The Ballot Box and the Union Card

...This dynamic of rage, fear and guilt is unusually forceful today, and its social consequences can only be reactionary...

...What is more, these bodies must become responsive to the needs and aspirations of their constituencies...

...This tactic is suicidal...

...Regrettably, no such movement exists today...

...We have to focus our attention, therefore, on the social and economic conditions that have produced poverty, segregation, deteriorated housing, inferior schools, and poor health...

...The prevalence of confusing emotions has led to the identification of white racism as the most pressing and immediate problem that must be solved...

...Accordingly, what is demanded of blacks is not undirected rage—however compelling this may be—but a clear definition of political and economic objectives, as well as a strategy for achieving them...

...It is highly misleading, though, to suggest that private enterprise can rebuild our slums more cheaply than the Federal government...

...Whites may for a time make minor concessions to blacks who use violence (and thereby help to discredit nonviolence as a powerful means for achieving social change) but the point must inevitably be reached when the state will take repressive measures that will inflict untold harm upon the black community...

...This article was adapted from a paper for the 25th Annual Plenary Conference of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Committee...

...In addition, since every one of these solutions is predicated upon the maintenance of the ghetto, whatever small contribution they can make will be negligible compared with the massive social injustices magnified daily by ghetto conditions...

...The 1960s have witnessed great social and political triumphs, and also saddening defeats...

...All that exists are various go-it-alone proposals, made more out of the desire to withdraw from social struggle than the hope that anything worthwhile can be achieved...

...Until this final objective is achieved, we cannot in all honesty claim to have built a democracy in this country...

...Nor is any serious thought being given to how to build one, or what groups it should be composed of...

...In the first place, if we locate the source of the problem in the attitudes of white people, it follows that the solution has to be mass psychoanalysis, something I find neither practical nor appealing...

...Violence may indicate the despair blacks feel, but its major effect is to aggravate the degrading social and economic conditions nurturing and perpetuating this despair...

...The Democratic party is essential to the black struggle because it is the sole mass-based political organization in the country that has the potential to become a majority movement for progressive social reform...

...I am not concerned with designs that might elect a local official or employ a few individuals, but with building a movement that can change the fundamental social and economic relations in the society...

...It may sound militant and provide masochistic churchmen with the opportunity to expatiate their guilt-feelings, but in effect, Forman is asking for a handout amounting to only $20 for every black person (although the money, if ever given, would certainly not be so evenly distributed...

...Filling the vacuum created by the absence of effective programs, we have a melange of cheap solutions, new forms of exploitation and psychological palliatives...

...There must, in other words, be visible minority representation in governmental decision-making bodies...

...But segregation—especially for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many—can by no means be considered progressive...

...All of the above proposals reveal a preoccupation with peripheral issues and a failure to come to terms with the problem of altering the basic forces shaping the lives of the poor in America...

...The new concern of business leaders with the plight of the poor is admirable, and the Urban Coalition and similar organizations have an important contribution to make...

...Martin Luther King's death...

...Yet at the 1968 National Convention in Chicago, many of them were unseated by insurgent delegations from Mississippi and Georgia composed of Negroes and white moderates...

...By organizing the unorganized—whether farmworkers in California, sanitation workers in Memphis, or hospital workers in New York and Charleston—the trade-union movement enables hundreds of thousands of poor Americans to escape from the lumpenproletariat and achieve a measure of dignity and economic security...

...they remain glaring monuments to the futility and self-destructiveness of violence...

...There is also much talk of black capitalism as the means by which Negroes can achieve "self-determination...

...For example, there is the peculiar notion of drawing industry into the ghetto through tax incentives...

...I reject this analysis, not because I think white Americans are innocent—I am sure many are prejudiced, as are some Bayard Rustin is the director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute...

...For this, it is essential to work within the institutions capable of providing black people JAMES FORMAN with the maximum power and leverage in their efforts to achieve equality...

...THINKING ALOUD The Ballot Box and the Union Card By Bayard Rustin In the black man's long history in America, no decade has been filled with more significant events than the one terminating at the close of this year...

...One technique adds to Federal expenditures...

...I am referring to the Democratic party and the trade-union movement, and the instruments that black people must use to make them more viable and progressive are the ballot box and the union card...

...While the objectives I have proposed can be achieved nonviolently, their realization would nevertheless amount to a revolution in our society, to a fundamental reorientation of our social and economic priorities...

...Black capitalism or "reparations" may in fact bring several hundred thousand dollars into the ghetto, yet from Central Harlem, the South Bronx and Bedford-Stuyvesant alone, $223 million are siphoned out annually by racketeers...

...If we can make improvements in these fundamental areas, I think it is possible that— as emotions and attitudes adjust to the new and more equitable social conditions—we shall also see a marked reduction in rage, fear, and racism...

...I must caution, however, that even if we were to achieve these objectives, there would still be protest, since the change we are presently undergoing also involves the demand for dignity and democratic participation in the political process...

...Yet while Negroes in general have little to gain from black capitalism, the concept is highly popular today among a small, vocal minority of black nationalists...

...For them, profit and separatism are interdependent, for behind the walls of segregation they will be able to monopolize the ghetto market...

...The union card, therefore, must be combined with the ballot box to form the basic dynamism of the black struggle...

