The Negro Lawyer and His Responsibility in the Urban Crisis, Part Two
Raymond Pace Alexander

Reprinted from The Boulé Journal, Volume 32/Number 4 Summer 1969

Raymond Pace Alexander, Judge of the Common Pleas Court of Philidelphia, delivered this talk in Washington at the forty-third annual convention of the National Bar Association.

In an America which spends mounting billions of dollars for defense and additional billions in the frenetic and chauvinistic race in the search for outer space we, as Negro lawyers, guardians of the increasing millions of our people who are still wards of an affluent society, living in the ghettos, the cesspool inner core of great wealthy cities, must challenge our government to retrieve and cultivate the inner space values of the Negro of America - find the true soul and heart and meaning of the Negro, what it means to be a Negro and what he, as a man, and his family as a unit, and his people as a race, mean to America and the future of this great country.

The Negro lawyers of America, the same professionals who, with consummate skill and advocacy, mastered the lawyer's highest art - the art of the relevant - always focusing their argument on the principal problems germane to the case at hand must now become the leaders of their people and fill the vacuum created by the death of one of the world's most treasured souls, the late Dr. Martin Luther King. You must make relevant to America that today the need for new, unselfish, dynamic and talented leaders among the Negro people of America is greater than at any time in the last twenty-five years. In no other way can the death of this greatest and the most holy of the world's modem man be vindicated. In this way alone can the mortal wound to America be healed.

The Negro lawyer can fill this void. He is among the best-trained professionals of his race. His years of study of the history of mankind, the social, ethical, psychological and socio-economic problems of masses of people of diverse background living together in great urban centers, etc., in his undergraduate courses, added to this the additianal years of study of the increasingly large number of subjects and areas of investigation comprehending the study of the law, make him the ideal person too assume the leadership role in finding and proclaiming to America and to the world the relevant issues, the relevant values and objectives which the American Negros seek and demand from America along with determining the relevant objectives and goals which we seek and the priorities to be established.

What Are Our Goals and Objectives

Above all, we as lawyers must always demand equal opportunity, equal treatment and full justice for the Negro in every matter necessary for his total participation in the life of his country. To be able to do this he must have three things that go hand in hand to make him a functional, literate and healthy citizen.

He must have good, quality education in the finest schools with a large percentage of male teachers to restore the father image so long removed from the lives of the young Negro because of the sick society that surrounds the Negro family in the ghetto, an education free from the defeating handicaps of segregation in both the North and South so that he will he able to get and hold a job to fit his skills or to further his education in the sciences or the professions.

The doors of commerce and industry must be opened widely to provide jobs at every level for the Negro worker. This may mean some harsh measures we lawyers must take against labor unions that deny Negroes apprentice training and others that bar Negroes from membership. These cruel and repressive practices have for many long years deprived the Negro worker, both the skilled ones and the able young men, of their manhood and the ability to provide for his family and have denied him the needed skills to work in industry, in effect denied him his right to work and, therefore, his right to earn a living.

Third in our list of objectives is the all-important one of a decent place to live.

All these goals go hand in hand: Education, jobs and nonsegregated housing. Either one (education) or two (jobs) without the third (non-segregated housing) will weaken and ultimately destroy this new structure that we must build for a free and equal Negro in a free and just America.

We must select from the great Negro talent at the American Bar, now numbering 4,700 Negro lawyers, a very encouraging increase from the 500 lawyers in 1928, a man or if need be, a committee of three, one of whom I suggest be a woman who will reject all ideas of separation of the Negro from the mainstream of American life as well as setting aside a Negro state.

This is an utterly stupid and ridiculous suggestion, completely devoid of any sense or reason, it is sheer fantasy. We have fought separation of the races in America all our lives. Many of our great lawyers, some no longer living and many in our audience here tonight, and, I need not remind you, l, as one, have literally sacrificed our lives, our homes and subjected ourselves and our loved ones to assault, abuse and insults too degrading to mention to save our country from the shame and world stigma of "an apartheid America."

How can we support the claims of those who say "in-tegration is irrelevant to the aims of the Negro?" What we have fought for, which I described in brief detail a few moments ago, resulting in countless victories in the highest court of our land, is a documented story that speaks louder than my feeble words, that America itself accents integration of the races in America as the sensi-ble goal to seek in our continuing struggle to make one family of all Americans.

An equally important goal for us to seek is that America must commit itself to the eradication, literally the complete elimination of the hard-core ugly ghetto areas in the cities of America which is the real "crime in the streets" in America. The crimes that flow from that disgraceful blot on America's landscape are seeded, nurtured and allowed to grow to full bloom by the willful neglect of the heartless, the apathy of the disinterested American and the failure of those who know better to become involved in America's problems.

