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FREEDOMWAYS FOURTH QUARTER 1972

recting historic inequalities that our community has experienced. This "quota system" is a minimum condition for securing economic justice.
The black and Spanish-speaking communities of America have experienced over many generations the quota of zero, being locked out of opportunity. Then with the pressure of our protest movement, we managed to pressure the powers that be and got another quota, which amounted to "tokenism." This simply meant, as you all know, that many corporations hired or upgraded one or two blacks for window-dressing purposes while the basic policy of discrimination remained intact. This tokenism was, functionally, also a quota hidden behind nebulous liberal rhetoric. 
So now we are defining a fair and equitable yardstick for minimum progress in which the criteria are our proportion in the local population and/or our spending power as consumers in relation to a given industry. 
I want to give you a few statistics which are relevant to the purposes of Operation PUSH and the new relationship that must be developed. The thirty-six million blacks and Spanish-speaking population in our country represent eighteen percent of the total United States population, yet the average wage-earning family has $3,000 a year less income than the average white family. This shortage amounts to tens of billions of dollars each year. We want to "save the children" from this deprivation and its results. Of the $13,700 banks in the United States, blacks and Latins own 60. These 60 banks have 740 million dollars in deposits, while the commercial banks alone in the United States have deposits amounting to five trillion, 391 billion dollars.
In the field of communications, so vital in our urban economic society, the picture is no better. Of the 7,200 radio stations in the United States, blacks own a total of 20, and of the 916 television stations, we own none. There is that zero quota again. We could continue a long list of statistics which describe the harsh economic realities of our lives. These realities translate themselves into bad housing for the great majority of our people, and the educational system which has always been poor, and is now in it crisis, wholly inadequate health facilities available to the community and many other social problems. 
The commitment of Operation Push is that this is going to be changed, and the change is going to cost billions of dollars in investment in human development. It will be expensive and costly, but it will not be more costly than war. We fully recognize the terrible

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