Schenken Suzanne O’Dea. From Suffrage to the Senate: An Encyclopedia of American Women in Politics (2 Volumes)

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Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication

that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. Ex-

perts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and

handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent re-

bellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a

swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine

and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young

and their sons from growing into delinquents. They were taught to pity the neu-

rotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or pres-

idents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher ed-

ucation, political rights—the independence and the opportunities that the

old-fashioned feminists fought for. Some women, in their forties and fifties, still

remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women

no longer even thought about them. A thousand expert voices applauded their

femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity. All they had to do was devote

their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.

By the end of the nineteen-fifties the average marriage age of women in

America dropped to 20, and was still dropping, into the teens. Fourteen million

girls were engaged by 17. The proportion of women attending college in com-

parison with men dropped from 47 per cent in 1920 to 35 per cent in 1958. A cen-

tury earlier, women had fought for higher education; now girls went to college to

get a husband. By the mid-fifties, 60 per cent dropped out of college to marry, or

because they were afraid too much education would be a marriage bar. Colleges

built dormitories for “married students,” but the students were almost always the

husbands. A new degree was instituted for the wives—“Ph.T.” (Putting Husband

Through).

Then American girls began getting married in high school. And the

women’s magazines, deploring the unhappy statistics about these young mar-

riages, urged that courses on marriage, and marriage counselors, be installed in

the high schools. Girls started going steady at twelve and thirteen, in junior high.

Manufacturers put out brassieres with false bosoms of foam rubber for little girls

of ten. And an advertisement for a child’s dress, size 3–6x, in the New York Times

in the fall of 1960, said: “She Too Can Join the Man-Trap Set.”

By the end of the fifties, the United States birthrate was overtaking India’s.

The birth-control movement, renamed Planned Parenthood, was asked to find a

method whereby women who had been advised that a third or fourth baby would

be born dead or defective might have it anyhow. Statisticians were especially as-

tounded at the fantastic increase in the number of babies among college women.

Where once they had two children, now they had four, five, six. Women who had

once wanted careers were now making careers out of having babies. So rejoiced

Life magazine in a 1956 paean to the movement of American women back to the

home.

In a New York hospital, a woman had a nervous breakdown when she found

she could not breastfeed her baby. In other hospitals, women dying of cancer re-

fused a drug which research had proved might save their lives: its side effects were

said to be unfeminine. “If I have only one life, let me live it as a blonde,” a larger-

than-life-sized picture of a pretty, vacuous woman proclaimed from newspaper,

magazine, and drugstore ads. And across America, three out of every ten women

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dyed their hair blonde. They ate a chalk called Metrecal, instead of food, to shrink

to the size of the thin young models. Department store buyers reported that

American women, since 1939, had become three and four sizes smaller. “Women

are out to fit the clothes, instead of vice-versa,” one buyer said.

Interior decorators were designing kitchens with mosaic murals and origi-

nal paintings, for kitchens were once again the center of women’s lives. Home

sewing became a million-dollar industry. Many women no longer left their

homes, except to shop, chauffeur their children, or attend a social engagement

with their husbands. Girls were growing up in America without ever having jobs

outside the home. In the late fifties, a sociological phenomenon was suddenly re-

marked: a third of American women now worked, but most were no longer young

and very few were pursuing careers. They were married women who held part-

time jobs, selling or secretarial, to put their husbands through school, their sons

through college, or to help pay the mortgage. Or they were widows supporting

families. Fewer and fewer women were entering professional work. The shortages

in the nursing, social work, and teaching professions caused crises in almost every

American city. Concerned over the Soviet Union’s lead in the space race, scientists

noted that America’s greatest source of unused brainpower was women. But girls

would not study physics: it was “unfeminine.” A girl refused a science fellowship

at Johns Hopkins to take a job in a real-estate office. All she wanted, she said, was

what every other American girl wanted—to get married, have four children and

live in a nice house in a nice suburb.

The suburban housewife—she was the dream image of the young American

women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American

housewife—freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the

dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beau-

tiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had

found true feminine fulfillment. As a housewife and mother, she was respected as a

full and equal partner to man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles,

clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had everything that women ever dreamed of.

