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The N.A.A.C.P.'s Ben Hooks also speaks out against "the more radical fringes" of the environmental and regulatory lobbies. "We are not antienvironmental," he stresses, "but we are saying that there ought to be social-economic impact statements for environmental regulations." Hooks condemns many niggling health, safety and zoning regulations that he says are "really killing our neighborhoods." The costly rules can prevent modestly financed blacks from starting Mom and Pop businesses or from buying ghetto enterprises from previous owners who were protected by grandfather :' clauses and did not have to meet the costly new regulations.
Hooks once bought a doughnut shop in Memphis from a man who had owned it for 25 years. "In those 25 years, they had passed all kinds of laws," he recalls. "You had to have separate rest rooms for men and women, you had to have ratproof walls and everything on God's earth. We were hit with all those regulations, and they cost us $30,000. We had to close the shop."
"It's obvious now," Hooks goes on, "that nobody, but nobody, is buying into a decaying black ghetto except blacks themselves. So the effect of some regulations is almost 100% to exclude blacks. This causes a lot of resentment." If a black veteran invests his nest egg in a doughnut shop and then is forced to close it, warns Hooks, he is absolutely convinced that "they" — the white-controlled Government — do not want him to succeed.
Hooks and a rising chorus of blacks argue that poor and unemployed minorities can succeed in the long run only if more private—not Government—jobs are opened in a free, growing economy. To that end, says Hooks, "at the national level, and in every local Chamber of Commerce and Better Business Bureau, black leaders and business leaders should be sitting down to deal on the points on which we agree."