...The dominant forces within the party are now precisely those groups—Negroes, liberals and labor—that form the basis of a majority coalition of the democratic Left, and which can move the Federal government to act upon the problems afflicting our nation...

...More importantly, white breast-beating will hardly help the black youth who is unemployed or the black child who is being miseducated...

...There has been an unprecedented rise in the hopes and aspirations of black people, and the frustration of these hopes has led to despair, violence and withdrawal...

...The payment of this pittance would hardly set straight the balance of injustices committed against black people, and it is absurd to even think in such terms...

...As the 1969 Report of the Council of Economic Advisers pointed out, "a dollar of direct expenditure and a dollar of tax incentive have identical effects upon the budget, requiring either a reduction in other Federal programs or an increase in taxes...

...Moreover, it is an error for them to concentrate their energies on so organizationally diffuse and nonpolitical an entity as the church, for this can only deflect their attack away from the major political and economic institutions of the society and seriously weaken the effectiveness of the black struggle...

...We would have to go back a century, to the time of the Civil War and Emancipation, to find a decade whose importance approaches the one we are now living through...

...At a recent meeting of bankers, lawyers and businessmen who favor tax incentive proposals, it was explained how by sponsoring a Federal housing program a private investor might earn an income of $126,000 and avoid paying any taxes...

...The burned-out homes and places of business have not been rebuilt...

...The sweep and complexity of events require that we resist the temptation of an emotional and simplistic response, and instead try to analyze the present situation with the utmost precision...

...But of course, such changes do not evolve spontaneously...

...Those who romanticize black violence, particularly the pseudorevolutionaries of the New Left who can retreat into their universities and suburbs when the repression comes, deserve special condemnation...

...Its legislative program for the creation of jobs, urban reconstruction, education, health, and tax reform is specifically designed to help the lower and lower-middle classes in which blacks are so disproportionately represented...

...James Forman's "Black Manifesto" is actually nothing but an aggressive form of begging and hustling...

...the other lowers Federal tax receipts...

...Quite the contrary, it will compel the well-meaning yet guilty individuals to justify their position by a soothing process of rationalization and self-delusion...

...For in the present political period, protest is of value only to the degree that it can creatively and non-violently call attention to social injustice and enhance the use of the ballot box and the organization of the unorganized...

...A forest fire cannot be extinguished with a garden hose...

...But they have no comprehensive strategy to replace the one I have just outlined, and without such a strategy their protest, though militant in rhetoric and intention, may be reactionary in its effect...

...It is toward such a coalition that we must build, and we can only hope to do so through the active and effective use of the ballot box...

...Finally, there are those who propose violence as the solution to the problems of poverty and injustice...

...alone, 4,900 employes—the majority of them Negroes—lost their jobs as a result of the riots in that city following Dr...

...This is a highly dubious economic strategy, since Negroes are overwhelmingly a working-class people, and where they have engaged in entrepreneurial activity, it has usually been in the marginal area of small-scale neighborhood services...

...The opportunity to work with dignity, not charity, is what black people today need and desire...

...Blacks have already suffered great losses from the ghetto riots of recent years—in lives, in property, in jobs...

...To the extent that it becomes violent, protest will strengthen the Rightist forces in the country and make impossible the further advancement toward political and economic equality...

...Nor can the idea of reparations...

...If the fire is to be quenched, a political strategy must be devised and an economic program planned to attack injustice at its source...

...The source of enthusiasm for schemes of this kind is financial profit, not social justice...

...Andrew Brimmer, the only Negro member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, has pointed out that the recent progress in desegregation has eroded "the considerable protection which segregation provided for Negro businessmen...

...If anything, I think it would be more expensive precisely because business, unlike government, demands a profit margin—in this case provided by tax advantages...

...The trade-union movement is essential to the black struggle because it is the only institution capable of economically uplifting the masses of impoverished and exploited Negroes...

...The proposal for black capitalism is an attempt to reestablish a separate and profitable economy, and its emergence at a time of heightened black nationalism is not entirely coincidental...

...Thus unintentionally, and perhaps even unconsciously, they may end in giving tacit approval to the growing white reaction against the movement for equality...

...Men of great stature emerged only to disappear suddenly...

...Indeed, the problems of our cities cannot be solved by anything less than a revolution...

...The rationale here is that by threat of force, black people can extort from the white community the resources they need to improve the conditions of their lives...

...Thus by the second technique, funds that might otherwise build homes would be used to guarantee earnings for the investor...

...They can be brought about only by a political movement whose specific objective is their attainment...

...True, it is not a majority party at this time, and there remain within it powerful reactionary elements, particularly the Southern conservatives...

...In the absence of such a program, rage must feed upon itself and inspire comforting but self-defeating forms of withdrawal, or violence—which is destructive to all concerned—and induce in the white community the uncreative feelings of guilt or fear...

...Many young Negroes today deny that the electoral process and the trade unions can play an effective role in the black movement...

...Businessmen, out of altruism or a need for workers in a tight labor market, have hired thousands of hardcore unemployed, yet at the same time they support recommendations to curb inflation that would leave millions without jobs, including those who have recently benefited from their generosity...

...One study has shown that in Washington, D.C...

...people of every race—but because it cannot lead to a constructive programmatic solution to the plight of black Americans...