i

Achieving the "Dream": A Challenge to Liberals and to Conservatives in the Spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr.

by Glenn C. Loury

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders, and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. (Hebrews 12: 1, NM

The struggle for freedom and equality is the central theme in the black American historical experience. This struggle, in turn, h as played a profound role in shaping the contemporary American social and political conscience. The trauma of slavery, the fratricide of the Civil War, the profound legal ramifications of the Reconstruction amendments, the long dark night of post-Reconstr u ction retreat from the moral and practical implications of black citizenship, the collective redemption of the Civil Rights Movement - these have worked to make us Americans the people we are. Only the massive westward migration and the still continuing f l ow of immigrants to our shores rival this history of race relations as factors defining the American character. Beginning in the mid-1950s and culminating a decade later, the Civil Rights Movement wrought a profound change in American race relations. Its g oal was to achieve equal citizenship for blacks; it was believed by many that social and economic equality would follow in the wake of this accomplishment. The civil rights revolution largely succeeded in its effort to eliminate legally enforced second cl a ss citizenship for blacks. Ile legislation and court rulings to which it led effected sweeping changes in the American institutions of education, employment, and electoral politics. So broad was the wake of this social upheaval that the rights of women, h o mosexuals, the elderly, the handicapped were redefined, in large part, as a consequence of it. Forcing a Rederinition. 11is social transformation represents a remarkable, unparalleled experience, graphically illustrating the virtue and vitality of our fre e institutions. In barely the span of a generation, and with comparatively little violence, a despised and largely disenfranchised minority descendant from chattel slaves used the courts, the legislature, the press, and the rights of petition and assembly o f our republic to force a redefinition of their citizenship. One can begin to grasp the magnitude of this accomplishment by comparison with the continuing turmoil which besets those many nations around the world suffering under longstanding conflicts amon g racial and religious groups.

Unfulffiled Hope. Yet, despite this success, hope that the Movement would produce true social and economic equality between the races remains unfulfilled. No compendium of social statistics is needed to see the vast disparities in economic advantage which separate the inner-city black poor from the rest of the nation. No profound talents of social observation are required to notice the continuing tension, anger, and fear that shrouds our public discourse on m atters concerning race. When in 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr. declared his "dream" - that we Americans should one day become a society where a citizen's race would be an irrelevancy, where black and white children would walk hand-in-hand, where persons wou l d be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character - this seemed to many Americans both a noble and attainable goal. Today, even after having made his birth an occasion for national celebration, his "dream" seems naively utop i an - no closer to realization than on that hot August afternoon when those inspiring words were first spoken. Today black Americans, and the nation, face a crisis different in character though no less severe in degree than that which occasioned the civil r ights revolution. It is not a crisis, however, which admits of treatment by use of the strategies that proved so successful in that earlier era. The bottom stratum of the black community has compelling problems which can no longer be blamed solely on whit e racism, which will not yield to protest marches or court orders, and which force us to confront fundamental failures in lower class black urban society. This crisis is particularly difficult for black leaders and the black middle class. For this profound alienation of the ghetto poor from mainstream American life has continued to grow worse in the years since the triumphs of the civil rights movement, even as the success of that movement has provided the basis for an impressive expansion of economic and p o litical power for the black middle class. Social Pathologies. There is no way to downplay the social pathologies that afflict the urban underclass, just as it cannot be denied that vast new opportunities have opened for blacks to enter into the mainstream of American life. In big city ghettos, the black youth unemployment Tate often exceeds 40 percent. Over one quarter of young black men in the critical ages 20 to 24 years old, according to one recent study, have dropped out of the economy, in the sense th a t they are not in school, not working, and not actively seeking work. In the inner city, far more than half of all black babies are born out of wedlock. Black girls between the ages of 15 and 19 constitute the most fertile population of that age group in t he industrialized world. The families which result are most often not self-supporting. The level of dependency on public assistance for basic economic survival has essentially doubled since 1964; almost one-half of all black children are supported in part by transfers from the state and federal governments. Over half of black children in public primary and secondary schools are concentrated in the nation's twelve largest central city school districts, where the quality of education is poor, and where white s constitute only about a quarter of total enrollment. Only about one black student in seven scores above the 50th percentile on standardized college admissions tests. Blacks, though little more than a tenth of the population, constitute approximately half of the imprisoned felons in the nation. Roughly 40 percent of those murdered in the U.S. are black men killed by other black men. In some big cities black women face a risk of rape which is five time as great as that faced by whites. These statistics depi ct an extent of deprivation, a degree of misery, a hopelessness and despair, an alienation which is difficult for most Americans, who do not have direct

