No candidate has addressed himself more realistically to the plight of the Negro slum dweller thus far in the 1968 campaign than did Richard Nixon last week. In a nationwide CBS broadcast, the former Vice President defined a philosophy that combined pragmatism, compassion and faith in the black American's will to achieve his aims within the framework of society. Highlights:
Today we commonly speak of the urban crisis. And yet the problems wrenching America today are only secondarily problems of the cities. Primarily, they are problems of the human mind and spirit. For years now, the focus of talk, of debate, of action has been on civil rights—and the result has been a decade of revolution in which the legal structure needed to guarantee equal rights has been laid in place. Voting rights, schools, jobs, housing, public accommodations—in all of these areas, new laws have been passed, old laws struck down. The old vocabulary of the civil rights movement has become the rhetoric of the rearview mirror.
Dismal Cycle
And yet these victories have not brought peace or the fullness of freedom. Neither have the old approaches of the '30s—the Government charities that feed the stomach and starve the soul. For too long, white America has sought to buy off the Negro—and to buy off its own sense of guilt—with ever more programs of welfare, of public housing, of payments to the poor, but not for anything except for keeping out of sight: payments that perpetuated poverty and that kept the endless, dismal cycle of dependency spinning from generation to generation.
Our task—our challenge—is to break this cycle of dependency, and the time to begin is now. The way to do it is not with more of the same but by helping to bring to the ghetto the light of hope, and pride and self-respect. We have reached a point at which more of the same will only result in more of the same frustration, more of the same explosive violence, more of the same despair. The fiscal crisis now confronting America is so great, and so urgent, that only by cutting the federal budget can we avert an economic disaster in which the poor themselves would be caught calamitously in the undertow.
The reality of the national economic condition is such that to talk of increasing the budget to pour additional billions into the cities this year is a cruel delusion. But this does not mean that because we cannot do more of the same, we must do nothing new. For the fact is that all the money in the world wouldn't solve the problems of our cities today. We won't get at the real problems unless and until we rescue the people in the ghetto from despair and dependency. If the ghettos are to be renewed, their people must be moved by hope. What we do not need now is another round of unachievable promises of unavailable federal funds.