In the fifteen years after World War II, this mystique of feminine fulfillment

became the cherished and self-perpetuating core of contemporary American cul-

ture. Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of

the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the

picture window, depositing their station-wagonsful of children at school, and

smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. They

baked their own bread, sewed their own and their children’s clothes, kept their

new washing machines and dryers running all day. They changed the sheets on the

beds twice a week instead of once, took the rug-hooking class in adult education,

and pitied their poor frustrated mothers, who had dreamed of having a career.

Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to

have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their hus-

bands. They had no thought for the unfeminine problems of the world outside

the home; they wanted the men to make the major decisions. They gloried in their

role as women, and wrote proudly on the census blank: “Occupation: housewife.”

For over fifteen years, the words written for women, and the words women

used when they talked to each other, while their husbands sat on the other side of

the room and talked shop or politics or septic tanks, were about problems with

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their children, or how to keep their husbands happy, or improve their children’s

school, or cook chicken or make slipcovers. Nobody argued whether women were

inferior or superior to men; they were simply different. Words like “emancipa-

tion” and “career” sounded strange and embarrassing; no one had used them for

years. When a Frenchwoman named Simone de Beauvoir wrote a book called The

Second Sex, an American critic commented that she obviously “didn’t know what

life was all about,” and besides she was talking about French women. The “woman

problem” in America no longer existed.

If a woman had a problem in the 1950’s and 1960’s she knew that something

must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself. Other women were satisfied

with their lives, she thought. What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel

this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so ashamed to ad-

mit her dissatisfaction that she never knew how many other women shared it. If

she tried to tell her husband, he didn’t understand what she was talking about.

She did not really understand it herself. For over fifteen years women in America

found it harder to talk about this problem than about sex. Even the psychoana-

lysts had no name for it. When a woman went to a psychiatrist for help, as many

women did, she would say, “I’m so ashamed,” or “I must be hopelessly neurotic.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with women today,” a suburban psychiatrist said un-

easily. “I only know something is wrong because most of my patients happen to

be women. And their problem isn’t sexual.” Most women with this problem did

not go to see a psychoanalyst, however. “There’s nothing wrong really,” they kept

telling themselves. “There isn’t any problem.”

. . . It is no longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation

of so many American women. This is not what being a woman means, no matter

what the experts say. For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason

has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed

far enough. I do not accept the answer that there is no problem because Ameri-

can women have luxuries that women in other times and lands never dreamed of;

part of the strange newness of the problem is that it cannot be understood in

terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness, hunger, cold.

The women who suffer this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill.

. . . If I am right, the problem that has no name stirring in the minds of so

many American women today is not a matter of loss of femininity or too much

education, or the demands of domesticity. It is far more important than anyone

recognizes. It is the key to these other new and old problems which have been tor-

turing women and their husband and children, and puzzling their doctors and

educators for years. It may well be the key to our future as nation and a culture.

We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: “I want something

more than my husband and my children and my home.”

1963 by Betty Friedan. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Workshop Resolutions—First National Chicana Conference, 1971

Sex and the Chicana

We feel that in order to provide an effective measure to correct the many sexual

hangups facing the Chicano community the following resolutions should be

implemented:

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I. Sex is good and healthy for both Chicanos and Chicanas and we must de-

velop this attitude.

II. We should destroy the myth that religion and culture control our sexual

lives.

III. We recognize that we have been oppressed by religion and that the reli-

gious writing was done by men and interpreted by men. Therefore, for those who

desire religion, they should interpret their Bible, or Catholic rulings according to

their own feelings, what they think is right, without any guilt complexes.

IV. Mothers should teach their sons to respect women as human beings who

are equal in every respect. No double standard.

V. Women should go back to the communities and form discussion and ac-

tion groups concerning sex education.

VI. Free, legal abortions and birth control for the Chicano community, con-

trolled by Chicanas. As Chicanas we have the right to control our own bodies.

VII. Make use of church centers, neighborhood centers and any other place

available.

“Liberate your mind and the body will follow....”

“A quitarnos todos nuestros complejos sexuales para tener una vida mejor y fe-

liz” (Let’s cast off all our sexual complexes to have a better and happier life).

Marriage—Chicana Style

Reaffirmation that Chicano marriages are the beginnings of Chicano families

which perpetuate our culture and are the foundation of the movement.

Points brought up in the workshop:

1. Chicano marriages are individual and intimate and solutions to problems

must be primarily handled on an individual basis.

2. A woman must educate and acquaint herself with outside issues and per-

sonal problems (sexual hangups, etc.).