experien ce with this social stratum, to comprehend. Tley pose an enormous challenge to the leadership of our nation, and to the black leadership. Yet, we seem increasingly unable to conduct a political dialogue out of which might develop a consensus about how to r espond to this reality. There are two common, partisan themes which dominate the current debate. One is to blame it all on racism, to declare that this circumstance proves the continued existence of old-type American racial enmity, only in a more subtle, m odernized and updated form. This is the view of many civil rights activists. From this perspective the tragedy of the urban underclass is a civil rights problem, curable by civil rights methods. Black youth unemployment represents the refusal of employers to hire competent and industrious young men because of their race. Black welfare dependency is the inescapable consequence of the absence of opportunity. Black academic underperformance reflects racial bias in the provision of public education. Black inca r ceration rates are the result of the bias of the police and judiciary. The other theme, characterized by the posture of many on the right in our politics, is to blame it on the failures of "Great Society liberals," to chalk it up to the follies of big gov e rnment and big spending, to see the problem as the legacy of a tragically misconceived welfare state. A key feature of this view is the apparent absence of any felt need to articulate a "policy" on this new race problem. It is as though those shaping the d omestic agenda of this government do not see the explicitly racial character of this problem, as if they do not understand the historical experiences which link, symbolically and sociologically, the current urban underclass to our long, painful legacy of r acial trauma. Their response, quite literally, has been to promulgate a de facto doctrine of "benign neglect" on the issue of continuing racial inequality. Competing Visions. These responses feed on each other. The civil rights leaders, repelled by the Re a gan and now Bush Administrations' public vision, see more social spending as the only solution to the problem. They characterize every question raised about the cost effectiveness or appropriateness of a welfare program as evidence of a lack of concern ab o ut the black poor; they identify every affirmative action effort, whether it is aimed at attaining skills training for the ghetto poor or securing a fat municipal procurement contract for a black millionaire, as necessary and just recompense in light of o u r history of racial oppression. Conservatives in and out of government, repelled by the public vision of civil rights advocates and convinced that the programs of the past have failed, when addressing racial issues at all talk in formalistic terms about t h e principle of "color blind state action." Its civil rights officials absurdly claim that they are the true heirs of Martin Luther King's moral legacy, for it is they who remain loyal to his "color blind" ideal - as if King's moral leadership consisted of this and nothing else. Its spokesmen point to the "trickling down" of the benefits of economic growth as the ultimate solution to these problems; it courts the support and responds to the influence of segregationist elements; it remains at this late date w ithout a positive program of action aimed at narrowing the yawning chasm separating the black poor from the rest of the nation. There is, many would now admit, merit in the conservative criticism of liberal social policy. It is clear that the Great Societ y approach to the problems of poor blacks has been inadequate. Intellectually honest persons must now concede that it is not nearly as easy to truly help people as the big spenders would suggest. The proper measure of "caring" ought not be the size of budg et expenditures on poverty programs, if the result is that the

recipients remain dependent on such programs. Moreover, many Americans have become concerned about the neutrality toward values and behavior which was so characteristic of the Great Society thrust, the aversion to holding persons responsible for those actions which precipitated their own dependence, the feeling that "society" is to blame for all the misfortune in the world. Characterizing the problem of the ghetto poor as due to white racis m is one variant of this argument that "society" has caused the problem. It overlooks the extent to which values and behaviors of inner-city black youth are implicated in the difficulty. Many American, black and white, have also been disgusted with the way in which this dangerous circumstance is exploited for political gain by professional civil rights and poverty advocates. They have watched the minority youth unemployment rate be cited in defense of special admissions programs to elite law schools. T'hey h ave seen public officials, caught in their illegal indiscretions, use the charge of racism as a cover for their personal failings of character. They have seen themselves pilloried as "racists" by civil rights lobbyists for taking the opposite side of legi t imately arguable policy debates. Ideological Barrier. Yet, none of this excuses (though it may help to explain) the fact that our national government has failed to engage this problem with the seriousness and energy which it requires. It has permitted ide o logy to stand in the way of the formulation of practical programs which might begin to chip away at this dangerous problem. It has permitted the worthy goals of reducing taxes and limiting growth in the size of government to crowd from the domestic policy agenda the creative reflection which will obviously be needed to formulate a new, non-welfare oriented approach to this problem. Ironically, each party to this debate has helped to make viable the otherwise problematic posture of the other. The lack of a p ositive, high priority response from a series of Republican Administrations to what is now a longstanding, continuously worsening social problem has allowed politically marginal and intellectually moribund elements to retain a credibility and force in our political life far beyond that which their accomplishments would otherwise support. Many are reluctant to criticize them because they do not wish to be identified with a Republican Administration's policy on racial matters. Moreover, the shrill, vitriolic , self-serving, and obviously unfair attacks on Administration officials by the civil rights lobby has drained their criticism of much of its legitimacy. The "racist" epithet, like the little boy's cry of "wolf," is a charge so often invoked these days tha t is has lost its historic moral force. Political Quagmire. The result of this symbiosis has been to impede the establishment of a political consensus sufficient to support sustained action on the country's most pressing domestic problem. Many whites, chas t ened by the apparent failures of 1960s-style social engineering but genuinely concerned about the tragedy unfolding in our inner cities, are reluctant to engage this issue. It seems to them a political quagmire in which one is forced to ally oneself with a civil rights establishment no longer able to command broad respect. Many blacks who have begun to have doubts about the effectiveness of liberal social policy are hindered in their articulation of an alternative vision by fear of being too closely linked in the public mind with a policy of indifference to racial concerns. I can personally attest to the difficulties which this environment has created. I am an acknowledged critic of the civil rights leadership. There are highly partisan policy debates in

