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BLACK POLITICAL ACTION in '72
STOKES

movement to draft me for president of the United States next year. 

I promptly called a news conference in my office in Cleveland. I proceeded to thank Representative Conyers for his kind attitude toward me, but I also clearly stated that I would not be a candidate for president of the United States. I stated that I am highly sympathetic, however, to the desire of persons like Representative Conyers, Borough President Percy Sutton, Reverend Jesse Jackson and others that Black and other minority groups have full voice in the selection of the major candidates next year. And I said, I will devote a substantial portion of my time with others trying to get effective representation at the major political parties' convention next year.

That is why I am here today. And that is why I will be in Chicago or St. Louis, Detroit or San Francisco, New York or Atlanta, tomorrow or next week or next month or the month thereafter, when people are coming together to discuss and work out this problem, this challenge, of developing and exercising political power to make whatever contribution my fourteen years of coalition politics at the local level may yield. If we develop and exercise that power, not to satisfy the ambitions of any individual among us, but, rather, to meet the needs of people of black, brown and other minority groups, or poor people, of young people and the elderly, then we will accomplish something worthy, something valuable, something useful and meaningful for this country.

My concern as mayor of the tenth largest city of this nation, Cleveland, Ohio, with over three quarters of a million people, is shaped and whetted by last week's release of the National Urban Coalition's follow-up on the Kerner Commission study.

They found, three-and-a-half years after the study:

1. Housing is still the "national scandal" it was then.
2. Schools are more tedious, have even less quality and reflect more turbulence.
3. The rates of crime, unemployment, disease and drug addiction are higher.
4. Welfare rolls are larger and appropriations for the needy are less.
5. With few exceptions, the relations between minority groups and police are as hostile as ever.

Then, the commission reported: "...since it is hard to be Black or Brown in America today and not be poor, if this trend continues at its present rate and if the racism-accounting for it-continues most cities by 1980 will be predominantly Black and Brown and totally

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