3. It is the responsibility of Chicanas with families to educate their sons and

thus change the attitudes of future generations.

4. Chicanas should understand that Chicanos face oppression and discrim-

ination, but this does not mean that the Chicana should be a scapegoat for the

man’s frustrations.

5. With involvement in the movement, marriages must change. Traditional

roles for Chicanas are not acceptable or applicable.

Resolutions:

I. We, as mujeres de La Raza, recognize the Catholic Church as an oppressive in-

stitution and do hereby resolve to break away and not go to it to bless our unions.

II. Whereas: Unwanted pregnancies are the basis of many social problems, and

Whereas: The role of Mexican-American women has traditionally been lim-

ited to the home, and

Whereas: The need for self-determination and the right to govern their own

bodies is a necessity for the freedom of all people, therefore,

Be It Resolved: That the National Chicana Conference go on record as sup-

porting free family planning and free and legal abortions for all women who want

or need them.

III. Whereas: Due to socio-economic and cultural conditions, Chicanas are

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often heads of households, i.e., widows, divorcees, unwed mothers, or deserted

mothers, or must work to supplement family income, and

Whereas: Chicana motherhood should not preclude educational, political,

social, and economic advancement, and

Whereas: There is a critical need for a 24-hour child-care center in Chicano

communities, therefore,

Be It Resolved: That the National Chicana Conference go on record as rec-

ommending that every Chicano community promote and set up 24-hour day-

care facilities, and that it be further resolved that these facilities will reflect the

concept of La Raza as the united family, and on the basis of brotherhood (La

Raza), so that men, women, young and old assume the responsibility for the love,

care, education, and orientation of all the children of Aztlan.

IV. Whereas: Dr. Goldzieher of SWRF has conducted an experiment on Chi-

cana women of westside San Antonio, Texas, using a new birth control drug, and

Whereas: No human being should be used for experimental purposes,

therefore,

Be It Resolved: That this Conference send telegrams to the American Med-

ical Association condemning this act. Let it also be resolved that each Chicana

women’s group and each Chicana present at the conference begin a letter writing

campaign to:

Dr. Joseph Goldzieher c/o SW Foundation for Research and Education, San

Antonio, Texas, and Director, SW Foundation for Research and Education, San

Antonio, Texas.

Religion

I. Recognize the Plan de Aztlan

II. Take over already existing Church resources for community use, i.e.,

health, Chicano awareness-public information of its resources, etc.

III. Oppose any institutionalized religion.

IV. Revolutionary change of Catholic Church or for it to get out of the way.

V. Establish communication with the barrio and implement programs of

awareness to the Chicano movement.

From Chicanas Speak Out. Women: New Voices of La Raza by Mirta Vidal

Educating the Black Child: Our Past and Our Future, Marian Wright Edelman, 1987

For many of you sitting in this room, it is the best of times. Black per capita in-

come is at an all-time high and many of you have moved up the corporate ladder

even if the ladders you are on frequently don’t reach towards the pinnacle of cor-

porate power. Black purchasing power, now at $200 billion, exceeds the gross na-

tional product of Australia and New Zealand combined. But it has not yet been

translated into commensurate black economic influence and benefit. Black

elected officials are more numerous than ever (6,681 in 1987, a 350 percent in-

crease since 1970). But white economic power still controls our city tax bases. The

amassing of committee and subcommittee chairmanships (8 full House Com-

mittee chairs including the Select Committee, and 18 Subcommittee chairs) by

members of this Congressional Black Caucus is impressive by any standard, al-

though the main political game in town is cutting the budget deficit. Spelman

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College, my alma mater, looks towards its future with a stronger endowment and

student body than ever before while many other black colleges are struggling

mightily to survive.

Bill Cosby is America’s favorite Daddy and Michael Jackson and Whitney

Houston dot the top ten charts. Black leadership has permeated a range of main-

stream institutions. Bill Gray chairs the House Budget Committee, Frank Thomas

heads the Ford Foundation, and Cliff Wharton heads TIAA-CREF. A. Barry Rand

is in charge of marketing at Xerox. Anita De Frantz is America’s representative to

the Olympic Committee, and Richard Knight is the city manager of Dallas.

I am proud of these and many similar accomplishments and applaud the

black middle class for whom the times are good tonight. We’ve worked hard to

get where we are. However, we have to work harder still to stay there and to move

ahead.