5

6

interests and strivings of black people. Yet it is to such double standard- setting, such gerrymandering, such maneuvering that many feel compelled to turn. Wrongs of the Past. Signs of the intellectual exhaustion, and of the increasing political ineffectiveness of this type of leadership are now evident. Yet we cling to this method because of the way in which the claims of blacks have been most successfully pressed during the civil rights era. These claims have been based, above all else, on the status of blacks as America's historical victims. Maintenance of this claiming status requires constant emphasis on the wrongs of the past and exaggeration of presen t tribulations. He who leads a group of historical victims, as victims, must never let "them" forget what "they" have done: he must renew the indictment and keep alive the moral asymmetry implicit in the respective positions of victim and victimizer. He is the preeminent architect of what philosopher G.K Minogue has called "suffering situations." The circumstance of his group as "underdog" becomes his most valuable political asset. Such a posture, especially in the political realm, militates against an emph a sis on personal responsibility within the group, and induces those who have been successful to attribute their accomplishments to fortuitous circumstance, and not to their own abilities and character. . It -is difficult to overemphasize the self-defeating dynamic at work here. The dictates of political advocacy require that personal inadequacies among blacks be attributed to "the system," and that emphasis by black leaders on self-improvement be denounced as irrelevant, self-serving, dishonest. Individual b lack men and women simply cannot fail on their own, they must be seen as never having had a chance. But where failure at the personal level is impossible, there can also be no personal successes. For a black to embrace the Horatio Alger myth, to assert as a guide topersonal action that "there is opportunity in America," becomes apolitically repugnant act. For each would-be black Horatio Alger indicts as inadequate, or incomplete, the deeply entrenched (and quite useful) notion that individual effort can ne v er overcome the "inheritance of race." Yet where there can be no black Horatio Algers to celebrate, sustaining an ethos of responsibility which might serve to extract minimal effort from the individual in the face of hardship becomes impossible as well. J a mes Baldwin spoke to this problem with great insight long ago. In his 1949 essay "Everybody's Protest Novel," Baldwin said of the protagonist of Richard Wright's celebrated novel Native Son: Bigger Thomas stands on a Chicago street corner watching air pla n es flown by white men racing against the sun and 'Goddamn' he says, the bitterness bubbling up like blood, remembering a million indignities, the terrible, rat-infested house, the humiliation of home-relief, the intense, aimless, ugly bickering, hating it ; hatred smolders through these pages like sulfur fire. All of Biggers's life is controlled, defined by his hatred and his fear. And later, his fear drives him to murder and his hatred to rape; he dies, having come, through this violence, and we are told, for the first time, to a kind of life, having for the first time redeemed his manhood.

