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FREEDOMWAYS    SECOND QUARTER 1972

And so let us consider issues and program.

We demand that any party which asks our support acknowledge the inhumanity every Black man, woman and child faces, in a hundred different ways, each and every day of his existence, up and down the width and breadth of this vast country. And we further demand that the party pledge, in bold script and deafening tones, the immediate liberation of Black people from their long night of relentless indignities.

Poverty in the midst of opulence is madness. We demand employment, amply compensated, for every able man and woman, or else a governmental income which honorably sustains them.

Advanced education is not meant only for the children of the elite. We demand free college with adequate stipends for every student who will but make the grade.

We would not house animals where many wretched people dwell. We demand, for every family, a place to live which does not affront the eyes nor offend the nostrils.

No sin is greater than the early maiming of a child's intellect and spirit. We demand a healthy system of public education in which our children can grow and flower.

The state of medical care in the country is a national disgrace. We demand the finest medical and hospital care for every human being. And the absence of the ability to pay shall not influence the quality of care.

We demand the eradication of heroin from the ghetto, now eating away the vitals of black youth. White Society would never tolerate it in such epidemic proportions in suburbia.

No political party which represents the interests of America's giant corporations, rather than the urgent needs of the people, may enlist Black political power in its support. These hugh [[huge]] corporations, which dominate every facet of American existence, now proudly hasten to assure us that they are involved.

They are involved all right! They are involved in exploiting the men and women who work for them, exhausting them with speed-up, cruelly tossing them into the trash heap of retirement, and discriminating against Blacks, Latin Americans and women as they hire and promote.

The corporations surely are involved! They're involved ever so eagerly in gouging the consumer, exacting enormous profits from him, threatening his health and endangering his life with products both inferior and unsafe. Behold, as well, the massive corporate involvement

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HISTORY WILL BE OUR JUDGE       HATCHER

as they darken the skies, and poison the waters beyond redemption. Witness their incredible underpayment of the local property taxes, unconscionably shifting them to the little man, already buckling under a mountain of other burdens.

Yes, the corporations are mightily involved. Like dinosaurs, they gobble up the legislatures, both state and national. What does it matter that they destroy or mutilate legislation salutary to the people? And if a mammoth corporation like I.T.T. wants justice, it is on sale at the Department of Justice for a mere four hundred thousand dollars. With equal ease, a bankrupt Lockheed can borrow two hundred and fifty million dollars with government guarantee. Listen, Black business man, try that out on your local Small Business Administration.

Add it all up, and we most certainly agree with the corporations. They really are involved!

Hereafter, every political party must make up its mind. It cannot represent both the corporation and the people. As the party chooses, so shall we then choose the party.

Finally, we shall shun, like the plague, any political party which does not demand, in unmistakable terms, the immediate return to these shores-of every single American boy from those distant South east Asian lands. This horrible war, the ugliest page in our foreign history, could never have taken place without the overwhelming complicity of both political parties. And it could not continue for another day without the same complicity.

That complicity has slaughtered and maimed over 360,000 American youth and millions of Indochinese, who, I need not remind you, are people of color; and people of color everywhere, no matter where they live, are our brothers and sisters.

And to what end this loathsome carnage? To prop up a cruel and corrupt tyranny in South Vietnam and to keep the mass of poor and aspiring peasants in their place. We Black people know the syndrome all too well. Our participation in the atrocious was is not an unfortunate mistake on the part of the American ruling class. Rather, it is part and parcel of an economic policy to make the world safe for American corporate penetration and to fill the coffers of the corporate treasuries.

That policy is designed to hold the Third World in a state of abject peonage and subjugation. We have shored up one quasi-Fascist regime after another. Greece in 1947 and the Greek Junta today; Chiang Kai-shek driven out of China by his own people in humiliating

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Transcription Notes:
Reopened for transcribing on 16 February 2024, 02:55PM. ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-16 16:10:22 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-18 09:58:43 Unsure if it should be, 'South east Asian lands' or 'South-east Asian lands' (middle of page 139) but I think it's the former as you use the hyphen for compass directions.