NIXON ON RACIAL ACCOMMODATION

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.

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.

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