9

10

Strengthening the Social Pillars of the Black Community

By J. Kenneth Blackwell

want to thank you for the opportunity to speak before The Heritage Foundation during this unique celebration of Black History Month.. As many of you may know, I recently resigned my appointment at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and announced my candidacy for. the Congress. Over the weekend, I@ye@ @qen back in the district in Ohio, starting what will be a long - and we hope successful - campaign. As I turn my thoughts from government to campaigning, the matter of building a bridge be t ween the conservative movement and the black community takes on new importance. I am conservative. I am black. That makes me a member of two minority groups. What saddens me is that while conservatives, as a subset of our society, are growing; and blacks, as a subset of our society, are growing; the subset made up of black conservatives isn't growing - at least fast enough! This forum is a good start toward discovering why that is the case. I believe there are two principal reasons for the failure of conse r vatism to attract a greater black intellectual following and a greater black popular following. The first reason has to do with something that people love to talk about here in Washington - appearances. We talk about the appearance of impropriety when it c omes to something that might not be unethical, but could be made to seem unethical. We talk about spin when we discuss matters with the media, so that what appears in a television report or newspaper account reflects what we want it to. We talk about perc e ption being reality, in wise voices steeped in the lore of Washington's mysterious rules of power and politics. Appearances Over Reality. We love appearances. We have embraced and accepted appearances, and transported them to a level of conscious importan c e on a par with - if not above - reality itself. Yet though we live and die by appearances in Washington, we seem as conservatives to have a tough time facing up to the way we appear to America's blacks. There is a line by Ralph Waldo Emerson which I thin k epitomizes our dilemma. "There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism," Emerson said, "joined with a certain superiority in its fact." How can we be so right, and still not have any bridge to black America? In a decade in which the c onservative ideal of individual liberty, individual opportunity, and individual choice have triumphed over totalitarianism - from Czechoslovakia to Nicaragua - why doesn't its light shine more brightly in America's inner cities? Let us accept for the mome nt that Emerson's superiority of fact is on our side. Perhaps the problem is a "certain meanness," to repeat Emerson's phrase.

Reality - the superiority of facts - might be on conservatism's side, but we will not succeed as conservatives in building bridges to America's blacks until appearances are also on our side. Unity of a Dream. Let me mention just one example from the early 1980s - conservative opposition to a national holiday in memory of Dr. Ma r tin Luther King. Whether you believe that civil disobedience is ever justified or not, whether you believe that contemporaries should be honored in the same manner as Founding Fathers or Lincoln, whether you believe that too-many. holidays cost the econom y too much in lost productivity isn't the issue. To blacks and to many Americans of many other colors, Dr. King symbolizes the unity of a dream we all embrace: the dream of equal opportunity, a chance to rise to the limits our initiative will take us. When Dr. King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and told a watching world he had a dream, he was giving voice to the idealism that makes America a beacon to the world. What he offered were profoundly conservative values in the deepest meaning of the w o rd. Yet in a few weeks of misguided conservative opposition to a holiday commemorating the ideals he died for, we pulled down a lot of bridges that might have spanned the gulf between us as conservatives and black America. Words of Despair. Let us come to the end of the decade. A senator I admire much for his principled conservatism, Barry Goldwater, pens his memoirs. They are, as he put it in his foreword, "straight from the shoulder." Yet when he comes to a discussion of the future of the Republican Part y , in what he calls a major challenge to the party, he minimizes the GOP's opportunities with blacks. "Blacks," he writes, "seem rockbound to the Democrats." That will only change, he says, as blacks begin to perceive, in his words, "that their disadvantag e d place in society was partly caused by the Big Brother syndrome of the Democrats." These are the words of one of conservatism's 20th-century spiritual fathers. They are words of despair, written in a passive voice. It is not enough for us as conservative s to sit back and await a black awakening, a disenchantment with the dependency-producing policies of the Democrats. Yes, that disenchantment might come. Some would say we've already seen its glinunerings in the work of a new generation of black intellectu a ls like Glenn Loury, Robert Woodson, Thomas Sowell, and others. But let us not forget that although the Democratic social policies intended to foster black economic and social progress have not worked as planned, they nonetheless represented a positive, a c tive agenda for black America. That is the difference between Goldwater's resignation when it comes to Republicans and blacks, and the Democrats' tenacity. We may wait a very long time for disenchantment to result in bridges being built from the black com munity to conservatism. We will wait far less time if we as conservatives build bridges to the black community. We suffer some from the sins of our conservative forebears of the 1980s, who first alienated and then wrote off blacks.

