Viewing page 63 of 132

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Poverty of Education
Sanchez

"What white Americans have never fully understood-but what the Negro can never forget-is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions main it, and white society condones it."
Another recent presidential report which complements the riot report and exposes the failures, indifference and short-sightedness of all branches of government and of universities and schools is the Report of the President's National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty. This report, called "The People Left Behind," was issued in September, 1967, was mentioned in the New York Times in late January or February of 1968, was ignored by the President's State of the Union Message and has been unexplored by television. Yet it was the work of the governor of Kentucky, the presidents and deans of several colleges and universities, two important figures from the communications media and assorted experts on rural life. They found that:

"Rural poverty is so widespread and so acute as to be a national disgrace, and its consequences have swept into our cities, violently. The urban riots during 1967 had their roots, in considerable part, in rural poverty. A high proportion of the people crowded into city slums today came there from rural slums. . . For all practical purposes, then, most of the 14 million people in our rural poverty purposes, then, most of the 14 million people in our rural poverty areas are outside of our market economy. So far as they are concerned, the dramatic economic growth of the United States might as well never have happened...  The Commission deplores the fact that the richest, most powerful nation in history compels millions of its citizens to engage in aimless wandering in search of jobs and places to live."

The statistics of rural poverty point to causes which go deeper than white disdain of non-whites. Of the 14 million rural poor (those who have not yet joined the great post war migration to the cities), three million are Negroes and an unlisted are Indians and Mexicans, but the report clearly states that the majority are white. One in four rural families is poor; in the metropolitan areas the figure is one in eight. Most of the poor do not live on farms, because they are no longer needed there. They live in small towns or villages which have lost their jobs and their tax base to technological changes and have either not found new types of industries. "The community in rural poverty areas has all but disappeared as an effective institution....Local government is no longer

357