crisis in American cities. Floyd McKissick, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality [CORE], defended the basic concepts of black power against charges by Senator Robert F. Kennedy that "the slogan of black power... has set the civil-rights movement back considerably in the United States."
McKissick explained that black power is a call to mobilize the political, economic and social strength of black people and give them pride in themselves. He stated it was time for Negro leaders to turn their attention from the black community in the south to the vast numbers who are in the northern ghettos. When asked what could be done to help etto Negroes, McKissick answered that "the first thing we could do is stop the war...a $10 billion error." His statement brought applause from the audience.
Martin Luther King, testifying before the subcommittee, charged the administration with "squandering" the nation's resources on war and space races while giving "miniscule" amounts to the fight against poverty and prejudice. Pointing out that Johnson's "war on poverty" is lagging badly, King said the war in Vietnam has become a "national obsession." He stated:
"While the antipoverty program is cautiously initiated, zealously supervised and evaluated for immediate results, billions are literally expended for ill-considered warfare.
"The recently revealed misestimate of the war budget amounts to $10 billion for a single year. The error alone is more than five times the amount committed to antipoverty programs.
"The security we profess to seek in foreign adventures we will lose in our decaying cities."
King clearly warned of forthcoming ghetto explosions if the poverty programs are not carried out: "I am convinced that if the intolerable conditions of Negroes in the ghettos are not dealt with and removed with haste, we are faced with many more dark nights of hate."
Bayard Rustin, organizer of the massive civil-rights march on Washington in 1963, and A. Philip Randolph, trade-union leader, predicted an explosion among Negro youth if President Johnson finances the Vietnam war at the expense of the war on poverty. Rustin said the president must not allow the Vietnam war costs to be put "on the backs of the poor people." He called cutbacks in antipoverty spending "not only stupid and dangerous but criminal" and warned that Johnson “cannot get away with it."
"Negro leaders cannot be held responsible for the reaction that occurs as a result of paring down the War on Poverty," stated Rustin at the subcommittee hearings.
Rustin and Randolph emphasized the need for a "freedom budget" --~ an idea announced by Randolph on October 26. His plan calls for increasing the federal budget to $155 billion within nine years, a $2-an-hour minimum wage, a guaranteed income program for unemployed, and increased investments in education, housing, vocational training and health services. "We propose and insist," he declared, "that poverty in America can and therefore must be abolished within 10 years."
The freedom budget plan has won the support of top national figures in the fields of labor, economics and civil rights. Its provisions attack the economic policies and arguments of the Johnson administration such as the wage-price guideposts which have been strangling the labor movement. Although Randolph himself says that adoption of his freedom budget would not mean cutbacks in expenditures for war, most of the people cailing for more antipoverty funds point to a direct connection between decreased spending on antipoverty programs and increased war expenditures.
In a speech given November 28 at Stanford University, Rep. John Conyers (Democrat from Michigan) declared, "The war in Vietnam is very likely to kill some of the new domestic programs such as the Teachers' Corps, the rent subsidy program and the model cities program in the next few months...The effect of the increased spending for the war can only be the destruction of vital domestic programs because there just isn't enough money in the national budget to pay for both. With the war expected to cost more
than the current rate of $30 billion a year in 1967, a tax increase is going to be needed just to cover the cost of the war alone."
Other Democratic politicians, pressured by the discontented millions in the cities, echo these statements. Expenditures for the space program, for example, were the target of Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, president of the National League of Cities. The League, representing almost 14,000 communities, met while the Senate subcommittee hearings were taking place. Noting that the space program was supported by a $70 billion commitment from Congress, Cavanagh said that the League was "asking that the programs which strike at the major problems of cities have no more than equal priority with the space program." He predicted that "if we overlook the urgent and flaming problems of our slums, then we can find our nation crumbling beneath the climbing spaceships."
Cavanagh warned, "The poor, hemmed in by hopelessness, poor education and poverty, are tired of waiting." He reminded the convention -- and the nation -- of serious racial explosions in almost 40 major cities last year.
Republican opponents of the administration are attempting to win over disgruntled Democrats and angry Negroes by playing up Johnson's sell-out of the war on poverty. The December 16 editorial of the Detroit Free Press states in its headline: "IT'S THE POOR WHO PAY." The editorial explains that "to finance the war in Vietnam, the funds to fight another war, closer to home, have been cut by $4 million in Detroit. It is the poor who pay for our misdirected vision of world leadership.
"One of the first to pay is the Mom and Tots Neighborhood Center at 9226 Kercheval, in the heart of urban poverty and last summer's urban unrest."
The Senate subcommittee hearings allowed many of these antiadministration sentiments to be aired publicly. The "big names" who were called to testify before the subcommittee reflected the constantly growing rank-and-file discontent with the crises of capitalist society. There are increasing indications that the civil-rights movement and the labor movement are groping toward alliances with each other to struggle against a lowering of the standards of living while the war escalates and escalates.
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