That is the past. Now let us look at what can be accomplished by making appearances and reality work together. If we. really want conservatism to have greater appeal to blacks, then we need a conservative agenda for black progress. "The Other America." This is the 26th an n iversary of Michael Harrington's landmark study, "The Other--America."- Harrington looked at the economic prosperity of the 1950s and asked how so many were left out. It is a fitting question to ask now as we look back on the 1980s - the longest peacetime economic expansion, with record numbers of jobs created, a non-inflationary economy, a general - but uneven - prosperity. According to the Census Bureau, in 1987 10 percent of whites lived in poverty - compared to 33 percent of blacks. And that is only on e measure of the other America. We could look at infant mortality rates, intact households, incarceration rates for males, the likelihood of suffering violence, the incidence of illnesses like cancer or heart disease that could be treated with early diagno s is, and they will tell us the same thing. The other America - black America and Hispanic America - is hurting. Black'America's political fate has been hitched to the Democratic ship of state, and now black America is sinking. At a time like that, do you w a it for the drowning man to swim to you - or do you throw him a lifeline? At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Jack Kemp, with whom I am proud to have served, knows that you throw a lifeline. Economic empowerment is one agenda item for black America. And don't fool yourselves about anyone with a good business plan and a good entrepreneurial spirit being able to find capital. Seeking A Fair Hearing. One of my favorite success stories from the 1980s comes from Dr. Ernest Bates. He's the founder of one of the country's largest leasing firms for medical diagnostic services. Dr. Bates was typical of many blacks in the 1950s. He worked hard in school and in the Army to become a neurosurgeon. He developed a successful practice in California, earning $ 500,000 a year by the 1970s. But he knew that many hospitals couldn't afford to purchase expensive new diagnostic technologies like CAT-Scan machinery, so he invested in a business to lease mobile diagnostics to hospitals. Like many start-up companies, hi s firm ran into difficulty. But Dr. Bates says that one of the greatest difficulties he had was getting a fair hearing when he went to the Small Business Administration, to venture capitalists, and to investment bankers on Wall Street. Once they saw he was black, interest in his business plan simply evaporated; until he met Michael Milken, then at Drexel Burnham Lambert, who provided American Diagnostic Services with capital to expand. It's now one of the most successful medical leasing services in America. If a successful, black neurosurgeon can't get a fair hearing when he looks for support for a business proposition at this point in 20th century America, where is an undereducated, twenty-year-old black male supposed to turn?

Programs That Work Economic empowerment has to begin in the black community. Strengthening the black middle class is important but broadening the black middle class is more important. And that will only come about as we determinedly seek new ways to lift p eople from poverty. It's not enough to say the Democrats' programs have failed. It's incumbent on us to develop programs that will work. And that requires a little soul-searching on our part. I don't know whether you consider Thomas Hobbes to be a conserv a tive, but his concept of human nature - life as "nasty, brutish, and short," - is, I think, a sordid view of humanity. Yet too many seem to share that view when it comes to analyzing poverty. We look for the disincentive that keeps the recipients of pover t y aid from working, instead of the incentive we could provide to help them work. The myth of rugged individualism often blinds us to the reality of social support that has always been so vital in our history. Whether we're talking about barn raisings, fie l d clearings, or quilting bees, Americans have banded together to help one another since frontier days. We have to recognize that a welfare mother struggling to earn her G.E.D. needs a network of support. We have to recognize that there is no stigma in tha t need. In much conservative discussion of the welfare class, we seem to want to make villains out of poverty programs' victims. For every welfare cheat, there are dozens who themselves have been cheated by misspent, misconceived, and mal-administered pove r ty programs. These people deserve our help in devising better alternatives - not the additional burden of being blamed by us for the disincentive effects of programs they didn't create, don't control, and can't get away from. In short, we as conservatives need to decide we are more interested in lifting people from poverty instead of bl=dng them for their circumstances. Capacity-Building. Conservatism has to move away from anecdotes about welfare chiselers and toward alternatives so we can create entrepren e urs. Let's get that "certain meanness" out of our rhetoric, and put our facts up front. Capacity-building, helping black Americans develop the skills to take advantage of opportunity, is critical. As conservatives, we need to be fiscal realists. We must a c knowledge that an agenda for black progress is going to cost money. In addition to empowerment through capacity building, there are things we can do now to increase economic empowerment and limit dependency. Tenant management in public housing is one such action item for our agenda. So also is expanding the equity stake through home ownership of public housing. It is time for the second great civil rights movement. Our Constitution guarantees equal rights, but not equal results. If we wish, as conservative s , to build inroads into black America, we can do so by delivering results. By concentrating on business development, business ownership, and home ownership, we can help build black America. The question for us today is whether we wish to be relevant to bl ack America. It is a question we must answer soon.

