Speech by Samuel D. Proctor, November 30, 1968, Wisconsin Historical Society (Madison, Wis.)

Opening remarks

The logical and moral conclusion that should follow from our national heritage of the Judeo-Christian ethic, the Constitution, and 350 years of national biracial experience is that the black and white community in America should effectuate a just and compatible rapprochement one with another. That is the only conclusion that can be supported on any honest, or any logical, or any historical basis: that by now, we should be well on our way to a just and 00:05:00compatible sense of community. At this point in history, only the most spurious anthropology, the most anarchistic social philosophy, or the most eccentric racial chauvinism could lead to any other conclusion. Our destinies, black and white, social, cultural, economic, and political, are inexorably bound together on this patch of real estate in North America, unless we pursue a purely irrational, illegal, and immoral course that would lead to an intransigent estrangement between us. Any economic program that would keep blacks poor will also operate detrimentally against the whole nation; the white poor. A fascist, racist philosophy would jeopardize the freedom of all in its implementation; a 00:06:00violation of law and order in high places will lead to a concomitant disrespect for law and order among the masses. We all stand to lose. Thus, in spite of the difficulties and the human failure, a society that blends the interests of all with justice and mutual respect is the only decent objective we have, no matter how sophisticated we try to put it. And, since 1954, there have been many of us naïve enough or hopeful enough to believe that this was the goal towards which we were moving. We held this hope sanguinely despite occasional setbacks and despite the sluggish pace of social change. We saw in it four potential developments. One, we saw in public school integration the end of a dual system 00:07:00with dual standards. This is where we were in '54. We thought that surely by 1968, one full generation of black children--with 12 years of schooling added to 1954--would have coursed their way through the public schools with only their innate capacities setting limits on their level of academic attainment. We saw them entering schools that would assume nothing permanent and immutable about their subcultural limitations and induct them into the mainstream of American life. We saw them starting on even footing with every other child and finding the stimulation that would offset economic and social vestiges of the legacy of racial inequality. Two: furthermore, our high vision in the mid-fifties led us to believe that the integration of schools would provide youngsters with sufficient contact beyond the wall of color to reduce the factor of color to an 00:08:00incidental aspect of humanity like fatness, or freckles, or flat feet, and hence signifying nothing regarding mental ability, character, or other intangible personal attributes. Three: we saw this as the beginning of the end of discrimination in housing and in jobs as a fallout from the leveling off of educational opportunity and social equality. And, fourthly, we looked forward to black ethnocentricity becoming no less of a social and economic impediment than the Catholic or Jewish faith or Polish and Norwegian ancestry. We saw social class as being eventually the result of one's own capacity, one's own income, one's own taste rather than a correlation of one's pigmentation, hair texture 00:09:00and physiognomy. But such hopes proved to be forlorn. Our optimism about social change was dulled successively by legal circumvention, the resurgence of the ultra-Right with heavy financing, a cautious national administration for eight years, and the general atavistic drag on human nature that begrudges the sharing of advantages. Meanwhile, there was an increase of migration to the urban North by 50% and the resultant cramming of the cities' slums. There was the parallel flight to the suburbs by the whites and their abandonment of city schools. There was the deterioration of urban conditions in every way and the fostering of hostility led by police who were alien to the new black masses in the cities. 00:10:00There was the generation of a rapidly growing young black militancy in response to the futility of life in these urban ghettos. The moral earnestness of the militants' cause, despite the overtones of violence, fragmented conservative black leadership, it dramatized the plight of urban blacks, it polarized the nation politically, and it snatched the covers off everyone in the safe center. Nothing was higher on the national agenda in the early sixties than the problem of containing young black militancy and the surge of awareness that it inspired. The question before us today is this: Can we salvage the hope of a nation in which cultural pluralism can allow this new black identity to thrive and at the same time preserve the notion of a common national destiny for all our people? Come now and let us consider that the answer cannot be found in a temporizing 00:11:00response to a single crisis or a single series of crises. The answer will require the leadership, black and white, to take very high ground and view this in the broadest possible perspective. The alternative to a common national destiny is a more cruel and a more destructive dualism than the one we thought we were leaving in 1954. The passive, accommodationist Negro of 1954 is now supplanted by a better informed, politically astute and psychologically uninhibited young black whose boldness is matched by his contempt for presumed white superiority. The thickening of the black center city means the crystallizing of a subculture of