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newspapers, listen to the same radio stations, watch the same television news as the majority population. They do not need to be told what their self interests are, no more than any other racial, ethnic or religious group in America needs to be told. They are smart enough to figure it out for themselves. If it is true, as the polls and media claim, that white Americans voted overwhelmingly in 1984 for their pocket books, so did most black Americans who, for the most part, have not shared in the recent recovery.

But the pocket book is not and has never been the only index of popularity among Americans, black or white. Black Americans knew full well that - quite apart from the Administration's economic policies, over which reasonable men and women can and do disagree - the attitudes of this Administration are, purely and simply, harmful to their interests. And if there were no Ben Hooks, or none of the other national black leaders, black Americans would overwhelmingly continue to perceive this fact.

The irony is that the NAACP has criticized every President since Woodrow Wilson for not going far enough in promoting the advancement of the only group in America which had suffered from almost three centuries of slavery and another century of legally-enforced second class citizenship. Nobody knows better than the NAACP how much progress has been made since our founding seventy-five years ago; scores of us have died and thousands have been lynched, maimed, beaten, and jailed to bring about that progress. And during that entire period, not one of the present-day Administration leaders - from the President to his Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights on down - had made a significant contribution to that struggle. Indeed, most of his appointees and followers have opposed every measure of black advancement wrought over the past three decades. Now they are trying to tell us that we have gone far enough - and to behave as if they had anything at all to do with the progress we and our white allies brought about, despite so much opposition, much of it violent.

Well, Mr. President, we have a message for you and your followers. You can meet with all of the self-anointed blacks you choose. Let me assure you that black Americans have learned too much from the past to abandon their claims to full citizenship and full prosperity now. Too much blood has been spilled and too many of our finest young men and women - black and white - have sacrificed too much for us to give up now. The memory of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, of Viola Liuzzo and Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, of the scores of local NAACP leaders who were mauled and killed to get this far, will not disappear that easily.

We remind the President and those who follow his lead that, as loyal Americans, we did not hesitate to criticize Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy or Richard M. Nixon for their deficient policies in respect to black Americans; we shall certainly not hesitate to criticize Ronald Reagan either.

Indeed, despite our criticism of each and every President since Wilson - be they Republicans or Democrats - we have recorded progress in civil rights under almost every one of them. (And much of that progress was earned through hard fighting and intelligent policies.) But never before have we lost ground or suffered so much retrogression, as we have under Ronald Reagan in the past four years. Next to the Reagan record, even Richard Nixon's six years in office now looks enviable.

In the past year alone, the Administration has initiated a series of policies which, if they succeed, will set back the cause of civil rights at least a decade. These include:

- transformation of the U.S. Commission on Civil rights from a bipartisan, independent agency to a self-serving advocacy lobby for the Administration's anti-civil rights views. The Commission's magazine recently went so far as to question the 1954 Brown decision on school segregation is in and of itself either wrong or harmful to black children.

- the Justice Department persuaded the Supreme Court, in the Grove City College case, to reverse the past policy of three Presidents (Nixon, Ford and Carter) by continuing federal funding to colleges which practice racial or sexual discrimination. The Administration lobbied strenuously in December to defeat in the Senate a bill already passed overwhelmingly by the House which would have prevented federal funds from going to any college, if a subdivision of that college practice discrimination. That bill is before the Congress again and the Administration still opposes it.

- the Justice Department, whose Constitutional mission is to enforce the laws of the land, has attacked a panoply of civil rights laws, most often those dealing with affirmative action. It has declared its intention to reverse even voluntary affirmative action plans, which were the centerpiece of the Nixon Administration's efforts in the civil rights arena;

- after more than thirty years of grueling and expensive court fights by the NAACP and its allies in almost every major city in America to realize the promise of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, the Reagan Administration is seeking to reverse the laboriously crafted federal court orders which resulted in desegregated schools, even when segregation remains or has gotten worse;

- and, perhaps more dangerous that all the other measures, the Administration is now supporting a drive to return to "states rights," the very disease which froze second-class citizenship and racial segregation upon one-tenth of our nation until the federal government intervened to break the centuries' old patterns. One proposal is to delegate to the states the responsibility for enforcing federal civil rights laws by recipients of federal funds. Another is to remove from the federal courts - the great bastion of civil rights advancement - the jurisdiction for a broad spectrum of civil rights claims. And that, less than twenty years after Lyndon Johnson, with his famous "We Shall Overcome" speech, routed the last bastions of states' rights forces.

These measures are not the figment of my imagination, or that of other black leaders. As you will see from the enclosure, they have been duly recorded in the New York Times, and in the media in general. Taken together, they represent a radical counterrevolution - an attempt to return to a past which was oppressive and unjust - a past we thought we had permanently put behind us.

What black Americans resent most of all is that, despite our differences with every past President since 1909, this is the first time almost every black American believes that this President is not the President of all the people - only the President of the advantaged, mostly white, population. We do not make this statement out of partisanship, for we revere the memory of Lincoln, who was a Republican, as we do of Truman and Johnson, who were Democrats. We acknowledge progress under Eisenhower and Nixon, as we do under Roosevelt and Carter. What we ask our Presient to do is lead the nation, not to follow its basest
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