Take a city like Chicago; it’s a prototype of all our major urban ghettos. There we find that 90 per cent of the Negro children of Chicago are in school with 92 per cent children of their own race, which means that the schools are almost 100 per cent segregated. Facilities are inadequate in all of the ghetto schools. Chicago spends approximately $266 per pupil in the predominantly Negro schools, when $368 are spent in the predominantly white schools. In the suburbs it spends as much as $780 per pupil. This is a very real problem. Then in the area of housing it is estimated that between 36 and 49 per cent of the Negro families of Chicago live in deteriorated housing conditions. Ninety seven per cent of the Negro families of Chicago live in what we refer to sociologically as the ghetto, that is 97 per cent of the Negroes live only with Negroes. They are isolated from the mainstream, the total life of the community. In the economic area, the problem is even more serious. Chicago has one of the lowest rates of unemployment of any major city in the United States. It’s 2.6 per cent, but when you go to the Negro community, the unemployment rate, which includes only People who once had jobs, is about 10 per cent. If you include those who have never held jobs, about 13 per cent of the Negro labor force is unemployed. If the whole of Chicago confronted in unemployment what the Negro is confronting there would be a staggering depression, worse than any this country has ever known. So the Negro in his own life is confronting a major depression.
This is true of every major city in the United States. While there is great affluence all around there still stubborn depths of poverty, deprivation and despair. The average white high school drop-out in Chicago earns more than the average Negro college graduate. Again, this is true in cities all over the country. These are stubborn, difficult problems, and yet they are problems that must be tackled, for I need not remind you of the dangers inherent therein. There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of individuals within that society who feel that they have no stake in it, who feel that they have nothing to lose. These are the people who will riot, these are the people who will turn their ears from pleas for non-violence. For the health of our nation, these problems must be solved. In the areas of housing, schooling, and employment there is still a great deal that must be done. We’ve come a long, long way; we still have a long, long way to go and action programs are necessary. I’ve heard it said that the day of demonstrations is over; this is something that we hear a great deal. Well, I’m sorry that I can’t agree with that. I wish that I could say the day of demonstrations is over, but as long as these problems are with us, it will be necessary to demonstrate in order to call attention to them. I’m not saying that a demonstration is going to solve the problem of poverty, the problem of housing, the problems that we face in the schools. It’s going to take something much more than a demonstration, but at least the demonstration calls attention to it; at least the demonstration creates a kind of constructive crisis that causes a community to see the problem and causes a community to begin moving toward the point of acting on it. The church must support this kind of demonstration. As the days unfold, I’m sure that we will need this more.