the ghetto, with more and more black children getting less and less education and falling farther and farther behind. These 00:12:00educational deficits are depriving them of the full benefit of what would appear to be a new openness toward equal opportunity in higher education. It is hard to face this fact, but it means also a hardening of a core of alienated young blacks, the response to whom will call forth the utmost in courage, intelligence and honesty on the part of all those in leadership positions. Another alternative to a common national destiny, reasserted with imagination in word and in deed, will be a similar and escalating hardening of white attitudes on race. It does not take much to cause liberals to abandon a lukewarm commitment to change. One's own interest is so close to him that he can embrace another's only on the most convenient of terms. And if the young black militant with his Afro "habitué" appears with his demands and strong language, this is all it 00:13:00takes to drive the timid to flight. And this flight is to a comfortable refuge in the center of a waiting indifference to black advance. The logical extremity of this argument is that the black militant has no one left to listen to him but those who have already been exiled from the polite, middle class center. These are those whites who for reasons all their own have likewise resigned from the mainstream of American life. Thus the young black militant is constantly tempted to make common cause with the very left, and to abandon all hope that America will alter its posture toward black aspirations. The next alternative to the bold assertion of a common national destiny with justice and equality is the official resanctioning of racism in American life. We cannot forget how the 00:14:00Emancipation was virtually vetoed by the 1876 Hayes-Tilden election. The deal made in the Wormley House in Washington that settled that election sealed the doom of black people for 75 years. And behind that came the 1896 Plessy-Ferguson decision sanctifying racial inferiority on the part of the blacks. What starts out as a national mood soon congeals into a national policy. And the mood today is toward a reversion to black containment. In the cities, the police are stiffening. The last election revolved around law and order, a euphemism for stifling black advance. The real estate and the demographic boundaries in the metro areas clearly reveal a pattern of containment, not one of inclusion. When the black militants respond to this in their own way, the majority community 00:15:00finds in their response a rationale for further recalcitrance. Racism, then, racism that once fell before the legal and scientific pressures, is revived on pragmatic grounds. The blacks don't want integration! Then, the logic has gone full cycle: blacks rejected; blacks become difficult; whites retreat; blacks further rejected. That is the simplest syllogism. The more highly developed logic goes this way: the blacks are forced into a cultural insularity; while in this insularity they are treated unequally. Then this insularity and this unequal treatment breed a subculture. The subculture produces a product that is so repulsive that further insularity is encouraged. Then the young blacks add to the logic by averring that this is what they want, a world independent of 00:16:00"whitey." In addition, the public schools, with their proximity to homogenized neighborhoods, serve further to galvanize the subculture. They are not only separate still, but with such large numbers in the cities' centers, they are massive production stations for countless blacks who approach college entrance and the job market with blinding deficits. All of this makes discrimination look fair and honest. Observe how much weight falls on the schools in this whole process. They have the power absolute over the pace of social change. When schools--beginning with universities that prepare the leadership, and that prepare the public school people--when the schools make a commitment to a common national destiny, and pledge themselves to whatever agony it takes, this can be stopped no more than one can sneak daybreak past a healthy rooster. Finally, a 00:17:00failure to commit ourselves to a cultural pluralism--everyone doing his own thing--within a larger goal of a national economic, political and intellectual community is tantamount to a denial of the best that we know and believe. When Americans are standing on moral and intellectual tiptoe, when they're really reaching for their best, we do believe that the veneer of race and of culture is thin indeed. The wisest among us, those who we have applauded the most, have always warned us from age to age that God has made of one blood all nations of the earth. From the days of Ruth and Boaz we have felt the guilt of racism as the scourge of mankind. But we know and believe more than that. We have a kind 00:18:00of visceral knowledge that we are here in America playing with the noblest experiment that man has attempted, a democracy that concedes nothing to a man on the basis of blood, on the basis of wealth, on the basis of caste, but a democracy that is ruled by those who are ruled. It has weathered many a storm and yet it persists. Some of us have a hunch that its basic premise, that the powers of the state derive from the people, is well founded on the idea that man is endowed himself innately with these unalienable rights. These do not derive from the state. And here lies the strength of the democracy, and this strength will prevail. It has taken a while to make this principle stick. But it must stick. It will take longer to make it come really alive. And when it does, unborn generations will rise up and call us blessed. Thank you.

Closing remarks