Four Views from Black America

pockets should be used. Nixon is correct in standardizing the welfare system, but $1600 a year for a family of four is laughable. The minimal amount should be $4500. Even that is absolutely rock bottom minimal. And these people also should have access to public or subsidized housing, food stamps, and all the other government programs aimed at low income people.

Fourth, we must improve the quality of primary and secondary schools, particularly among minority people. In some schools a kid goes to high school 12 years and comes out on a fifth grade level. He's just passed on up the road.

JACKSON: Hunger in this nation should be made illegal. War should not justify starvation nor surplus economy. That's like having too much food on your table, and some people sit at the table starving. At least if I go into the Army I can get some food and I can get to travel. So, the only explanation for a surplus economy having starving masses is that the Defense Department makes the decisions to keep some of the masses starving so as to keep their anxiety level high.

In the next decade, you must have a more aggressive move toward socialized medicinal care for the poor of the nation in general. There must be free medical care, with as much emphasis upon health, education and food as on the Sputniks in the 50's. You know that we have explored outer space, but we've exploited inner man.

The black doctor should study medicine in order to improve public health and not just to secure personal wealth. The black lawyer should study law to distribute justice not just to secure a judgeship. The black teacher should teach out of a genuine motivation to distribute information and not want to tear the school down for a $10 raise.

We will be more vigilant in the Seventies than we've ever been before.

We've got seven black radio stations across America, but 429 stations beam to the black community. I expect for us to be controlling and owning more than 100 of those stations. Blacks have no television stations, which means we're cut off from communications there.

Finally, if we can distribute foods and bullets in Vietnam, I know damn well we can do it in Mississippi.

YOUNG: We must modify attitudes. The major campaign on the part of the media, political leadership, the churches, and everybody else, should be to convince Americans of the historic racism of which the whole society has either been a participant in or an observer of, and that black America has been the victim of. Nothing is going to happen until people accept that fact of life.

Secondly, there has to be a major campaign to convince Americans that the correcting of inequities and the equalizing of life chances of all Americans, through specific programs that will be costly, represents not on expenditure but an investment and that to not do it in the long run will be much more expensive. It will take billions of dollars to get national health insurance in this country, but we spend billions of dollars in both tangible as well as intangible ways for not doing it and these costs will continue to escalate. So, just as we spent $17 billion for the GI Bill after World War II, the figures now show that the return is around $25 billion, from the standpoint of their ability to pay higher taxes, the skills that they have developed, the contributions they have made.

Changing attitudes must start at the elementary level. This is why I pushed so hard for integration and desegregation.

Now, let's assume that we've sold the American public on the investment in ending poverty and discrimination and on the historical inequity of racism, and the fact that they were part of it, and that fairness now demands that something be done about it. By way of specific programs, I've come strongly to believe that housing is the number one problem. It's the only way we are going to break up the ghettos, get rid of squalor and congestion, and get better education. To improve housing will require a combination of private and federal resources. The private sector will have to do the job.

But the private sector has never done a job in the public interest unless it secured adequate subsidy, insurance's against loss, and so on. The federal government must do this. We wouldn't have an airplane industry in this country today if the federal government hadn't subsidized it. We wouldn't have had a space program without the federal government. We couldn't have a highway program without the federal government.

I think Mr. Nixon's welfare reform program is, in fact, a step in that direction. It's inadequate, but I'm supporting it, knowing that once the concept becomes law we can always then work to raise it as it proves inadequate. But it's an important new concept.

I am a strong advocate of community control of the institutions that serve it. I believe that it is now clear that the black community that is poor is, for the most part, segregated in America, not through choice, but this is through historical practices of a majority of society. It also quite clear that the institutions which serve black people in these communities are doing a bad job. Everybody agrees. The schools are doing a bad job. The health institutions are inadequate. The welfare institutions are inadequate.

I don't believe that's going to change until the community is clearly given certain authority as to hiring and firing. And this includes the police department.

I don't see this as revolutionary. After all. I think, in the final analysis, the kind of discipline and responsibility that the white community keeps asking the black community to assume can only come when they are given authority and power.

This to me is not going to be a threat in the sense that if we put blacks in charge of then communities they are going to run all the whites out. What black parents want are results. They want their kids to learn. The purely civil servant who's watching the time clock is going to be put out. But whites who have a sense of commitment, heart as well as head, will be hired. And black people are not going to tolerate black people who are going to do nothing but rap in the classrooms.

