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The '80s CIVIL RIGHTS:

If Blacks and Whites don't work together to eliminate racism, "the '80s will be an age of perilous social upheaval."

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BY BENJAMIN L. HOOKS
Executive Director
National Association For The Advancement Of Colored People

I am sorry to look into the 1980s and see such a bleak future for civil rights. But one doesn't have to have a crystal ball to predict what is the foreseeable outcome of inadequate action on the 1970s agenda for racial equality.

First, there are the hundreds of thousands of Black children who were pushed or dropped out of school as functional illiterates in this past decade. Many have never had a job in their entire lives. Unskilled and undereducated, they cannot compete in the world of business will be fully productive citizens. Already this group feels a sense of rage and alienation. They may have the right to vote but not the inclination. In the '80s, they will be adults deficient in reading, writing and figuring — swelling the ranks of the Black underclass. This will be so because American society dillied-dallied on shoring up the public schools, and because school boards, on which people with good intentions sat, failed to hold the professional staff accountable for the education and futures of these children.

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American society has had a thousand inventions and excuses for the failure to create a single society. The 1980s will, no doubt, perpetuate the racial superstitions that track Blacks and Whites in segregated schools, and divide neighborhoods according to race and class. The high demand for quality housing, for open communities, has not daunted the racially discriminatory practices of steering, redlining, and outright community biases toward poor and Black people. The ghettoes are firmly established as pockets of poverty and powerlessness. 

To the extent that the courts in the '70's have struck down attempts to open communities to economically mixed housing; to the extent the government gave up on the construction of low-cost housing to meet the high demand; to the extent that politicians pander to fire-bombings and cross-burnings at the homes of Blacks who broke out of the ghetto, and religious leaders were silent, America in the 1980s will remain two racially separate, unequal societies.

No doubt in the 1980s there will be a climate of crisis in the air, if not overt racial confrontation. As the Kerner Commission Report of 1968 warned, "White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities...." The Jim Crow housing practices, the police abuse against non-White people trapped in the slums, the trepidation about school integration, the racial impact of cut-backs in the delivery of social and human services, the spiraling inflation, massive Black unemployment and disparate incomes between Blacks and Whites, are all a part of a formula for explosion.

There can be no question that there has been significant progress on the racial front in the past twenty-five years. But the enactment and spotty enforcement, especially in the last ten years of civil rights laws have not been sufficient to meet the task at hand. The civil rights statutes are the tools but not the measurements of a race's progress. Every honest report of the living conditions of the masses of Blacks tells the reality that not much has changed for the better. Indeed, over a third of black families still are in officially defined poverty. The fledgling Black middle-class, in an economic downturn, teeters on the brink of poverty. That is the meaning and diet racial consequences of the policy of "last hired, first fired." That is the heritage of an overdeveloped White community and an underdeveloped Black community.

For the 1980s the concept of sharing and cooperation across race and economic lines can be a high point. But America can talk about racial equality unless it means full employment and affirmative action to ensure that Blacks get a fair share access to American institutions and to the benefits of citizenship. And America can solve its energy crisis without resolving its moral crisis. That will entail revitalizing the cities, and treating the causes of crime and racial tensions, rather than the symptoms.

Unless Blacks and Whites can work diligently and urgently together on a realistic agenda for eliminating the badges and incidents of racism in our land, the 1980s will be an age of perilous social upheaval.

The imperatives for sustained social action are clear. Being angry is not enough. Wallowing in despair and self-pity is the road to nowhere. For there to be progress, there must be effort. Not every action will produce victory, but we can learn from our defeats in devising bold strategies for overcoming monumental barriers to racial equality.

The civil rights movement is as it's always been — an alternative to the firm and and dilemma of hypocrisy in the affairs of a democracy. To win racial justice, we need an educated and aware people — the involvement of freedom fighters from all walks of life. We need our young people and senior citizens. We need our White people working with Black and Brown people. We need Christians and Jews. We need laborers and professionals to rekindle a spirit of "can" and "will."

We need millions of people registered and voting because we do not correct votes by not voting. So the NAACP is committed to encouraging political participation. Civil rights is not just protest, it is negotiation. It is the vote, and it is the dollar. So we have to have economic development — jobs and businesses. By acquiring wealth and property, we gain the essential tools of power to change our destiny. And that is our mission, to bring Blacks out of the periphery of society and into the mainstream.

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