MONDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1984
Jesse Jackson:
The Condition
Of Black America
Greensboro Daily News
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, director of the Chicago-based Operation
PUSH, is a graduate of A&T State University and now an A&T
trustee. Here are excerpts from a recent conversation with members
of the editorial page staffs of the Daily News and Record:
Q: Where is the civil rights movement 20 years after the Greensboro sit-ins?
Jackson: Black Americans are under a double yoke. When European immigrants come here, they are under the yoke of a poor class
in a strange land. They go to a college or trade school and rise from
where they are. But they do not have the yoke of caste or color as the
negative factor in their lives. Blacks have class and caste to deal
with. The result is that, after all of these years here — in Greensboro, for example, in 1960, whether you were a Ph.D chemist or a
freshman student or the mother or father of that child without any
degrees, all of us were equally denied access to eating at the cafeteria
or using the library. So despite our class variations, our caste was
absolute.
Historically, there has not been an adequate appreciation of the
double yoke of blacks in this country. Because that's true, we must
deal with a development formula that speaks to the double nature of
our equation. The extent to which integration means equal protection
under the law, equal access, one judicial system, an obligation to pay
taxes and serve our share of military duty, to that extent it is solved.
To the extent it does not take into account the needs of caste to
develop institutional structures — such as banks and schools and hospitals, in order to compete with the other caste — then the integration theory becomes inadequate, because it speaks to the class side of
our problem, not to the caste side of our problem. The missing element in black development has been the role of corporate America
and a formula for economic parity.
Q: What about the debate in Congress over extension of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965?
A: It's clear that until blacks are 50-plus percent of the population they will not be mayor, they will not get a congressman from this
area, and no matter how brilliant they come out of the schools they
will not be governor or U.S. senator. It's as clear as 100 white U.S.
senators.
Our progress is almost directly proportional to our numbers, or
to the voting configuration that allows our numbers to count. The
Voting Rights Act in real measure has been sabotaged. Its real intent
was to get fair representation. And yet 17 years later, there's only
one congressman from the Deep South (in Houston, Texas).
Whereas poll tax and literacy tests were used prior to 1965 to
knock us out of representation, gerrymandering; annexation and at-
large have been the new forms of denial. It was always clear that in
a ratio of nine whites to one black, you could either destroy black
political participation by locking us out or by locking us in and destroying us through dilution. We can be destroyed either of those
ways. The bottom line is the same.
Q: Should the Voting Rights Act protect not only the right to
vote, but also guarantee a certain racial result?
A: People are motivated by possibility. If you remove possibility
you reduce motivation. If it's clear you can't win, it has a discouraging effect. And so we find this gross discrepancy 17 years later.
There are more that 80 counties with majority black population
across the South without a black representative. So we look at the
5,000-plus black elected officials that we now have in contrast to what
it was 17 years ago. But then we're 10 to 12 percent of the population and there are 600,000
elected officials. We're less than 1 percent of the
total 17 years later. On top of that, the president
threatens to undercut such growth as we've experienced.
Q: What about the experience of a politician
like Guilford state Sen. Henry Frye, who draws
support from both black and white constituencies. Isn't he a model for others?
' A: You can point here and there to aberrations of sorts — such as Los Angeles Mayor Tom
Bradley, or the biracial coalition that put in California Rep. Ron Dellums. But if you used that as
a role model, you wouldn't have 600 black elected
officials in the whole nation, because by and large
whites vote in blocs and they vote "white first" in
character. We must therefore empower ourselves
to protect ourselves.
; Q: What is the essence of your economic development program for blacks?
A: You have ghetto and you have government. This has been the historical dialectic. Either way you go, whether to the liberal or the
conservative side, there is more or less aid. But
ho one can develop without trade. Trade is the
missing factor in black development. The corporate community which owns the government and
the ghetto must be made to be a factor in the
formula.
; In the black community, there's a huge trade
deficit and a talent surplus. We trade with Coca-
Cola and Pepsi and the tobacco industry and the
furniture industry, but they don't trade with us,
they don't retain our lawyers or our CPAs, they
will not use our banks or our advertising agencies. So it is the restraint of trade that leaves us
essentially undeveloped and on the public economy.
'■ We end up with our best minds either receiving welfare in the poor class or distributing welfare as social service agents still in the same
class. By and large, our best minds are shifted
Over here as distributors of services in the public
economy because the private economy has locked
— out. The flaw in that is that it has locked out
