Transcript
Now, nobody has been censured. You know, when Senator Joseph McCarthy was censured, they had a great to-do about censuring him in the Senate. Some of you don't remember because you're too young. But they had a big argument about, shall Joe McCarthy be censured? And they finally voted to censure him. This was a great thing. And then what did they do? They moved to put the censure in the record. Nothing came out on the floor. Nobody
said a word to Senator McCarthy. They simply put in the record that he was censured. That's all. But Adam was to come up and stand in a corner like a dunce and be flayed in front of all of his colleagues. Now, of course, that isn't racism. One was white and one was black, but that was just an accident of history. And so sensitive Negroes shouldn't think of it as racism. They should think of it as proper
punishment for a proper crime. Well, if you can reach that peak of objectivity where you can look at it that way, well and you could, you know. But I can't do that. I think you may be interested to know that you aren't, you're batting par for the course. I haven't spoken to an audience since January 1st, even on the uses of nuclear power, where the question of Adam Powell hasn't arisen. And you don't have a press
conference on anything. You can have a press conference on our relations with Latin America. And the reporters will say, well now, thank you, Mr. Wilkins, but what about Adam Powell? Are there any other questions on Adam Powell? Let's get rid of all of it at once. All right. Is there another question? I was just going to ask, sir, if you think this will result in a formulation of a code of ethics by the House of Representatives.
Which? Formulation of a what? A code of ethics? Yes. Well, I would hope that it would result in the adoption of a code of ethics, but I am, I has me dudes. The Senate adopted a code of ethics here some time ago with a non-enforcement clause. They can always say they have one, but there's no way of enforcing it. What are you going to do to keep the Powell affair from detracting emphasis and public opinion
from the civil rights? Well, I thank you for that question. I thank you for that question. You're a very perceptive young man. This is the whole business. You see, the Powell business takes away from the concentration on the real objectives of the civil rights movement. One of the things about Powell is, of course, he brought four-fifths of this on himself. And another factor is that he has not been closely identified with the civil rights movement
as such. He's been identified with Adam Powell. Adam has been for Adam. Everybody knows that. Everybody who knows him, everybody in Harlem knows that. Now, he speaks up and he cusses out the white folks and he does that. He makes everybody feel good. But as far as Adam is concerned, everything he does is motivated by what good it does for Adam. And in this particular instance, down there in Bimini or wherever he is, he is wrecking
the civil rights movement because he's giving an image. Here, a man stood up in the Senate yesterday and said, Adam Powell is down in Bimini with a cocktail in one hand and a woman in the other. Well, now, this is the United States Senator saying this. This kind of thing doesn't help the civil rights movement. First place, it takes your mind off of it. And in the second place, if you were the kind of man whose
mind wouldn't be taken off by that kind of a picture, it makes it difficult for you to advance the thesis. So that your question is a very good one and we're working hard at trying to keep the civil rights movement, the 1967 civil rights bill and these murders that I was talking about and the poverty program and the training of Negro workers. I just read a horrendous story in U.S. News and World Report. It's just
come on the newsstand. And they say something that we in the NAACP have been saying for the last 10 years. And they have just come upon it as a great truth that the Negroes are being dislodged from the southern farms and rushed into the cities, southern and northern. And they're unskilled, unprepared and uneducated and have no disciplines in an organized democratic society. And they're posing increasing problems for northern urban centers because there's no dialogue with them.