But there is another black community that is not riding high tonight and

that is going down and under. If you and I don’t build a bridge back to them and

throw out some strong lifelines to our children and youths and families whom

poverty and unemployment and hopelessness are engulfing, they’re going to

drown, pull many of us down with them, and undermine the black future that

our forebears dreamed, struggled, and died for.

I am grateful, therefore, that the Congressional Black Caucus has focused

attention this year on Educating the Black Child. Just as Martin Luther King, Jr.,

and others accepted the challenge of their time, so the challenge of our time is ed-

ucating all of our children in mind, in body, and in soul if we are to preserve and

strengthen the black future.

It is the worst of times for poor black babies born within a mile of this ho-

tel and in many inner cities around the country who have less of a chance of liv-

ing to the first year of life than a baby born in Costa Rica. Black babies are still

twice as likely to die in the first year of life than white babies.

It is the worst of times for black youth and young adults trying to form fam-

ilies without decent skills or jobs and without a strong value base. Young mar-

riages have essentially stopped in the black community. Sixty percent of all black

babies today are born to never married single mothers; 90 percent of those born

to black teens are born to unmarried mothers. One out of two children in a fe-

male-headed household is poor. Two out of three (67.1 percent) children in black

female-headed households are poor. If that household is headed by a mother

younger than 25, three out of four are poor. Even when teen pregnancy results in

marriage, young two-parent families are almost three times as likely to be poor as

those with parents 25 to 44 years of age.

A significant cause of this black family problem lies in young black men’s

eroding employment and wage base. Only 26.5 percent of all black male teens

were employed in 1986 and 61.3 percent of those 20 to 24 years old. And even

when they are lucky enough to work they frequently can’t earn enough to lift a

family out of poverty. Between 1973 and 1984, the average real (inflation-ad-

justed) annual earnings among males ages 20 through 24 fell by nearly 30 percent

(from $11,572 to $8,072 in 1984 dollars). This sharp drop affected virtually all

groups of young adult males—whether white, black, or Hispanic although young

black men suffered the most severe losses (nearly 50 percent). So the links be-

tween teen pregnancy and poverty are related not just to age and single parent-

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hood but also to the poor skills and employment experience young parents seek

to bring to the work force and to the lower wages young workers are paid.

To combat the poverty which is engulfing half of the black babies born to-

day—half of our future as a black community—we must all work to prevent too

early sexual activity and pregnancy and encourage our boys and girls to wait un-

til they have the education and economic stability to form lasting families. If the

share of single births in the black community grows at the rate of the last decade,

by the year 2000, only one black baby in five will be born to a married woman.

And if you don’t care about these babies unselfishly you’d better care selfishly, for

the future black voting and economic base upon which much of our leadership

status rests resides in the health and education of the black child and the strength

of the black family.

Not only are too many black babies and youths fighting poverty and sick-

ness and homelessness and too little early childhood stimulation and weak basic

skills preparation, they are also fighting AIDS and other sexually transmitted dis-

eases; drug, tobacco, and alcohol addiction and crime which hopelessness and the

absence of constructive alternatives and support systems in their lives leave them

prey to. A black baby is seven or eight times more likely to be an AIDS victim than

a white baby and minority teens (15 to 19) are the highest risk group for a range

of sexually transmitted diseases. A black youth is five times more likely than a

white youth to end up in an institution and is nearly as likely to be in prison as

he is to be in college. Between 1979 and 1985 the number of black youth in juve-

nile detention facilities rose by 40 percent while the number of black youth en-

tering college immediately after high school graduation fell by four percent. More

black males go to prison each year than go to college. There are more black drug

addicts than there are black doctors or lawyers.

Now some of you sitting here will ask what this has to do with you. You

struggled and beat the odds and those folks who haven’t made it could do the

same. Others of you will rightfully say you’re already doing your bit for the race

by achieving yourself and by contributing to black organizations. Still others

place the blame for growing black family poverty and weakening community

bonds and support systems on urbanization and the continuing racial discrimi-

nation in national life which devalues black talent and curbs black opportunity.

As many nuggets of truth as each of these views may contain, I will simply

say that unless the black middle class begins to exert more effective and sustained

leadership with and without the black community on behalf of black children

and families both as personal role models and value instillers and as persistent ad-

vocates for national, state and local policies—funded policies—that assure our

children the health and child care, education, housing, and jobs they need to grow

up into self sufficient adults, to form healthy families, and to carry on the black

tradition of achievement, then all of our Mercedes and Halston frocks will not

hide our essential failure as a generation of black haves who did not protect the

black future during our watch.

