all people in general and black people in women in particular. And so by continually pressing forward toward that goal of equality within government, you run into resistance because you are demanding some power that others have and they don't want to relinquish. And whenever you do that description, when you reach for power that someone else has, they're not going to give it up easy. Frederick Douglass said that too that power concedes nothing without a demand. It never will and never has. So whenever you try to take power, those who have that power are going to strike back. And so I found that kind of retaliatory actions toward me, but nevertheless I never gave up the fact that since we pay for government

we pay taxes that we should share all of the benefits that government or any other institution has that we are part of. Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plane seeking a home where he himself is free. America never was America to me. Let America be the dream, the dreamers dreamed. Let it be that great strong land of love where neither kings can I have nor a tyrant scheme that a man be crushed by one above. Oh let my land be a land where liberty is crowned with no force, patriotism and patriotic grief. But opportunity is real and life is free. Equality is in the air we breathe. There never has never has been equality for me nor freedom in this homeland of the free. Oh let America be America again. The land that never has been yet and yet

must be. The land where every man is free. The land that's mined, the poor man, the Indians the Negro and me who made America, who strengthened blood, whose faith and pain, whose hand at the phone tree, whose plow in the rain must bring back our mighty dream again. Oh yes I say it plain America never was America to me and yet I swear this oath America will be an ever living seed. Its dream lies deep in the heart of me. We the people, we the people must redeem our land, the mind, the plants, the rivers, the mountains and the endless clean all of the stretch of the great green states and make America again. Its dream lies

deep in the heart of me. Ten score and six years ago. A dream became a nation. A dream became a nation. A nation called America conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are created equal and endowed by their creator with the inalienable right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We the people of the United States

in order to form a more perfect nation. We dedicate our lives, our honor, our sweat and our blood. What has happened to the dream? The dream has been deferred. And a dream deferred can very well be a dream in turn. The NAACP, the oldest, the largest, the most feared, the most revered, the most criticized, the most consistent in the forefront for fulfilling

the dream has only asked America to give us what it promised us in its dream. It wasn't Dr. Martin Luther King's dream. It was America's dream. In 1863, a president of the United States declared that we were free, illegally free. And we made some gains in the 1860s. We had voting rights. We had civil rights. We even had lieutenant governors. We had governors

in 1863. We had U.S. senators. We had from the 1860 to the 1880s. We had eight congress persons from South Carolina in the 1870s, 80s. We were marching on toward freedom. Some had already thought they had arrived in freedom land. But we found out by the time of the 1880s that we were losing everything we had. The Ku Klux Klan was born. We began to lose all of our political leadership. We lost all our rights. Everything that we gained in the

60s and the 70s of the 1800s was slowly being eroded from us. And by the year 1900, blacks were back in a state of slavery, de facto slavery. We had not one person in office. We lost all we had. We had more congress persons doing that time than we have today in Washington. We had 22 at one time in Washington in the 1870s. We lost it all in 1900. We had nothing. The dream was deferred. And at that time, one of the great social historians of that day, Frederick Douglass, a sable son of Africa, said these words to the people who were in despair

as much as we are today. He said to them, do I hear? You ask in a tone of despair, if the time will ever come when we shall have an equal chance in the race for life. The question is not new to me. I have tried to answer it many times and in many places. When the outlook was less encouraging than now, there was a time when we were compelled to walk by faith in this matter, but now I think we may walk by sight. Notwithstanding the great and all abounding darkness of our social past, notwithstanding the clouds that still overhang us in the moral and social sky and the defects inherited from a bygone condition

of servitude, it is the faith of my soul that this brighter and better day will yet come. But, but, but whether it shall come soon or shall come late will depend mainly upon ourselves. Did you get that message? This was the lesson of the hour that Frederick Douglass gave to our people at a parallel time such as this, the 1880s, when we were losing everything that we had gained doing the reconstruction. The post reconstruction at city. Frederick Douglass added this post script, if there is no struggle, there is no progress. And those

who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They were reigned without the thunder and the lightning. They went the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power conceits nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. If you got any power, eat nobody, go and give it to you. Frederick Douglass said power conceits nothing without a demand. And if we want our freedom, they are not going to give us our fair share of the power. Unless we decide to organize. You were fired from Secretary of State because you refused to hire and fire a subordinate who wanted political lawyer to whatever administration was in power in Pennsylvania. Why did you take that stand? Well more than