What we said, the only thing the U.S. News and World Report didn't say that we said, is that this horde of migrants should bring home to the northern states, to the northern states, how long and how complete the deprivation has been of the Negroes in the south. For example, in 1929, a Negro who was five years old in 1929 and just starting the school, let's say, six years old, in Mississippi, they were spending in Mississippi
in 1929 the magnificent sum of $4.44 per capita per year on Negro education. Now that man is now 45, 46, 47 years old. And if he went to school on $4.44 per capita, you know how much he knows. Now that assumes that he went to school all the time, but he didn't, of course. He was on a plantation. He went to school when the cotton didn't demand his attention and the boss had the whole
family out chopping cotton. And he went to a bad school even when he went to school. In Mississippi, his school year was 99 days a year and the school year for white boys was 170 days a year. Of course, they expect the Negroes to be equal. You know, they say, well, look here, you're not the equal of white people. I don't know what they think. We can't give a handicap of 80 days. You know, we may
be smart, but we're not that smart. So these problems that we're trying to call attention to, we're not trying to grapple with it, problems of the cities, which are the problems of Negro migrants. 70% of Negroes live in cities today. 73% of the whole American population lives in cities. And until you solve the city problems of housing, of employment, of education, the public school system, of transportation, of health and welfare services, air pollution, water
pollution, and what have you, until you solve these problems, but basic to them are housing and education and employment. Why, you aren't going to solve the problem of the minorities, and if you don't solve the problem of the minorities, you aren't going to solve the problem of the cities. They're intertwined. Now, anything like Adam Powell, which excites the emotions and gets people all torn up and excited and emotionally distraught, and especially gets white people all, you
know, white people get all excited about a Negro who swam in the water and got smoked a long, thin cigar and blows smoke in their faces. See, this is not the way a Negro is supposed to act. He's supposed to behave himself, you see, and so naturally they want to kick him out. And you say something to him, well, don't you think the colored people ought to have better schools? And they say, well, I don't know
whether they ought to have better schools or not. Look at that so-and-so down there in Congress. And he's hurting the civil rights movement. The Adam Powell case is. And if you have any ideas about how to keep it on the track, why, see me after this is over. This man right here. Part of the appeal of groups like the Black Muslims or the Black Nation has been an appeal to a real self-pride in
the Negro and a hatred for the white, all the white. Do you see that this is in any way helpful to the civil rights movement? Is there any value in this kind of attitude? Well, there's no value, and let me say it right away, there's no value in the attitude of hatred for mere color. And of course, I don't really believe it's hatred for color. I think it's hatred because of condition. See, we have 196 million
people in this country or something around that. And 22 million or 20 million of them are Negro, Puerto Ricans and Latin Americans thrown in. But that leaves about 165 million whites. If those 165 million were yellow, the feeling of the Black Muslims would be directed against yellow people. See, it's because of the resentment of the condition imposed. Now, the hatred is out. I have no patience with that at all. We aren't going to win anything with
hatred. White people haven't won anything all these years with hatred, and neither are the Negroes if they adopt it. But when you talk about instilling race pride, this is a sort of a salesmanship or gimmick that the Black nationalists and the Muslims have used, which has no validity in history. That is, their implication that they are the first ones to come along and talk about pride of race. This is not so. The theory of Black power,
which was just enunciated as a slogan last June, and the dedication of the Black Nationalist movement where educated young men and women will get up and tell you about race pride and pride in being Black and not being ashamed of yourself and this, that and the other. Well, this has been preached by American Negroes in their so-called moderate middle-of-the-road, even backward in the language of the Black power rights organizations for years and
years and years. The real culprit in the race pride business has been the failure of the school system and the failure of the institutions in the Negro community that should have assumed this burden, the failure of them to do so, because the history is there. We have now, we're just coming from the printer, the galley proofs, on 300 new titles and texts, reading materials, textbooks, history, civic books and so forth, which are slowly turning the corner
on the part of the American Negro and the American history. Now, back in 1915, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History was founded by Carter Woodson, a Negro graduate of, excuse me, of Harvard. And since that time, Negro history, we grew out of Carter Woodson's concept. It didn't grow out of Black nationalism. It didn't grow out of communism. It didn't grow out of radicalism. It grew out of the ultra-conservatism of the Negro