Just as our nation is committing moral and economic suicide by permitting

one in four of its preschool children to be poor, one in five to be at risk of being

a teen parent, one in six to have no health insurance, and one in seven to face

dropping out of school at a time when the pool of available young people to sup-

port an aging population and form a strong workforce is shrinking, so we are

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committing racial suicide by not sounding the alarm and protecting our own

children from the poverty that ravages their dreams. For America will not treat

our children fairly unless we make it.

We must recapture and care about our lost children and help them gain the

confidence, self-esteem, values, and real world opportunities—education, jobs,

and higher education which they need to be strong future guardians of the black

community’s heritage.

How do we do this? There are nine steps we must take if we are to help our

children.

The first step is to remember and teach them that black folk have never been

able to take anything for granted in America and we had better not start in these

waning Reagan years of budget deficits and looming economic recession. Frederick

Douglass put it bluntly: “Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they

must certainly pay for all they get.”So you make sure that you are ready to do your

part to help yourself and black children and to hold public and private sector of-

ficials accountable for doing their part in fostering health, education, and fair em-

ployment policies that are essential to black family survival.

Tell our children they’re not going to jive their way up the career ladder.

They’ve got to work their way up—hard and continuously. Too many young peo-

ple want a fast elevator straight to the top floor and resist walking up the stairs or

stopping on the floors of achievement between the bottom and the top. Tell them

do their homework, pay attention to detail, and take care and pride in their work.

People who are sloppy in little things tend to be sloppy in big things. Tell them to

be reliable, to stick with something until they finish and resist jumping from pil-

lar to post. And tell them to take the initiative in creating their own opportunity.

They can’t wait around for other people to discover them or to do them a favor.

The second step is to teach them the importance of getting a good education.

While not a guarantee of success, education is a precondition to survival in Amer-

ica today. At a time when a smaller proportion of black high school graduates go

on to college than ten years ago, we need to tell all of our children that college pays.

In 1986, the average unemployment rate among black college graduates under 25

was 13.2 percent—more than one in every eight. Among young black high school

graduates, it was 26.6 percent—more than one in four. College doubles their

chance of getting a job. And we need to insist that they get a liberal education and

learn how to think so that they can navigate an ever changing job market.

The third step is to tell them that forming families is serious business and re-

quires a measure of thoughtful planning and economic stability. In 1986, one in

every five black families with children under 18 had someone unemployed. Of

those 44 percent were single parents with no one at work. Among black married

couples with children, only 18 percent had no one working.

That is the crucial point. Education alone, although of enormous value in

itself, cannot guarantee a young black adult the income needed to raise children

in economic safety today. But two black adults, both working, have the safety net

of the second income when unemployment strikes. Remember, that’s the only

safety net President Reagan hasn’t found a way to cut yet.

All these figures are from 1986, the fourth year of a long period of economic

recovery. When the next recession arrives—and it will—the black unemployment

rates will soar. Since this recession will come at a time when we have an extraor-

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dinary budget deficit, there is a great danger that the American voters will buy the

argument that we must cut government spending in order to reduce interest rates

and stimulate the economy. If this happens, there will be many unemployed

teachers, nurses, employment counselors, and government workers of all sorts.

There is a warning here that relates to steps one and two. Just as black pen-

etration into civil and social service professional jobs occurs, the growth and se-

curity of such jobs fall. Just as blacks rise to senior ranks in industrial and indus-

trial union jobs, steel and auto manufacturing industries enter a steep decline.

The economic goal posts keep shifting. How, then, do we work towards a full

share in the power to set the goals in place, and not just the right to run the race?

The fourth step is to set goals and work quietly and systematically towards

them. So often we feel we have to talk loud rather than act effectively. So often we

get bogged down in our ego needs and lose sight of our broader community

goals. T. S. Eliot in his play “The Cocktail Party” said that “half the harm that is

done in this world is due to people who want to feel important.” Wanting to feel

important is good, but not at the expense of doing important deeds—even if we

don’t get the credit. You can get a mighty lot done in this world if you don’t mind

doing the work and letting other people take the credit. You know what you do

and the Lord knows what you do and that’s all that matters.

