AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION 971

I have hardly mentioned race up to this point. I have talked of
the desperate needs of human beings. They are needs we should face
up to without asking what color people are.

Perhaps we should talk less about race when we discuss urban prob-
lems. After all, it is a fact that our slum dwellers are not all black.
There are more whites than blacks below the poverty line in our
cities. In New York City, the median income of Puerto Ricans ap-
pears to be lower than that of Negroes. When we look at the slums
of the largest cities, we find that two of the three cities with the high-
est subemployment rates are San Antonio and Phoenix — and in these
places the victims of poverty are mostly Americans of Mexican descent.

Yet we cannot ignore race as an autonomous factor in the urban
problem, nor can we fail to recognize discrimination as a major ob-
stacle to its solution. We will not attain the objective of making
cities completely fit for human habitation until discrimination in
housing, employment, and education has become as extinct as slavery.

At the hearings on the Republican Platform at Miami Beach, a
great man, John W. Gardner, now chairman of the Urban Coalition,
offered memorable remarks. I would like to step over that fine line
that separates research from plagiarism and make the words of John
Gardner my own. But, before this audience, I feel obliged to put
his in quotation marks:

"Don't be fooled by appearances. A nation doesn't run on dollars
or wheels or skills or natural resources.... A nation runs on motiva-
tion, on aspiration, on a vision of what it might become.

"Woe to the nation that has no animating values, or having them,
gives up the endless effort to be true to them. The price is not just
a guilty conscience, it is disintegration of the society.

"The great work of our generation.... is to make this a livable
society for every American, a society in which no child's growth will
be stunted or fulfillment impaired by circumstance that can be pre-
vented; a society in which ignorance and disease and want will tyran-
nize no longer; a society that does not assault the senses with ugliness
nor the mind with mediocrity nor the spirit with bleakness. "

American cities today are a denial of our animating values — those
values to which we all give lip service on the Fourth of July and other
special ceremonial occasions.

When we begin to take seriously the things we say in speeches and
carve on monuments about human brotherhood and equality, then
we shall redeem our cities.