community, which recognized that you had to have pride of race. Now, the concern for education, for example, Negroes established a school, free Negroes established a school for their children in 1744 in Charleston, South Carolina. This was a concern for education, a thirst for knowledge. 1744, long before we talk about all these new problems that we've just talked about, nobody paid any attention to until we came along in 1966. Well, kind of ridiculous. But the Black Muslims
have performed a service in, let's say, forcing an analysis of Black people, Black history, Black accomplishments and so forth. Now, they don't know any more about it than the people who aren't Black Muslims. They'll tell you, ask any one of them, how many Negro soldiers were in George Washington's army? He won't know. He doesn't know. He doesn't even know that there were any Negro soldiers in George Washington's army, because he's oriented toward a separatism. Nothing is
good that was integrated. There was a lot to be found out about the Negroes in George Washington's army and a whole lot of other armies and about the kinds of business they were in. The first Negro Savings and Loan Association was established about 100 years ago. The Black Power boys will tell you that the Negro needs economic power. He needs political power. He needs race pride. This is what Black Power means. Black Power doesn't mean competing
with white people. Well, if that's all it means, then all I've got to say is it took them a long time to discover it, because it's been going on a long time. Are there any other questions I'm running? Yes. No discrimination here against the rear. Come on. I say no discrimination against the rear. What were you going to ask? My question relates to the place in which the The activities which what? Well of course I don't
know what you mean by modified violence. See, violence is violence. Now if you mean aggressive assertion of your rights and pressure to correct conditions short of attacks, bodily contact, beatings, shootings and fist fights and so forth, well I can understand that. I think the Negro is justified in using as much pressure as he can mobilize within the ghetto. It isn't true of course. It's a shibboleth to say that the only outlet he has in the ghetto
is violence. For example, in Harlem the Negroes are registered less than 50 percent. They don't use the vote like they should. I was in a little town in town and I said to the president of our chapter there, how many Negroes of voting age do you have? He said a thousand. He said we have about 2,200, 2,500 people in town. We have about a thousand voting age. I said how many are registered? He said
400. Now they aren't using the ballot like the Irish did for example. The Irish used the ballot in Boston and all into Tammany and New York City. Why do you think they had the slogan vote every star? For those who couldn't read democratic, you vote the star. They laugh at the Congolese who vote by snakes and ants and bees and so forth and so on. They voted every star. I just feel they ought to use every
weapon possible, but I don't believe in violence. I don't think violence gets you anything. I think probably when you're provoked, the trouble is what's your boiling point? You get provoked. You've got a low boiling point. You've got a high boiling point. You can flare into nothing. The Harlem riot of 1964, where you have a policeman that killed a 15-year-old boy, had quieted down, but a small group of Negroes decided to organize a march on
the funeral parlor or at the funeral parlor or at the funeral or something. Anyway, at a moment of high emotional tension and bingo, the thing exploded. The feeling was rekindled. A few days later, you had people with high boiling points exploding all over the place. I don't know. I think the venture into or even daring up to the margin of violence is pretty dangerous. I also think equally dangerous is the preachment to people who have little
except muscle and emotional resentment that they should assert themselves in a physical way, because there are ways. There are other ways. One of the factors which contributed to Congress's failure to enact a bill in 1966 was that the people who were against the bill had in Washington highly organized lobbies, whereas the people who were in favor of elect civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965 made no serious attempt to enact a civil rights bill. It was
quite obvious that many Congressmen drew the conclusion that Negroes and a lot of other people in America were no longer interested in civil rights. Now, my question is this. Whether or not the civil rights organizations have any planned organized attempt to prevent the same thing from happening which happened last year? The second part of my question is, why is it that civil rights organizations and those related bodies entered into civil rights? Why is it that they
didn't make a more serious attempt to enact a civil rights bill in Washington last year? Where were you last year? Do you live in Africa? No, I live in New York City. Very good. Now, if you know anything about Africa... I only asked this question, but I asked this question for another reason. Because I read an editorial which you had written last summer, which also pointed out the fact that there were not a great many people
in Washington. No, no, no. I'm sorry. You read the editorial wrong. It wasn't in Washington. What I pointed out was that the people back home were not excited about the civil rights bill. In fact, we were working our... In Washington, we were breaking our backs in Washington. And all we got when we went to a senator or a congressman was the fact that he had no letters from home demanding this bill. May I ask a question?