The fifth step is knowing the difference between substance and style. Too many

of us think success is a Saks Fifth Avenue charge card or a “bad” set of wheels or

coming to this Black Caucus dinner. Now these are things to enjoy, but they are not

life goals. I was watching one of President Johnson’s inaugural balls on television

with a black college president’s wife in Mississippi when Mrs. Hamer, that great lady

of the Mississippi civil rights movement who lacked a college degree, but certainly

not intelligence or clear purpose, came onto the screen. The college president’s wife

moaned: “Oh my, there’s Miz Hamer at the President’s ball and she doesn’t even

have a long dress.” My response was:“That’s alright. Mrs. Hamer with no long gown

is there and you and I with our long gowns are not.” So often we miss the real

point—we buy BMWs and fur coats before we think about whether where we’re

going to drive and wear them is worthwhile. Nobody ever asks about what kind of

car Ralph Bunche drove or designer suit Martin Luther King, Jr., bought. Don’t

confuse style with meaning. Get your insides in order and your direction clear first

and then worry about your clothes and your wheels. You may need them less.

The sixth step is valuing family life. We must build on the strong black tradi-

tion of family and teach our children to delay family formation until they are eco-

nomically and emotionally stable and ready to raise the new generation of black

children and leaders. Black and white men must support their children as best

they can and not have them until they are ready to take responsibility for them.

We must strengthen family rituals: prayers if we are religious, regular family

meals, and participation in school work and in non-school activities. Our children

need constructive alternatives to the street. We must do things with our children.

Listen to them. Be moral examples for them. If we cut corners, they will too. If we

lie, they will too. If we spend all our money on our backs and wheels and tithe no

portion of it for our colleges, churches, and civic causes, they won’t either.

We must join together as an entire community to establish an ethic of

achievement and self-esteem in poor and middle class black children. They can do

science and math as well as basketball and football, computers as well as cotillions,

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reading along with reggae. If we expect these accomplishments of them, support

them in their learning processes, and help them in setting priorities. They need

strong consistent adult buffers to withstand the negative messages of the external

world that values them less than white or middle class children.

When I, like many of you, was growing up in my small segregated southern

town, the whole outside world, the law of the land, local officials, the media, al-

most everybody outside our own community told black children we weren’t

worth much or were second rate. But we didn’t believe it because our parents said

it wasn’t so. Our preachers said it wasn’t so. Our caring teachers said it wasn’t so.

And they nurtured us as a community, shielded us against the constant psycho-

logical battery of our daily environment and made us understand that we could

make it—had to make it—but in order to do so, we had to struggle to make our

own opportunities in order to help change America. And we went on to college—

poor and black—and tried to carry out their other lesson to give some of what

they gave us back in service to others left behind. Service, they taught, is the rent

you pay for living. Where is our buffer today for the black and poor children who

are daily wounded by a national administration who would rather judge than

help the poor? Where are the strong local officials and community voices and

hands shielding and fighting for the poor children in our city streets against the

ravages of drugs and crime? Where are the role modelling, mentoring, and tutor-

ing programs that help black children overcome the pernicious undercurrents of

many, even our purported friends, who really think black children lack the po-

tential of other children? What activities are your churches and sororities and fra-

ternities sponsoring to keep children busy and off the streets?

The seventh step is to vote and use our political and economic power. Only 51

percent of all voting age blacks voted in the 1980 election and only 56 percent in

the 1984 election. Seventy percent of 18- to 25-year-old black youths did not vote

in the last election. People who do not vote have no line of credit with people who

are elected and pose no threat to those who act against our interests. Don’t even

pretend that you care about the black community, about poor children, about

your nation, even about your own future, if you don’t exercise the political lever-

age Medgar Evers and others died to make sure we had. And run for political of-

fice. And when you win don’t forget that you are the means to serve others well

and not the end.

No one running for president or any office should get black community

support unless they have a well thought-out set of policies designed to lift the

black child and family. Similarly, we need to use our economic power for the ben-

efit of black families, particularly in industries where we constitute a large mar-

ket share.

Two last steps and I’m done.

Remember your roots, your history, and the forebears’ shoulders on which you

stand. And pass them on to your children and to other black children whose par-

ents may not be able to. As a black community today there is no greater priority

than assuring the rootedness of all our children—poor, middle class, and Ivy

League. Young people who do not know where they come from and the struggle

it took to get them where they are now will not know where they are going or

what to do for anyone besides themselves if and when they finally arrive some-

where. And if they run into bad weather on the way, they will not have the pro-

818 Documents