Viewing page 52 of 100

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

FREEDOMWAYS FOURTH QUARTER 1972

because of racism, remember "what is good for one of us is good for all of us."
You don't want me to cross your picket line because you are in the Union Movement. Don't cross my picket line because I'm in the Civil Rights Movement. Whenever these two forces, those of you who are on the inside working and those of us on the outside who are not working, are together and we close in on the elite, then the law of the pressure vacuum sets in and the powers that be have to deal with us.
The second challenge is going to be work now; it can't be done with just a resolution. It is our job to win back the blue collar workers who shifted from the coalition in 1968, thinking that "Law and Order" was the same as a job or an income. That is your challenge to get them back. They are your neighbors and some are in your Union. And they have gotten trapped on Wallace's false "Populism." Much of what has been called the Wallace vote, some of it isn't just race, but just a general reaction to bad economic conditions. There are numerically more whites on welfare than Blacks. Where did welfare come from, the gettos? No! Welfare was a depression measure offered by Roosevelt and urged by labor to recover the nation from an economic crisis. Unfortunately it was not realized at the time that welfare will cease to be a temporary aspect of the economy unless we re-direct it and freeze the profits and release the wages. Unless this is done welfare will be a permanent feature of the American economy. So when Time Magazine and Newsweek talk about a welfare crisis and put a Black family on the front cover and we react to it, you must understand if nobody does, that of the forty million people malnourished in the country, twenty-eight million are white. But let's go a step further. Of that forty million, thirty million live in a household where somebody is working everyday. They're making such little money, until they are still in poverty. It is our job to challenge any administration to deal with that. 
My closing challenge is urban voter registration. Some people wonder why the Chicago fight has been so hot. What are the ramifications of it? Why am I involved? There are 600,000 Black unregistered voters in the city of Chicago, more than the state of Mississippi, or in Georgia and Alabama combined. The '65 Voting Rights Bill assumed that disenfranchisement was a southern problem, as opposed to a national problem. Daley's machine, just like Bilbo's machine and just like Long's machine in Louisiana, 

314