Yes, of course. Are you speaking specifically about the deep learning about civil rights organizations? Well, I'm speaking of civil rights organizations because I happened to head the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, which is composed of 81 national organizations. And we worked like beavers on that bill. We met every Wednesday afternoon. We had 57 legislative agents at work covering Congress. We had people back in the hometowns trying to stir up stuff in the hustings. We did everything
possible that we could do with the little money we had, and we couldn't get Negroes to sit down and write a letter to their congressman. And this is the main trouble now. The reason Adam Powell was rejected yesterday, if you just want to know something, is because they brought mail bags full of letters from white people back home saying, keep Adam out. And there wasn't a letter in there from a black man in America saying to
his congressman, don't keep Adam out. Now until they learned to write and back up legislation for them to talk about what happened in Washington, when all that can happen in Washington is for the congressman to look at us and say, look, Wilkins, I know you're concerned about this, but nobody in my district is. A senator from New York showed me his files. He had eight letters in support of the Civil Rights Bill from a million Negroes
in his state. A million. At least a hundred thousand of them can write. I want to say something else on that one. When we have had our lobbies in Washington bringing people from the hinterlands in to be their congressmen, it is the white lobbyists, with very few exceptions, the Negro lobbyists who are effective are usually part of trade union delegations. But it's the white lobbyists from Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Idaho, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, it's the white
lobbyists who come in, who have a sense of organization, who can go back and report to their union locals and to their churches, and who work like beavers when they come down there. And it's like pulling teeth to get Negroes to come down there. And when they come, all they're full of is emotional resentment of what the congress hasn't done, but no skill, no finesse, and no power back home. We in the NAACP have been trying
to get them to organize letter writing committees. Now we get the president of the NAACP branch to write a letter, and he sits down on his grand stationery and he writes, dear Mr. Congressman, and he signs himself president of the NAACP branch. And we say to him, go out in your community and get Susie Jones and Henry Smith and the rest of them, and the head of the Carpenter's Union and the painter's local, and this one,
that, and the other to write letters. Does he do it? No. Now all of this, of course, is not blanketly true all over, because you do have exceptions to it. But by and large, the matter of politics and political pressure and power has very largely escaped the Negro on the national level. Now he's doing better on the local level. He goes down, pounds on the mayor's desk, and he balls out and cusses out the city councilman,
and he picks fights with everybody on the local level, and he's bringing to bear something. But if he really had a sense of political involvement, he would be better than 50% registered in Harlem. He would be better than 60% registered in Chicago, even considering the fact that the major political parties and political machines don't want a heavy registration. If there's any way to upset a political boss, it's to take a precinct that has a
normal 250 registration and run it up to 410. And he worrying himself to death about what those extra voters are going to do. This is, I'm just hoping that by the time I get to be 98 and a half, that we will grow up to these realities of politics. Now some of the other ethnic groups, it didn't take them long at all. It didn't take the Irish long to find out. James Curley, the mayor of Boston,
said to me, I belong to the NAACP, but not for a political reason. He said, I belong because I'm against discrimination. And I said, yeah? He said, yeah. So he said, when I was a boy and came to Boston, he said, you couldn't find an Irishman in the City Hall. It was full of Yankees. He says, now Mr. Wilkins, I invite you to come down to City Hall tomorrow to visit me and see if you can
find a Yankee. I'm not in favor of that kind of politics, but you've got to admit it has its points. Thank you. We have one more question. This gentleman here wants to say something. We talked about politics being involved in the civil rights movement. I think that this is important. But really when you get right down to it, I find that acceptance of each other is right at the heart of the problem that we face in
the races. And I really don't see any action taken on this part, on the side of the colored people. What's going on here? You mean on the matter of interpersonal relationships? Yeah, I think so. Well, this can be carried, you know. This is true. I know what you mean, though. But you mean concern, and we have to have respect for each other. I think that this has to be before we can fully achieve what we're talking
