James Farmer, "We Must Be in a Position of Power": Address before the CORE National Convention, Durham, N.C., July 1, 1965. In Francis L. Broderick and August Meier, eds., Negro Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 422-24, 428.

As CORE meets at its 23rd Annual Convention, we have behind us many successes achieved and victories won. But this report will not be a recounting of past successes; to rest on one's laurels is to atrophy and die. Past victories—in public accommodations, in voting right, in the support ofl aw and public policy—have been in battles preceding the major encounter.

The major war now confronting us is aimed at harnessing the awesome political potential of the black community in order to effect basic social and economic changes for all Americans, to alter meaningfully the lives of the Black Americans (our plight has not been and will not be challenged by past victories), and to bring about a real equality of free men.

This job cannot be done for us by the Government. In the first place, the establishments—Federal, State, and Local—have too much built-in resistance to fundamental change. Any establishment by definition seeks its own perpetuation and rejects that which threatens it. For example, politicians take over and seek to make the antipoverty programs an adjunct of their political aspirations. They attack community action programs of the antipoverty war as being anti-city hall. School Boards, which have already lost the dropouts and underprivileged youth, reach out greedily to control community education program and see that they do not shake up the school systems. Powerful lobbies, such as the financial and the real estate interests, exert tremendous pressue to see that programs to relieve poverty do not threaten their interests.

Further, it is impossible for the Government to mount a decisive war against poverty and bigotry in the United States while it is pouring billions down the drain in a war against people in Viet Nam. The billion dollars available to fight poverty is puny compared with the need and insignificant compared with the resources expended in wars.

Thus, we must be constructice critics of the antipoverty program, using its resources for our fight where we can, insisting that local antipoverty boards be truly representatives of the deprived communities and the minorities which they are supposed to help, and attacking waste and pork-barreling wherever it occurs.

Yet it would be fatal to think that the antipoverty program alone can make the necessary changes in the social and economic life of Black Americans. It can be no more a solution to our problems than the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 were, or the Voter Rights Act of 1965 will be. Like those laws, the antipoverty program has to be seen as no more than a tool, useful at times but inadequate at best to do the job.

We can rely upon none but ourselves as a catalyst in the development of the potential power of the black community in its own behalf and in behalf of the nation. CORE alone has the nationwide network of militant chapters required, unshackled by compromising entanglements, political commitments and alliances. CORE alone has the flexibility to move in the new directions demanded by this phase of the war, while it fulfills its commitments to the unfinished tasks of the last phase.

In this new phase of our war to change the life of the Negro in a changed America, there are two aspects: Community organization and Political organization. It must be clearly seen that neither aspect is an end in itself. Community organization, including social services, for its own sake is mere social uplift and has no basic importance in changing the life role of the Negro. Political organization for its own sake is sheer opportunism. While both aspects must be undertaken simultaneously, the first, community organization, may be seen as a step to increase the effectiveness of the second, political organization. Or another way of viewing it is to see community organization as a tool—a tool to build a vehicle. Political organization, then, is the vehicle to take us to the desired objective. That objective is an open society free of race discrimination and forced segregation, shorn of poverty and unemployment, with decent housing and high-quality education for all. The objective, in a word, is a new society, a free and open society.