I have faith that what black people will be seeking, whether you're talking about policemen, teachers, or social workers, are people who are going to produce results and color is not going to be the crucial thing.

SEALE: Black people as a nation are going to have to be significant in setting forth what is to be accomplished. I have spoken of the 10 point program and platform of the Party, but when we speak of what is to be accomplished, we have to deal with an understanding that the political, economic and social injustices and evils and inequalities that exist have to be solved with some practical program.

The Panther Party's free breakfast program for children and its attack on hunger is very significantly related to where we're going. There are 15 million people in this country who are hungry, and this is a documented fact, and 50 per cent of them are black, and when you move in this fashion, you talk about a broad political scope, not only free breakfasts every morning, free lunches in the schools every day, you start taking care of the children, because they are the ones who will sustain the struggle. We were talking about free health clinics in another program, significantly related to the political desires and needs of the people. We see the people unifying around these types of programs-free clothing programs.

The government is supposed to have paid for them a long time ago. And if they don't masses of the people, not only black people, but even the young white students are going to rise up against the government, to slap them in the face and make them pay for it. What it's going to entail, though, is black people institutionalizing such programs in the community, where they have control over them.

Even the poor white people have to oppose the system with these kinds of programs. In essence, it's a need for cooperative housing, cooperative marketing, more unity with the workers in the country. The workers are going to have to unify and start demanding a 30-hour work week with the same 40-hour pay, and by demanding this they will be opening up more jobs for the poor oppressed, because the poor oppressed is predominantly white unemployed, you see, and in turn this would allow for more workers' control over the means of production in this country. The courts have to be controlled more by the people, and the constitutional rights of the people are going to have to be secured.

The power structure is going to move against these, and the people at large are going to have to see that they're going to be better off by joining the revolutionary struggle to change for the better because the revolution itself is for the people. When we speak of power to the people. we're speaking of power which is of, for and by the people.

It's absurd for them to be spending billions of dollars going to the moon for some rocks, when every common sense and human person can see that it's necessary to solve the social injustices and evils that exist.

These social evils and injustices are perpetrated and maintained by the power structure. So we see a relentless revolutionary struggle being waged for these very things against the ruling class.

People are more organized now. They are learning a lot of things. They are tired of this system. And as far as black people are concerned, we are human beings and we respect ourselves and we are revolutionaries. From students to brothers in prison.

We're not only black and beautiful, but we put first that we're revolutionaries. Because to be a revolutionary means that you want to survive an a black and beautiful human being. And brothers are hip to it. And we're not stupid. We know how to use firearms ourselves.

TERRY: As a path to racial justice, has black violence replaced black nonviolence? Will the black revolution become more violent?

BOND: Violence has not replaced nonviolence in the sense that all the people who believed in nonviolence have reversed themselves. There are still large numbers of people who will use nonviolence as a technique even though they may not think of it as such. A picket line around a grocery store is a nonviolent technique. It was good ten years ago; I think it will be good ten years from now. What has happened is that a new group of blacks has come along who are willing to be nonviolent, violent or both.

JACKSON: It will be based upon the white male. The white male makes every major decision in America in terms of our reacting to him. If more of us are starving, more of us will be fighting at the desperate level. If the situation is survival the pressure that we are under will determine how we will react. This is independent of any black leader's thoughts of it. It's irrelevant. That is what will happen because of the nature of man.

SEALE: As the grievances of the people mount up, as the Fascist pig avaricious demagogic ruling class turn their deaf ears to what the people want, then many people I believe will use quite a bit more violence against the system. A lot of people are trying to say the violence is against white people.

That's not the truth at all because, as we see now, white people themselves are using violence against the various establishment. You don't run around and say that the poor white people are part of the establishment. Just the contrary. It's just that they are politically uneducated and the power structures consistently dupe them with demagoguery.

The masses of black people, brown people. Indian Americans, Puerto Ricans, all add up to be over 50 million peoples, and when you get all the colored peoples together, you start moving over into the area of progressive and liberal whites, and also poor whites in this country. You start getting over 100 million, then it is a nation. As you begin to educate more of the masses, you will see more of violent activities.