Time is running out on us. Not because black America will explode, but because we may soon become irrelevant to it. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, America is on its way to a work force c risis. In a study last year, a commission chartered by Secretary Ann McLaughlin to explore America's preparedness for economic competition in the coming decade confirmed that due to demographic trends we are on the way to a labor shortage and a skill shor t age in our work force. Such a skill and worker shortage will force a response. Business and employers will demand it, and government will provide it. But will it be a conservative, Republican response? Or will it be another Democratic response? If we choo s e the way of Senator Goldwater, with all respect, I submit we'll be waiting for the awakening while the Democrats lay some pontoon bridges and race right past us as we stare across the gulf separating us from black Americans and wonder what happened. I'd l ike to conclude with some thoughts provoked by a recent interview with James Fallows. Fallows was President Carter's senior speechwriter. He recently returned from living several years in Asia, including Japan, and was interviewed by Ken Adelman for the W a shingtonian. What struck me in Fallows's words were his remarks about the naive uniqueness of the American social vision - the concept that many different peoples from all over the world can come together in one country and build a vigorous, successful so c iety. Alien Idea. Fallows notes how alien that idea is to most of the world, especially to Asia. He says that racism in many other societies blinds them to the concept that we take for granted, the notion that men are equal, that people of different herit a ges can not only live together harmoniously, productively, but in fact with greater accumulated energies and vibrancy of spirit than would be conceivable in a homogenous society. Fallows has returned to America worried about the fragility of this unique v i sion. And, befitting a speechwriter who worked for a President who delivered the "Malaise" speech, he is worried about our ability to live up to that unique promise that is America. Ladies and gentlemen, it is no secret that some in Japan believe their ra c ial homogeneity to be a virtue, and our diversity to be a hindrance. Japanese leaders have said, and apologized for, as much. Tle fact is the rest of the world does look on the state of black America with bewilderment about what that says about the soul o f this great county, which promises so much, but leaves out so many. Essential Premise. We as conservatives must put at risk our national prestige, our national heritage, and our national competitiveness. With an agenda for black progress, we can not only build bridges that will be to our own political benefit, but we can restore to the world the essential premise of America: That free people, with economic freedom and limited government, will always thrive;

That the human spirit breathes with the same yearning no matter what one's skin color; That ability and talent deserve nurturing wherever they are found, and not just in the privileged classes, whether defined by party label as with Djilas, or social and economic power.

Is the Black Community a Casualty of the War on Poverty?

By Robert I. Woodson, Sr. About four days ago I was the guest of a group of black legislators in Milwaukee. When I got off the plane, a gentleman about my age greeted me. After a ten-minute search for his car, he finally acknowledged that he couldn't find it because he had left his glasses at home. "I guess you could say I'm blind and vain," he confessed. And that's true with far too many of us who have been engaged in the civil rights move- ment. We have been blind, but w e have also been vain. We must now discard the vanity in- duced by the nobility of our struggle and find the courage to embrace a new honesty in as- sessing its legacy. So what I have been trying to do within the black community is to stimu- late a return to our rich tradition of debate as to the nature and course of post-civil rights change. Historically, there were always active currents of debate within the black community. From the time of slavery up until the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., voic e s of many persuasions were heard as we sought to shape our destiny as black Americans. Since then there has been little or no substantive debate. We have allowed our dynamic diversity of thought to be muted into a predictable monolith. A brief historic re v iew of major currents of debate among blacks will provide an ap- propriate perspective. During the period of slavery, there were "insurrectionists," who believed that we should use violence as a means of achieving our rights. Then there were the "accommod a tionists," who felt just as strongly that we should try to seek justice and rights within the American context. In the decades preceding the Civil War, many enslaved blacks thought the road from bondage to dignity led back to their African homeland and be c ame "re-colonizationists," championing a return to meccas of resettlement such as Sierra Leone and Liberia. At the same time, other blacks vigorously protested against the idea of leaving a country being built on the backs of their free labor and cast the i r lot with the "abolitionists" and others working to dismantle the system of slavery. Working Within the System. Following Emancipation, the turn-of-the-century years were characterized by vigorous dialogue between pre-eminent black leaders of the day suc h as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. While the militant Douglass and the younger, more conservative Washington both promoted economic self-sufficiency for newly- freed blacks, they differed on the extent to which their goals could be achieved w ithin the existing system. As the century progressed, Washington's gospel of black entrepreneurship and industrial training was challenged by yet another outstanding black thinker, W. E. B. DuBois, who espoused the concept of the "Talented Tenth," an inte llectual elite of social scientists and humanists who would create a black technocracy. DuBois thus set forth for generations of