It never occurred to me to give up on any of these things. I don't have
any intention of ever doing that. But the reality, of course, is that
the end of apartheld in America is a very much worthwhile development,
comparable to slavery. So, with all the dark corners that still remain,
the black ghettos still remain and all the gross mass discrimination
that exists in race, apartheld itself, except for the ghetto, is
hopefully gone for good. If that were the only accomplishment of the
country, it got rid of slavery in one century and segregation in the
next century, a long century between.
I'm not at all optimistic about current trends. I think there has been a
deliberate, just as there was a deliberate nationwide conspiracy in 1876
and the years leading up to 1876, to put the fourteenth and fifteenth
amendments and even to some extent the thirteenth amendment on slavery
to make them dead letters by means, primarily, of klan terrorism. That
was accomplished and the North acquiesced in it and it persisted for a
hundred years before blacks started to vote again and get their civil
rights which those Civil War amendments promised them at the time. It
demonstrates that not only civil rights laws but Constitutional
amendments and sections of the Bill of Rights can be dead letters.
I think that we at the present time are confronted by a conspiracy to set
aside and negate much that the civil rights legislation has
accomplished. If this is being done on all
Page 39 levels,
the executive, the legislative, and perhaps above all the judiciary. And
on our lower level, the school boards and local administrations, so that
in my opinion, school boards all over the country have deliberately
bused black and white students not to the nearest school but usually to
the ends of the earth, so to speak, so that the children would leave in
the dark and come home in the dark hysterical. This would make their
parents likewise hysterical. Blacks and whites almost equally were
opposed to busing for that reason.
In reality, there was no necessity for that sort of busing pattern. The
intention, in my opinion, was to raise the standard of neighborhood
schools and entice people to go back into segregated schooling. If that
happens, in my opinion, it will mean possibly another century of
second-class educational opportunities for blacks, a postponement of the
masses of blacks getting into the mainstream.
One of the other areas: we have the token black for awhile in business
and public affairs, and the token black has given way to a token black
middle-class, and that's a degree of progress. But in my estimation the
black masses are as bad off or possibly worse off than they have been in
recent memory. So, we got all these bits of unfinished business on the
agenda and where they are going to end up I don't know. One doesn't see
immediately. There's no Southern Conference for Human Welfare in the
field and the Southern Regional Council is still with us but I don't
think it's thinking or talking in these terms and I don't know who
is,
Page 40 including black leadership, by and
large—Jesse Jackson a possible exception, and a few others.
In my opinion, the size of those problems and the urgency of them is at
least as alarming as what we were facing back in the 30's, 40's, 50's
and 60's. As for optimism, no, I'm gratified by what's been done and
alarmed by what hasn't been done and all the back sliding that has taken
place.
The environmental thing . . .