On Christmas Eve the Governor of Arkansas issued a press release and sent me a copy. This is how the release started off:
“The Federal Government’s ‘War on Poverty’ program, working in partnership with state government, has had about the same effect as a ‘blue chip’ industry coming into the State during the past year.”
Eight months before his release I had been invited to speak to a joint session of the Arkansas legislature. That was March 8, 1965. I was the first federal official ever invited to address the legislature. After I spoke there, some people said I might well be the last.
But the important event -- the really important event -- took place two days before I visited. In Little Rock, I spoke on a Monday, but on the Saturday before, Mrs. Faubus had a tea in the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock. You may remember that mansion --its picture was on the first page of virtually every paper in the world back in 1957. But that Saturday, up the steps of that mansion, one by one, came black and white together -- Negroes and whites Negro civil rights leaders and-white segregationists. And together they had tea in the Governor’s Mansion. Such a meeting had never before occurred in Arkansas history.
A few weeks after that, Governor Faubus dedicated the first Job Corps center in Arkansas -- and one of the first in the nation. Speaking to his racially integrated audience, Governor Faubus extolled the Job Corps and asked us to open more. So when Governor Faubus said that the poverty program in Arkansas was as good as getting a blue chip firm with a triple A credit rating, he was talking about more than dollars.
He was talking about more than the economic health of his State.
He was talking about the social health and the spiritual health of Arkansas. We’ve pumped more than 28 million dollars into Arkansas -- and over one billion dollars into programs across the nation. But some of the most important victories we’ve won can’t be measured in dollars.
Take the religious issue - the church-state issue.
Just three or four years ago, it was practically impossible for a federal agency to give a direct grant to a religious group.
People said there was that “wall between church and State.” But we said that wall was put there to keep government out of the pulpit, not to keep the clergy away from the poor! That wall protects belief, and even disbelief! It does not exclude compassion, poverty, suffering, injustice. That is Manton territory -- not exclusively yours, or mine -- but everybody’s! With no wall between! And so we said, “Reverend Mr. Jones or Father Kelly or Rabbi Hirsh,” if you’re not afraid to be seen in our company, we’re not afraid to be seen in yours, because we are all about our father’s business!
So -- as of today -- we have given hundreds of grants to religious institutions or religiously affiliated organizations to run poverty programs without violating the principle of separation of church and State.
In doing so we’re fulfilling the mandate of Congress -- expressed in the law establishing our OEO - to mobilize “all the resources of the nation.” And all denominations are working together. In San Antonio, Texas, a Jewish synagogue rented a hall to a Lutheran church group to conduct pre-school classes for children from a predominantly Catholic area!
Take the race issue -- in mid-September, Martin Luther King, Sr., came to our office in Washington along with other members of the local Community Action program -- white and black. The Mayor of Atlanta, Ivan Allen, was there. A press briefing was scheduled for 4 P.M. As the hour approached, the biggest press assembly we ever had was milling around -- waiting to see whether “it” would really happen, and “it” did. Elevator doors opened and out stepped Herman Talmadge and Richard Russell of Georgia to shake hands and have their picture taken with Negro leadership. White and Black had joined hands in the War Against Poverty. That has never happened before in the history of this country. And Senator Richard Russell had never come to the Executive Branch to announce any grant in all his years in Congress.
Take the birth control issue. Eighteen months ago practically no public official could discuss it in public.
Today, our agency, OEO, is the first agency in the history of the Federal Government to give public money directly to private agencies for family planning purposes. We’ve been doing it for a year. We’re still the only one. We’ve been reproached for doing it at all, and we have been criticized for the careful and precise criteria we established to prevent abuse. So far we appear to have done it in a way which avoided arousing the sensitivities or religious convictions in such a way as to block the program altogether.
Let’s turn for a second to that hot political issue -- the Governor’s veto. As of midnight last night the 50 different governors had been standing behind us for 18 months calling “safe or out.” They’ve had over 10,000 chances to say “no.” And only 9 times have they used their veto.
And I did some figuring -- some long division -- coming over here. And I figured the percentage and suddenly realized: “We’re purer than Ivory soap.
These aren’t dollar achievements, but two years ago, no one could have bought them with the entire federal budget!
And there are other divisions -- deep spiritual divisions -- which are slowly healing. That’s what the issue called involvement of the poor is really all about.
Many poor people feel that nobody cares about them or understands them -- that nobody really wants to help them or values their opinion.
In the past, they have withdrawn -- in isolation, defeat, and in bitterness. And there are others who charge that involvement of the poor means class warfare -- they say we want the poor to fight city hall or the county, or the governor!
None of these ideas is true.
We believe that involvement of the poor is our way, and Congress way of saying that the poor are not second class citizens. The poor have a right, a human and a civil right to participate in shaping their own destiny.
We believe that to listen to criticism, and to respond to the needs of the people, especially the poor and the helpless, is the heart of democracy -- not to listen undermines democracy.
We won’t penetrate the wall of isolation and frustration unless we are willing to listen to statements like this one, from a 15 year old Boston boy -- from the Boston ghetto -- with a history of delinquency and poor language, but very bright. He was “discovered” by a Harvard student who was tutoring him. Listen to this boy:
“My father, he tried, and he tried. My mother, she tried, too. My father, he would put his head on the kitchen table and he would cry, all six foot three of him would cry. And my mother would tell him to stop, and say it wasn’t his fault; and we would stay alive somehow. But my brothers and I, we knew she wasn’t so sure. She tried to make it easy for us by lying, but we knew.”
Those are the voices we’re listening to. And we’re hearing the poor speak out, often for the first time, from every part of the country...
