Address at the New Orleans Press Club Awards Dinner

"We say the poor should help themselves and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps -- but we forget that poverty is itself more than financial want; it is a lack of the basic skills and savvy and of the self-confidence it takes to get out of the mire of despair."
New Orleans, LA • September 09, 1964

Tonight I bring you a challenge -- a challenge to communicate to America and, most important, to the people of New Orleans and all Louisiana, the dirty, frustrating, empty, hopeless story of poverty. For only with profound understanding of the nature of poverty will come answers to the problems of poverty in our communities, nationwide.

Newspapers and journalists have made Americans aware of a complex Einstein’ formula—E=MC2.

You have taught them the meaning of ICBM, of Polaris, DEW line, and of the Van Allen radiation belt.

You have made Americans aware of a word like Thalidomide and what it means to a pregnant mother and her unborn child.

But take a simple word like “poor”. Have we succeeded in making Americans aware what that means? Have we succeeded in making Americans aware of what it feels like to be without hope...to be without the self-respect of a weekly pay check...to be without the talent to earn one?

Have we shown what it means to a young man when he can’t read an application blank for even a menial job?

Have we translated to our fellow Americans how a mother feels when she can’t do arithmetic well enough to help her seven-year-old son: with his homework...when she hasn’t got an extra dime to let him splurge on an ice cream cone when she hasn’t got a bedsheet to cover the grimy mattress in his room a room and a mattress that may be shared by several of his brothers and sisters?

The plain answer is that we have not. And many of us do not want to.

By shutting out the poor -- by handing them over to the professionals -- we are able to concentrate on tri-level instead of split-level homes...on three cars rather than two...on swimming pools, Sting-ray convertibles, and if I may say so, ham radio sets.

Many of us close our minds to the plight of the poor. We fear that we may get involved. We’d much rather just write a check.

The poor are an embarrassment, and every one of us knows that when we’re embarrassed we look the other way.

We would rather look the other way. We find many convenient reasons for avoiding a head-on look. These are some of the things we say:

“The poor are poor because they deserve to be poor” – we forget that one-third of the poor are children.

We say that the poor are lazy and shiftless -- and we forget that jobs for unskilled labor are rapidly decreasing.

We say the poor are made of juvenile delinquents and young punks who are no good -- and we forget that a sense of failure and defeat often began in their cases before kindergarten...in 1966 as many children will drop out of school as will graduate from high school in that same year, 2,666,000 in one year:

We say the poor should help themselves and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps -- but we forget that poverty is itself more than financial want; it is a lack of the basic skills and savvy and of the self-confidence it takes to get out of the mire of despair.

We say that most of the poor are Negroes and that the whites do not have to worry -- but we forget that only one-fifth of the poor are Negroes.

We say our fathers worked their own way up and out of poverty --and we forget that we face now a new kind of poverty – inherited poverty that perpetuates itself and is passed on from father to son.

Underneath all these excuses and all this forgetting is fear --fear of poverty and fear of defeat in eliminating poverty.

Earlier this year the Gallup Poll reported that 83% of the American people don’t believe that we can win this war against poverty.

They’re wrong.

If the Gallup Poll had asked the American people 50 years ago if we could eliminate infectious diseases like polio, diphtheria, whooping cough, typhoid and smallpox, the vast majority would have said “No...we can’t eliminate these ancient plagues of mankind.”

But we did eliminate these diseases. And we are going to eliminate the affliction called poverty.

You must help us turn our faces to this task.

In my own home city of Chicago, I asked a poor illiterate woman why she wanted to go to school at night to learn to read.

And she said, “This woman, Susie, she lives up the hall from me in 6B. And her boy came home, and he asked her to help him with his homework. And she had to say, she couldn’t. You know, that’s embarrassing. And I don’t want that to happen to me.”

How can you shut your eyes to a woman like that? Or to the teenage boy who was asked whether he wanted to be a teacher, and he answered, “No. Look, I can’t even teach myself enough to get a job. How am I gonna teach anyone else?”

These are not people to be ignored or feared. They are people who want help, who need help, and who can be helped. And that’s why we have to take that simple word “poor” and see who the people are behind that word.

It’s going to take more than normal reporting to do this. It’s going to take more than a few human interest stories and one feature story on the war against poverty. Day by day, it’s going to take coverage of the unseen, unwritten about, and unreported one-fifth of our Nation. It’s going to take a reporting system as sophisticated, as flexible, and as complex as the problem itself. No single piece, no single part of the story is enough. And no single part can be written without understanding the whole problem.

And that is- why here, in this city of traditions, I would like to propose a break from tradition. I want to suggest two new approaches to reporting, approaches which will get at the truth -- the whole truth -- approaches that will sell papers and reach people.

I would like to see an anti-poverty team established in every news room in the United States. Your newspapers now have reporters covering parts of the poverty story. You have one at City Hall, covering politics and urban renewal; another at the county offices covering health and welfare; another covering the activities of the private health and welfare agencies. But no one is able to cover the whole poverty beat. Poverty is so complex it needs a team of reporters under the direction of a top editor to provide the comprehensive coverage this story needs...Couldn’t such a team rout slum landlords, expose the profiteers of the poor, and provide the kind of total picture that would excite and stir your readers?

And I have a second proposal -- a proposal to cover the poverty beat through more than one means of communication. Couldn’t we develop a reporting team that would cross mass media lines that would include representatives of all the communications industries in each community? A radio station, a television station, and a newspaper could do a combined job in exposing the problem of poverty that none could do alone.

