The current issue of Ebony Magazine runs an article by a friend of mine, Stan Sanders, called “I’ll Never Escape From the Ghetto.” The title is a little misleading because the fact is, Stan Sanders doesn’t want to leave the ghetto.
He was brought up in Watts. He went to Whittier College in California and then to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Later, he decided to go to Yale Law School.
Right now, he is back in Watts and he plans to stay there. He said, “Some people said I was either a federal agent or a fool, because no reasonable man, they said, returns to Watts by choice.”
But I think his decision is an example of contemporary heroism. What it means is this: Stan Sanders is working for the day when the people of Watts will be proud to claim it as their home. The same way people from Beverly Hills are proud of their home, or Palm Beach, or Shaker Heights.
But how can this be done? Are ghettos like Watts, Harlem or Hough going to be removed geographically? Or by pouring money into them? No. The answer is not that simple.
People will become proud of Watts, only when the people in Watts can become proud of themselves. And that is the great challenge of this decade-- to create a sense of community among American Negroes.
- Not a community that pits them against us, black against white.
- Not a community that is an armed camp.
- Not a slave-like community where the Negroes who have made it give lip service to progress.
- Not a community of people who must escape the ghetto to achieve success.
But a community that can bring success to the ghetto, the way Stan Sanders is doing.
It is no fun living with rats, garbage, noise, dirt and being forced to pay high prices to endure it. No American should ask another American to have patience with these conditions of death.
That is why all America must say, “Let us destroy the suffering of the ghetto before the suffering of the ghetto destroys us.”
“But will we?” asks theologian Harvey Cox in the latest issue of Christianity and Crisis. “King George III refused to believe the reports (about rioting) from Boston. An eight-year war ensued. A national guardsman described the Newark uprising as ‘just like a war between two nations.’ Maybe he was wrong, maybe just premature. That war has not quite begun, not yet. If it does, God help us. We will assuredly disembowel ourselves, as a nation and, just as in a hydrogen war, there will be no winners, white or black. Only losers.”
Right now, the way to create a Negro community is to create an American community--not by a call to battle, but by a call to reason. We have a statue of liberty on the east coast given to us by a foreign community. But we need a statue of unity built by all Americans, for all Americans-- in every American community.
Today, our nation is not united. This country is in trouble because too many Americans prefer not to know each other. Not to care about each other. The great American slogan is, “You go your way and I’ll go mine.”
I am not saying all Americans must become friendly with each other, or that privacy is evil. I am saying that ignorance of our fellow citizen’s needs destroys more than it protects:
- Our country is destroyed when people living in $40,000 houses don’t know people living in $4,000 houses.
- Our country is destroyed when the affluent know more about the “Beverly Hillbillies” than the destitute hillbillies in Appalachia.
- Our country is destroyed when poodles eat better than people.
- Our country is destroyed when we are soft-hearted about sending slum kids to summer camp, but soft-headed about job training for their fathers.
Our country cannot go on like this. More and more, the poor who are cut off from normal American life are repeating the sentiment of Churchill when someone tried to ignore Britain: “We will not be dealt with as part of a blob.” We in America cannot treat the poor as a blob. Their needs are human, personal, immediate.
The need for jobs, for education, for decent housing, for health, for justice.
And there is another need--a need for both affluent Americans and poor Americans to get rid of some wrong thinking.
Right now, wrong thinking is everywhere.
- The affluent are wrong if they think poverty can be destroyed without personal sacrifice.
- The affluent are wrong if they think the poor are happy getting handouts year after year.
- The affluent are wrong if they think guns and tanks will prevent riots.
- The affluent are wrong if they think they can seek more ways to become richer, while countless Americans are becoming poorer.
- The affluent are wrong if they think white backlash is the answer to the race problem.
- The affluent are wrong if they think forestalling poverty is better than eliminating poverty.
And the poor have some mistaken ideas, too.
- The poor are wrong if they think they can get out of poverty without making any effort themselves.
- The poor are wrong if they think they can escape poverty without help from the rich or from government or business or labor. Everyone must help if the poor are to escape poverty.
- The poor are wrong if they think hatred of the whites, or hatred of the establishment, or hatred of the government can solve the problems of poverty. Hatred destroys, it never builds.
This kind of wrong thinking--by the rich and the poor--is keeping America from being a “more perfect union.” It is keeping America divided into ghettos--not the city slums, but ghettos of the mind where we seal off parts of democracy that don’t suit us, where we box off our obligations to justice and shut out our commitments to fairness. These ghettos of the mind are more damaging to America than the ghettos of the city.
The riots have shocked this country--all of us. Even the Civil War was less shocking, because we knew it was coming. But Lincoln’s words about the Civil War are still true about today’s riots:
“Surely God intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion which no mortal could make and no mortal could stay.”
Some great good will come from these riots, the way St. Paul said good can come from evil.
Already, thanks be to God, we can see some signs of the good.
The latest Lou Harris pool says that large majorities of white and black Americans now agree that the way to stop riots is to destroy the conditions that create riots.
Right here in Cleveland, we can see with our own eyes that this is true. The conditions of poverty are being destroyed; slowly, perhaps too slowly, but some movement is visible.
- In two years, the Neighborhood Youth Corps has enrolled over 6,000 youths. They have earned over $2.5 million in wages. 85% are from poor families.
- Project 1060, for youths between 14 and 16 has employed over 2,000 this summer: in community improvement programs at $1.25 an hour.
- Five Legal Services offices have assisted 2,350 persons, with more than 4,000 receiving education and direction.
- Foster Grandparents with 38 elderly involved.
- Head Start with 128 classes enrolling 2,400 children.
- The Job Corps Center for Women, directed by Dr. Zelma George, now has 355 girls enrolled. It has the lowest national dropout rate and the highest national graduation rate. 74% of its graduates are employed. 274 have graduated already.
