Just four days ago on Saturday morning an article appeared in the Washington Post criticizing the Poverty Program. The article discussed only one part of our program but what it says concerns all of us.
Here is what it said:
“A widening conflict is breaking out within the War on Poverty -- and its most sensitive battleground is the community action phase of the program. In both the north and the south, local leaders have been slow to understand that the poor must be involved in the planning and administration of programs if their community is to qualify for federal antipoverty dollars.
Thus, as the War on Poverty begins its sixth operation month, protests are mounting in city after city over the ‘silk stocking’ or ‘segregationist’ composition of those who are attempting to control the local program.”
And the article continues:
“Part of the difficulty stems from the fact that community leaders who can be counted on to run a wide variety of civic affairs are not necessarily those most suited for running an antipoverty operation. But the folks who run city hall have not recognized this yet.
In addition, difficulties stem from the high hopes minority groups have placed in the poverty program. To them, the program represents the last chance for economic and social survival.”
Well, I don’t know how you feel about those statements -- but for me, they don’t spell failure -- or disaster. They spell achievement, and progress. And above all, they spell, a promise:
-- A promise that the poverty program can work a real change in our society;
-- A promise that for the first time, the poor can begin to speak out with a new hope, a new determination -- and, yes, a new sense of urgency and desperation;
-- A promise that for the first time, our nation is really beginning to listen to the voices of the poor -- to value what the poor have to say.
That’s what that article said to me... A dialogue, has begun, a great national dialogue about the most fundamental values and premises of American life. I know that’s not much consolation when you’re on the spot -- as each of you are, day in and day out. You’re caught in the middle, trying to bring change to your communities while working with established institutions. And it doesn’t help to be told: A dialogue is underway -- when you’re getting it from both sides – particularly when that dialogue is punctuated by denunciations, ultimatums, charges and recriminations. That dialogue is not all sweetness and light.
But then, Thomas Jefferson remarked:
“We cannot expect to be translated from depotism to liberty in a featherbed.” And that statement applies just as much to the tyranny of poverty as it did, a century and a half ago, to the tyranny of George The Third.
But it may help to know that you are not alone. That we are behind you. And that we understand what you are going through and what you are up against.
You have now -- and you will continue to have, when the chips are down – the backing and support of the Office of Economic Opportunity. That is my pledge. No one promised that this war was going to be a Sunday School picnic. In my office hangs an inscription which seems more and more applicable every day.
He said not: Thou shalt not be troubled, thou shalt not be tempted, thou shalt not be distressed; But, He said: Thou shalt not be overcome.
What some take for signs of failure, I take for proof of achievement, of progress, or engagement with the enemy. This program cannot succeed if that process does not go on. - If the poor do not participate -- even when participation means criticism. If they do not speak out, as Mrs. Janice Bradshaw spoke out one month ago, when she told a conference in Tucson:
“Poverty is a personal thing. Poverty is taking your children to the hospital and spending the whole day waiting with no one even taking your name -- and then coming back the next day, and the next, until they finally get around to you.
Poverty is having a landlady who is a public health nurse -- who turns off the heat when she leaves for work in the morning and turns it back on at six when she returns. It’s being helpless to do anything about it because by the time the officials get around to it, she has turned the heat back on for that day and then it will be off the next.
Poverty is having the welfare investigators break in at four o’clock in the morning and cut off your welfare check without an explanation -- and then when you go down and ask, they tell you it is because they found a pair of men’s house slippers in the attic, where your brother left them when he visited a month ago.
Poverty is having a child with glaucoma and watching that eye condition grow worse every day, while the welfare officials send you to the private agencies, and the private agencies send you back to the welfare, and when you ask the welfare officials to refer you to this special hospital they say they can’t -- and then when you say it is prejudice because you are a Negro, they deny it flatly -- and they shout at you: “Name one white child we have referred there:” And when you name twenty-five, they sit down - - and they shut up -- and they finally refer you but it is too late then, because your child has permanently lost 80 percent of his vision -- and you are told that if only they had caught it a month earlier, when you first made inquiry about the film over his eyes, they could have preserved his vision.”
That’s the voice of the poor. And it must be heard. We face a revolution in expectations -- a radical shift in the hopes, demands and aspirations of the poor themselves. We cannot stem that tide. And we do not wish to do so.
Right now, those demands focus on representation -- numerical representation of the poor on the board of community action programs. This is at the heart of the complaint now pending before the United States District Court of the District of Columbia in the case of Associated Community Teams vs. United Planning Organization. Count 10 of that complaint states:
“None of the members of said board of trustees is a member of the group comprised of the poor of the District of Columbia.”
