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What we do need is imaginative enlistment of private funds, private energies and private talents in order to develop the opportunities that lie untapped in our own underdeveloped urban heartland. We need incentives to private industry to make acceptable the added risks of ghetto development and of training the unemployed for jobs. Bridges of understanding can be built by revising the welfare rules so that, instead of providing incentives for families to break apart, they provide incentives for families to stay together; so they respect the privacy of the individual; so they provide incentives rather than penalties for supplementing welfare checks with part-time earnings. We must make welfare payments a temporary expedient, not a permanent way of life, something to be escaped from, not to. Our aim should be to restore dignity to life, not to destroy dignity.
Black extremists are guaranteed headlines when they shout "Burn!" or "Get a gun!" But much of the black militant talk these days is actually in terms far closer to the doctrines of free enterprise than to those of the welfarist '30s—terms of pride, ownership, private enterprise, capital —the same qualities, the same characteristics, the same ideals, the same methods that for two centuries have been at the heart of American success. What most of the militants are asking for is not separation but to be included in, to have a share of the wealth and a piece of the action. And this is precisely what the central target of the new approach ought to be. It ought to be oriented toward more black ownership, for from this can flow the rest: black pride, black jobs, and, yes, Black Power—in the best sense of that often misapplied term.
Promise & Fulfillment
We should listen to the militants, hearing not only the threats but also the programs and the promises. They have identified what it is that makes America go and, quite rightly and quite understandably, they want a share of it for the black man. The ghettos of our cities will be remade when the people in them have the will, the power, the resources and the skills to remake them. They won't be remade by Government billions. We have to get private enterprise into the ghetto. But at the same time, we have to get the people of the ghetto into private enterprise.
At a time when so many things seem to be going against us in the relations between the races, let us remember the greatest thing going for us—the emerging pride of the black American. That pride, that demand for dignity, is the driving force that we all can build upon. These past few years have been a long night of the American spirit. It's time we let in the sun. It's time to move past the old civil rights and to bridge the gap between freedom and dignity, between promise and fulfillment.