about. I agree with you. I agree 100 percent. And I also agree with what I think you left unspoken, and that is that the colored people sometimes act suspiciously and standoffishly about this matter and don't seem to have their hearts in any kind of rapprochement between groups and individuals. And I must say that that is probably true. Because, you see, the colored people have seen this relationship and goodwill and mutual esteem used as a substitute for
real justice and equality. They are suspicious. They've been used by politicians who use them and pat them on the back and say nice things to them and get them to vote for them, and then they forget them after the election is over. And they have been used to, for example, in this hall here. This is a part of a seminary and represents a church commitment. But until recent years, when the church became more actively involved in
the civil rights movement, and I speak here of the church as a whole, the Protestants, the Catholics, and the Jews, but until they did become more involved, the colored people tended to regard church socials and church interchange of pastors and that sort of thing as a kind of a sup, a kind of a substitute for the real thing. Now, I think where you do have, wherever you can build solid interracial appreciation on the basis of individual
worth, you are going to have a more solid advancement of the whole civil rights cause than you would have otherwise. But I don't think it's, I don't think we ought to deceive ourselves into believing that the colored people are going to get off of that little island that they reserve unto themselves and come gushing over to the white people and take them on trust, wholesale lots, because they have found that this doesn't get them too far.
Besides, they're afraid, really, of being seduced. I use seduced in the broadest sense, of course. I mean, they don't want to be, they don't want to be regarded either by the white people or by their own people. As Uncle Tom's, there's a, there's a kind of a probrium attached to colored people who run around after, as they say, after white people anyway, who seek to associate with them. The black Muslims made this very popular slogan of
Negroes who try to be white. They even label the NAACP as white. I don't know why. We have 60 national directors of whom seven are white. And our national policy is made by our delegates to our annual convention, 99% of whom are not white. And I don't understand how they can say this is a white organization. But all I'm saying is that the whiteness and the association with whiteness, whereas it really ought to be cheered
and rewarded, is regarded a little suspiciously. I will agree with your basic contention. I think this was underlying in my talk, that the commitment of concern to the ideal, the willingness to sacrifice, the esteem for people regardless of their religion, their race, their color, where they live, the appreciation of their basic humanity and their needs, this is the basis of real progress. And it's the only way in which we're going to make progress. One of the
most heartening signs, people ask me, is there any progress? One of the most heartening signs is that the church finally, the Catholics, the Protestants, and the Jews, the Jews were always concerned, and the Catholics were always concerned within their own church. They had several stages. When I first came to New York in 1931, there wasn't a Negro attending Fordham University in the undergraduate school. They were in graduate school, but not in the undergraduate school. And there
were no Negroes at Notre Dame in 1931. But the Catholics cleaned up their own school system, and they never made any noise about the first Negro at Notre Dame. All of a sudden, he popped up there. And out in St. Louis, they desegregated St. Louis University, and then they desegregated their high schools, and the parents threatened to go to the pope, and the archbishop told them, if you go to the pope, I'll excommunicate you, and that
ended that. Right there. So the Catholics have always been concerned within their own group. The Protestants, of course, have been the hardest nuts to crack. They came lately to this fray, but they're in it up to their ears now. And some of the pronouncements of the Protestant denominations could have been written in the office of the NAACP. I can't give them any higher praise than that. But the greatest factor in the past 10 years has been
the emergence of the Church as a factor in the civil rights picture for justice and equality. And I look for this to blossom. I look forward to it. It's going to have some difficulties. It's already having some difficulties. But the Church members are getting to know each other. They're getting to know that every black man is not an angel, and colored people are getting to know that all white people are not devils. Some of them are,
still, and some of the Negroes are far from angelic, still. But we're beginning to find this out, and integrated churches are coming up, and membership in churches, and we're finding out who has talent and who doesn't, who's dedicated and who's just there for show. And I look for this development to produce great things in the future, perhaps when I'm not here, but I look for it to be a great, unifying force. Thank you. I speak for
all of you when I say a word of enthusiastic thanks to Roy Wilkins for being with us this evening.