But let’s not fool ourselves. The issue of numerical representation is not the only issue -- though it is a highly symbolic one. In community after community, the issue is beginning to shift from the number of poor persons on the board, to other and possibly even more far-reaching issues:
-- To the pattern of staffing
-- To the roles which the poor play as employees of community action programs
-- To the creation of mechanisms and procedures to guarantee a voice for the poor within community action programs
-- To the selection of program priorities
-- To the timetable for particular programs
-- To the willingness of community action organizations to become involved in controversial programs.
There is no need to romanticize the poor, to pretend that they possess all the wisdom, all the insight, all the perspective on how to eradicate poverty. If that were so, we would need no poverty program -- the poor could find their own way out. But we cannot assume either that the professionals and the established institutions have a monopoly on knowledge, on ability, on insight.
And consequently, it will be necessary, continuously to involve, the poor, to utilize their insights, to harness their energies, and to heed their criticism. We all know that process isn’t easy. Calling it coordination won’t make it easy. – That’s like, telling a Roman charioteer to coordinate a team of wild horses.
Coordination will provide no magic reconciliation of the competing pressures you face:
-- To produce results -- but not to take only the easy cases
-- To avoid controversy -- but not at the price, of silencing dissent
-- To avoid risk -- but yet to innovate
-- To involve major institutions -- but not to exclude the poor
-- To provide services -- but not through unilateral action
-- To mount new programs immediately -- but not without consulting the wishes and needs of all participants.
It is no easy task. Working things through takes time. Opening new channels of communications often involves delay. We understand that. And you have our pledge to stand behind you, to back you.
But let us be candid. We have another pledge -- a pledge to Congress, a pledge to the American people -- a pledge to the poor. We all labor under a duty to act and act now. Action cannot be deferred indefinitely.
Mrs. Bradshaw’s child could not wait while some great philosophical process went on. A million four and five-year olds can’t wait when this fall they will enter school confused, frightened, and already six months behind, unless we do something.
100 thousand teenagers -- school dropouts can’t wait -- while they become old enough to graduate from being children on ADC to being adults on public assistance.
The dialogue must proceed -- but not at the cost of human lives. We must act now, decisively through operation Head Start -- a special program for children who will be entering school this fall. We need to enlarge programs like Job Corps and Neighborhood Youth Corps. But our purpose is not to cut such programs adrift from community action organizations. Quite the opposite. As community action organizations take shape, we will support efforts to integrate these programs into the structure reached by local consensus.
But we cannot wait -- and you cannot wait until all disagreement is gone, until a total plan of attack, a total strategy, a final resolution of all issues is reached.
This meeting here, today, can teach us all a lesson. You didn’t wait until the federal government was perfectly coordinated before you came together. If you had, perhaps, this meeting would never have been called. In fact, I guess that one of the reasons you are here is become of your frustrations in dealing with the federal government. And today, you have set in motion a force which may do more to end those frustrations than all we could have done in weeks or even months of negotiating, meeting, talking, and exchanging memoranda.
This same lesson applies to our own communities. Don’t ask the poor to wait while you create the perfect bureaucratic structure. In the final analysis, coordination is not an end in itself
-- but only a means to increase our capacity to respond to needs.
And that is why we need to maintain direct contact with the sense of immediacy, of urgency, of desperation that comes from the poor when, they speak in their own words in ways that have meaning to them.
You may have read in a recent Time Magazine about the work of Chaplain Carl Burke at Brie County Detention Home. In an attempt to reach these boys, he encouraged them to rewrite, biblical stories in their own terms.
For them Jesus was not born in Bethlehem, but in Buffalo during a convention when every hotel room was taken. His stable was a hot dog stand in Delaware Park. That may seem less idyllic and pastoral -- but it is impossible to ignore its impact and relevance or consider this revision of the 23rd Psalm:
“The Lord is like my probation officer.
He will help me.
He tries to help me make it every day.
He makes me play it cool.”
That kind of language, of feeling, strips us of all, our pretentiousness about sub-professionals, indigenous leaders, replication, counter-productive and all the current “in-group” jargon which we use to hide inaction, and indifference.
And perhaps, all those good, upstanding citizens who stood idle while a woman was murdered in broad daylight, before their eyes, could have benefitted from the story of the Good Samaritan as rephrased by those boys. For them:
“The Good Samaritan became the ‘cool square’ who helped a mugged victim after a ‘hood’ and a ‘squeak’ (not so cool as a hood) had passed him by. “You don’t have to be a square to show love, and to be sorry for someone and to help a guy,” the parable ends. “But get with it man: -- this is what God wants you to do.”
We all must heed that message: Get with it man! Every city, every community, every state. And our slogan at the Office of Economic Opportunity will be: “Let’s Get With It.”
