My remarks today are the first in a series of three speeches about one major aspect of the unfinished business that is ahead: the quality of life for the Negro in the urban areas of the North.
I do not mean to downgrade the problems that remain in the South. But my purpose today—and in the speeches I shall deliver tomorrow and Saturday—is to emphasize the magnitude of the problem in the North, and to suggest that our purpose to help the northern Negro must pervade every plan we make for the future of our cities. In the course of the last generation, the face of the American city has changed almost completely. Millions of Negroes, impelled by hopes of job opportunities and a better life, have poured into the great cities of the North and West. Their arrival, and the simultaneous flight of millions of whites to the suburbs, has created a situation of segregation unparalleled in our country’s history…
And the thoroughgoing segregation of the urban Negro is actually the less serious part of the story. The worst part is that the ghetto is also a slum.
From his birth to his death the urban Negro is a second—class citizen.
For three hundred years the Negro has been a nation apart, a people governed by a repression that has been softened to the point where it is now only a massive indifference. The Watts riots were as much a revolt against official indifference, an explosion of frustration at the inability to communicate and participate, as they were an uprising about inferior jobs and education and housing. What exploded in Watts is what lies beneath the surface…
We can expect continuing explosions like Watts, continuing crises in the management of our cities, and, worst of all, a continuing second-class status for a large group of American citizens. Clearly the present pace is unsatisfactory.
What, then, are they specific elements of our course of action? Ultimately, we must succeed in wiping out the huge central city ghettos. By this I do not mean that the outcome will be racial balance in every urban and suburban neighborhood. Many Negroes, given a completely free choice, will choose to live in predominately Negro neighborhoods, just as members of other racial groups have chosen in the past to live predominatly among their own kinsmen.
The important thing is that the Negro must have freedom of choice. What we must achieve is freedom for him to move if he wants to and where he wants to…
If we can break down the massive housing segregation of the ghetto, we can break down the other forms of segregation which it has caused. The ghetto, for example, makes it practically impossible to achieve meaningful racial balance in the schools. Even if there were enough whites left in the city to make a balance, the physical distances involved in transporting children, particularly in a large city, might be insuperable…
Obviously we cannot wipe out the ghetto overnight. Were this our sole goal, we could succeed only in writing off a whole generation of present ghetto residents who would never live to see its fulfillment.
At the same time, therefore, we must devote our attention to improving living conditions and rebuilding the present Negro areas, to giving their residents new job skills and jobs to go with them to improving the education of their children, to providing new cultural interests for those who live there.
Many have said that the goals of improving living conditions in Negro areas and of dispersing the ghetto are mutually exclusive. I disagree most emphatically, in fact, the two goals are interdependent…
What can we do now to begin reversing the concentration of the Negro in the central city?…
First, we must evaluate existing federal housing programs in light of the goal of desegregation. It will turn out, of course, that we have been doing things just about backwards for a long time.
Public housing has been a significant force in perpetuating segregation. It has been built, on the whole, as large projects in ghetto areas, and it is all clear that this has not been wholly accidental…
Second, we can act at the federal level to break down the barriers which the suburbs present to the relatively few Negroes who can afford now to buy a home…[and] to outlaw discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.
Third, we can begin making efforts in other areas to complement our efforts in the housing area.
We might, for example, consider special federal aid to suburban schools which take in slum children…
Finally, it would be invaluable to desegregation if we established, with federal assistance, well-publicized advisory agencies to tell new arrivals to the city of available places to live, available jobs, and so on…
It is the inevitable erosion of the spirit which isolation [of the ghetto] has brought that we seek to counteract…Our ultimate purpose is to assure that every American comes to know the full meaning of the truths that we held to be self-evident for the rest of America almost 190 years ago.