that, I was not fired particularly, that was part of it. But I was asked to resign from office because at the time I refused to support a man who had been crowned the successor of the governor that appointed me. The man that had been designated the successor of the governor that I served under was not committed to affirmative action. And he wanted to demolish the affirmative action mechanism that I had institutionalized in the government. And as a result of that, I could not support him. Therefore, the powers would be recognized that I could not hold that high position of Secretary of State in control of the whole electoral process and not support that candidate. Also, many of the political powers sent me up persons to put on the payroll, like a 65 number of persons, and not one was black.

And I resisted putting them on the payroll. So when you don't yield and play the game as the politicians want you to play it, then they changed the rules and then tried to put you out of the game. And so that's what happened to me. I was asked to resign and I said I had done nothing. I wouldn't resign. And so, as has happened with a lot of our black politicians who fail to play the game according to the rules, which exclude us generally, we have found that they've had to leave office. And in the 70s, we lost the United States Senator Ed Brooks. We lost two lieutenant governors, Mervyn Dimely. We lost a lieutenant governor out of Colorado. These were men who just were too independent and too sassy. And whenever you have that in politics, you buck the system, the system bucks you. It's even you related to black political power. The South leads to nation and black public elected officials.

Well, I think in the north, too many of us who have a sense of that we are free because we've had the vote. Sometimes we think we're free and we get lulled into a sense of complacency. I think the South had to fight so hard for the vote. Blood, sweat, tears went into it that it's new to them and they are beginning to use it. They know that it has power. They know that they were denied it. And I think two, the other factor is that they are in greater number in the South percentage wise. And we are in the north, for instance, in Pennsylvania, we are 11% of the population. In some of the southern states, the blacks are 35% of the state population. So that's an attributable factor. But also the factor is that blacks

in the South somehow because of the burden of segregation that they have so recently endured, they have a closeness. They stick together more. And I find that they are more unified than we who are in the north and who have had, like from Pennsylvania, we feel that we have been free so long when we don't know that we're not free at all, that it's a game that's been played on us. Why is there a continual need for organizations such as the National Association for the Vanspin of Color People? There's a need for the NAACP because really it's the only organization. It really is free. Some of the other civil rights, some of the other organizations, it's not only free, but it is a grassroots organization. It is the only organization that has a strong network consisting of 1,700 various branches across the United States. The bulk of the money that comes into the NAACP is from black people. Some organizations have corporate contributions,

etc. But the NAACP is going to always be needed because it is the oldest. It is a large. It is the most feared. It is the most revered. And it has been the forefront of all the progress that we have made since 1905. And it continually stays on the job. And it's going to be needed because there's nothing else to defend black people and to stand guard over our rights and to make certain that we achieve full freedom. The NAACP now has launched on this recent struggle now for a fair share of not only the rights economic rights that we are entitled to from government, but also from corporate America. We are the margin of profit in many of the major corporations. But yet, we not only do we not have jobs in percentage to the contribution that we make, but in most of the corporate boardrooms,

a black is not present on the corporate structure from the top to the bottom. We're not there. And we are demanding now a fair share for black media, for our black banks, for contracts, for everything that they have to give. We want our fair share. So the NAACP has been on the forefront. It's the only voice that's out there with a large membership and has a network in every major city and state in the nation. Any future political aspirations? Well, right now, I have no political aspirations except to make certain that we do bring the kind of men and women to government and to increase the number of blacks in government. And all people, white or black, whatever color they may be, those who are sensitive and responsive and recognize that we've got to share in this government or there may be no government at all. The honorable C. Delores Tucker, former Secretary of State of Pennsylvania. If you have a comment or would like to purchase a cassette, copy of this program, write us. The address is in

Black America, Longhorn Radio Network, UT Austin, 78712. That address again is in Black America, Longhorn Radio Network, UT Austin, 78712. For in Black America's technical producer Walter Morgan, I'm John Hanson. John is next week. You've been listening to in Black America, Discussions of the Black Experience and Contemporary Society. In Black America is produced and distributed by the Center for Telecommunication Services at UT Austin and does not necessarily reflect the views of this station or the University of Texas at Austin. This is the Longhorn Radio Network.