The census, if taken today, would show the Negro population of America to be close to 25 million, of whom nearly 6 million live in the inner cities of our country. The five largest centers of Negro population are: Washington - 64 per cent; Newark - 56.8 per cent; Baltimore - 42.1 per cent; Chicago - 32.5 per cent, and Philadelphia - 32 per cent. There is a very forceful human problem underlying this whole question. Clearly, if for no reason other than an economic one, though the human social problems to my mind are the greatest, the country must see that if America itself is to survive, there must be radical and monumental efforts made to eliminate this eating, cancerous sore in our mid-cities.

But we as lawyers who live in or near these ghettos, and from which so many of our clients come, must know how destructive these conditions are to the people who live there. It is our duty to see that the Negro men (and I am certain that soon there will be at least one woman from the Brooklyn area come November, 1968) who are members of Congress - I am proud to say "both Houses of Congress - will by appropriate legislation urge our government to provide the billions of dollars to remove the Negro and white poverty families from these life-destroying ghettos of our great cities and provide healthy suburban or outer-city areas so that these people and their children may have some hope for the future and, perhaps for the first time in their lives, a sense of self respect, faith in their fellow man and pride of race.

We, as lawyers, know from our travels in the back-woods and muddy swamps of the South where we have often gone in the "dark days" of Southern justice to save the defenseless poor among our people from the curse of irrational, intemperate and degrading racist justice in Southern court houses under the "form of law" where many cases of so-called "legal sentences" of death were imposed upon innocent Negroes, that those people and now their descendants in the North who live in these ghettos, have been confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness.

We have seen the breakdown of our families, the absence of a father who had been so long denied the right to a decent job he lost hope andd became emasculated in body and soul. Their culture, if, indeed, any they had, was one of no purpose in life, and they were resigned to it. We, the lawyers, must in a sense invade the hopeless and purposeless people of the ghetto and create for them faith in themselves and faith in us as fellow Negroes, and with the help of a white America, those white people and organizations with which we will and can work, and American financial aid, restore their faith in white America, -which is greatly needed.

To do all of the above we and they must have help. It is not too much to ask America to unlock its store of treasures and give to these people, the poor and disadvantaged in the richest country in the world some of its wealth.

This is the only industrial democracy in the world that does not have a family or childrens' allowance. And, as has been pointed out by so many scientists, not only are we the wealthiest country in the world, but the greatest industrial nation in the world and the only one which does not adequately provide for our families, and the only country whose streets are filled with rioters each summer.

Canada, a very small country, as well as several Scandinavian countries, have model family allowance laws that if enacted in America would effectively eliminate the poverty dwellers, the number of Negro families in the ghetto and would give to them a new psyche - a new faith in themselves, and restore the status, the strength of and the respect for the Negro family and the faith of the family in itself, as a social structure.

As an alternative to this or perhaps preferable to the "Family Allowance Plan" described above, the Negro lawyer should urge the "guaranteed income plan" to our Congress as a very real and scientific way to create a base upon which the poverty family would be provided the means to become an integral and productive part of the American community.

This is a time to dare - and the Negro lawyer must always do the daring. If we could dare to take on the cruel and entrenched establishment of an old order and the courts of the old South and win, we can dare to stitutions now infesting the North, and there are thous-go forward in the counterparts of those barbaric in-ands of "Northern segregationists" equally as dedicated to the "Negro inferiority" and second-class status for the Negro, and make America a healthy society for all its people.

The job will not be easy, but we have as partners in our efforts millions of fair-minded, honest and sincere white friends and, what is more important to us as lawyers, thousands of friends among the white Bar throughout America who have offered their help, both financial and physical help and their resources to eliminate hate against the Negro, to destroy racism wherever they see its ugly head and to create for the Negro in America a full life, free from all restrictions or barriers, free from every economic, social or political restraint. Only the lawyer with his special training and experience to cope with the most difficult situation and the most extreme emergencies can bring quiet and order out of the difficult conditions that face the Negro within our group.

We would be able to define the lines of action, picketing and protests, between what is lawful and permitted within the framework of state and federal laws and acts that amount to clear and unmistakable violence that inevitably lead to destruction of life and property which are totally against the law and which defeat our purpose and serve to inflame the hatred of those too willing to perpetuate a racist America.

And they will, as usual, blame the Negro who, as experience shows, suffers the greatest loss.

The call is clear. The time is now. The need for intelligent, unselfish, dedicated and courageous leadership awaits your answer. Is black America listening? (Concluded)