Six months ago, I was down at the bottom of Cataract Canyon – right next to the Grand Canyon. Two thousand feet down, that’s where the Havasupai Indians live. They have lived in this deep canyon since before the white man came to America. And they talk about us, the people who live on the surface, as the people on top. When I went down to the bottom of that canyon, do you know what those Indians wanted to know more than anything else? Could they have their own bank account and draw checks on that account themselves? All their lives they had been required to go to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and ask permission to use their own money. They were treated as children by the great white father who knew best. But now they have that bank account. They made their first withdrawal on November 22, 1965, from the first Navajo bank in Kingman, Arizona. And I predict that they’ll soon learn to get just as much in debt as the rest of us.
We are involving the poor in every aspect of the program -
- By seeing that they are represented on the boards of these programs,
- By providing jobs for the poor in the administration of the program,
- By educating and training for greater opportunity.
Some people have called this a social revolution. If it is a revolution, it is not a revolution in the old sense -- like the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution -- class warfare spawned by hatred, bloodshed, and barricades in the streets. The head of a small neighborhood settlement house in Washington put it this way: He said: “This revolution is too good to waste only on people who hate.”
The people of good will in our country are the ones who are making this revolution work. And it is working.
But some of the real tests are still ahead. The most obvious one is: How many poor people are we reaching and helping? Nationally, we know we have reached over five million poor people -- either directly or indirectly -- with services, jobs, education and assistance.
- Created almost 3/4 of a million part-time and full time jobs filled exclusively by poor people.
- Involved more than 5,000 residents of the areas served by poverty programs on community action boards, thus fulfilling a congressional requirement for participation of the poor.
- Enrolled more than 960,000 pre-school children in Head Start classes, or about half of the children in the United States who need this pre-school experience.
- Approved more than 5,500 separate grants for community action projects and more than 700 community action agencies covering more than 1/3 of all the counties in the United States and more than half of the 182 poorest counties.
The American people are beginning to learn about these accomplishments. We still have a job to do -- or rather two jobs. The first, to get as many people out of poverty as fast as we can and second, to keep the American people informed about our program, its successes, its problems and its plans. You might call that an advertising job. But we are confident that this program can stand the test of the market place if the American people are kept informed.
However, there is one place where we are in danger of failing -where we simply have not developed the techniques and the skills we need to carry the message of the poverty program.
We still need to develop techniques for communicating with the poor, for telling them what opportunities are available, what the gains of participation are, what the programs are all about.
And it is in this crucial area -- the problem of communication with the poor -- that I would like to ask the help and enlist the resources of this council. I am not asking for you to do a PR job for the program.
Thirty-two million American people who live in what has been described as “another country.” Some call it a “subculture” with values and mores of their own. This may be true. But the plain fact is we have not yet succeeded in finding out what their values and aspirations and motivations are -- and what is really needed to help them economically, socially and culturally.
We have tried comic books, billboard signs, TV spot advertisements, a notorious rock-and-roll show. But we haven’t yet discovered how to open channels of communication to the individuals who live in urban ghettos and isolated rural communities.
This country has important messages to give them -- and equally, it has vital information to find out from them. But, to date, the most effective means of communication we have discovered is the face to face confrontation of the neighborhood worker with the families he serves. And this process of knocking down doors, trudging through streets, seeking out the poor themselves is a slow, tedious – and not altogether successful process.
The elections we funded gave us a sharp awakening on this count elections for the poor to select their own representatives. We thought this would be of significance to the poor. We thought they would jump at the chance to participate. We thought that this would make democracy meaningful. But fewer than 1% of the eligible voters turned out in Los Angeles, 2.7% in Philadelphia, 4% in Cleveland. That isn’t a, very good return. Those elections are, our most spectacular failure, one might say. But they are symptomatic of a far larger problem – the problem of communication.
We didn’t really realize there was a communication problem at first. It isn’t like the Peace Corps where we knew we were going to a foreign country. You take Somali Land for instance. We knew we had a problem there -- if we wanted to improve the education system or even attack simply the problem of literacy. Because Somali isn’t a written language. They don’t even have an alphabet. So how could we begin to write textbooks in math or history. We had to send in linguistic experts -- PH.D.'s who could transcribe the Somali language phonetically, devise an alphabet teach that alphabet and then turn out printed materials and textbooks in that alphabet.
The problem we face with the poor is often just as great -- maybe greater because it catches us unawares. We assume that we are getting across and then only later find out we haven’t.
The advertising council includes the finest marketing media and creative talents in the country. It could be of tremendous assistance to the War on Poverty by helping us improve and enhance our communications with the poor.
The contribution of the advertising council in informing middle class America about mental health, mental retardation, physical fitness and job retraining has been profound. But the poor don’t get these messages -- or any message for that matter except a message of rejection and helplessness.
A program of research and discovery in this area could very well be one of the most challenging, provocative and meaningful undertakings yet embarked upon by this council and its members. If the project intrigues the council at all, I would be delighted to set up a preliminary meeting to open up discussion and get this much needed research underway.
In closing, and by way of illustrating how profound the communication problem is let me tell you one story which I heard just the other day.
I met with the executive director of the Massachusetts Association for the Prevention of Blindness two weeks ago. She told me about the eye examinations she gave to children in Head Start last summer. Eye examinations for children utilize pictures, not letters. Slides with pictures of animals and toys are projected on a screen. One of the pictures projected is a teddy bear. Last summer, some 40 percent of the children in project Head Start identified that teddy bear as a rat!
That’s what I mean by a communications problem -- a problem that affects the way physical objects are actually perceived, the way words are used and concepts are developed. Will you help us -- because we’re working for the day when no four-year-old or five-year-old American girl or boy -- black, yellow, white -- speaking Spanish, English, or Hawaiian -- will look at the picture of a teddy bear and say: “That’s a rat.”