This has been done in Chicago. Two competitors -- the Chicago Daily News and WBBM-TV combined the written word with the spoken and added the dimension of film to tell a complete slum story. They won the Sigma Delta Chi citation for public service in journalism. The award stated they had dramatized significantly, the slums of Chicago and exposed those who profit from human misery. They did a public service job to be proud of. They not only created a public understanding of the problem, but they got action. Fines for housing violations were raised, and new legislation opened the way to prosecution of slum landlords previously protected by dummy corporations.

If it can be done in Chicago, it can be done here and in every community across the country.

New Orleans has already set an example for the rest of the nation. It has looked squarely at itself, at the local problems of poverty. And the picture isn’t very rosy.

Reports from the Bureau of the Census indicates that New Orleans faces perhaps, the most difficult poverty problem of any major American city. You rank second, of all major American cities, in number of families with income under $3,000, second, in the number of men over 25 with less than 7 years of schooling, second in the number of housing units with more than one person per room, second in the number of unskilled mill workers; and third in the number of children under 18 living in broken homes. When all these separate indices are put together and compared, city by city, New Orleans is the one hit hardest by the problems of poverty among major American cities.

That is not a pleasant fact -- but your willingness and success in facing it will be a real measure of the strength and determination and courage of this community. Fortunately, New Orleans is facing its own problems -- and it isn’t running scared. Under the leadership of Tom Godchaux, Darwin Fenner, Larry Merrigan, and Matt Sutherland, more than thirty citizens from all segments of the community have joined in forming the New Orleans. Committee for the Economic Opportunity. That Committee is charting the next steps to be taken; it has hired an executive director Winston Lill with a long history of experience in New Orleans affairs. It is identifying the city’s needs -- and designing a program to meet those needs. Mayor Schiro has kept me abreast- of this-development and has told me about the formation of this committee. We intend to give every bit of help we can. President Johnson’s anti-poverty program stands ready to help any community that has the-courage and determination that New Orleans has manifested. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars have been set aside for Louisiana alone to plan local anti-poverty programs, to hire staff, and if necessary to bring in experts. And for the nation, three hundred and fifteen million dollars have been authorized for the New Orleans’s type of local action under local leadership. Louisiana’s share of this, incidentally, would be at least 5.2 million dollars.

We have another new program designed to take unemployed kids off the streets of cities like New Orleans, Chicago, Boston, and Birmingham. Job Corps camps are going to be set up all over the country.

Last-weekend in New Hampshire, ten thousand teenagers rioted at Hampton Beach. There wasn’t a Negro in the crowd. This was not-a race riot, The was a riot by youngsters whom one Boston newspaper called “overprivileged,” but, like many young people they lacked purpose and maturity and a chance to do something worthwhile.

We are going to take poor kids with the same superabundance of energy, and give them the kind of training and attention they never got before. And those kids will be getting a - living allowance and extra money to send-home to their folks in New Orleans, in Baton Rouge, in Shreveport, or wherever they come from.

These are programs to get people out of poverty, not to make them more comfortable in poverty. These programs can mean a lot for Louisiana. You spend one-fifth of your annual budget on welfare. We can help you cut that relief load. For example in Louisiana the Federal Government will pay the whole cost of support, of training, and of job placement for unemployed parents of families on public assistance. State and county welfare departments have already been negotiating to set up such programs in Caddo and Arcadia Parishes.

But this program is not just for Caddo and Arcadia. It’s for poor people, all over Louisiana, and you can set up this program with federal funds.

And we are going to do more. When Andrew Jackson fought the Battle of New Orleans, he repelled the British invaders with an army of volunteers -- of men who fought because they believed in what they were fighting for. We are going to organize another army of volunteers -- of 20th Century Americans willing to fight poverty. We call that army VISTA -- Volunteers in Service to America. And these volunteers will be made available, upon request, to communities such as New Orleans to work under local leadership in local antipoverty programs, in schools, in playgrounds, in settlement houses, and Y’s.

We welcome enlistment in that army by the men and women of Louisiana. We need everybody who really wants to fight for domestic peace and economic opportunity for all.

At the heart of this new anti-poverty program is a recognition of the need for a new kind of relationship between the poor and the rest of society -- a relationship of trust, of mutual understanding and mutual respect. We can make that relationship work. But we have to communicate in the language of human feelings and needs. This is-the common language of all mankind. The voices of humanity, of compassion, and of calm concern must prevail. Distrust, fear, and resentment breed all too rapidly. The best intentioned efforts can be misconstrued and the best intentioned of persons misbranded and misunderstood. Somehow, through your help, the voices of men of good will must come through loud and clear. You can help, help immeasurably, to make sure that the still small voices of compassion, of human understanding, and indeed, of love, are not distorted, do not falter and grow silent. And you can do much to help us listen for the first time to the voices of the poor. For the first time, those voices, through you, can begin to speak hesitatingly and fearfully, but with hope.

Let me read you the words of one such voice. They come from a letter written by a 17-year-old delinquent who participated in a Job Corps pilot project in Philadelphia. He writes: “This is the next to the last day.... Even though I didn’t think I would, I think I am going to miss this place. I have met a lot of different people here and found out how they lived. Perhaps some of them I’ll never see again. Maybe I’m wrong but I think this program was to draw people together who probably would fight on the outside. If I go back to the way I used to live I think I will be able to think before I do something, and I found out something that I need a hell of a lot of growing up. I don’t know but I think I’ve grown up a little since I’ve been here.”

And then he continues in a postscript:

“This is night time of that same day. I just came back from my graduation, and I saw something I either never saw before or never cared to look. I saw my mother being proud of me, maybe it might seem stupid but it made me feel good.”

And that’s what this war on poverty is really all about.

Peace requires the simple but powerful recognition that what we have in common as human beings is more important and crucial than what divides us.
RSSPCportrait
Sargent Shriver
Get the Quote of the Week in Your Inbox