Rustin and Conyers Speak on Stopping Racism, Speeding up Poverty Program

Civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, said yesterday that the only way Negroes can get social and economic equality is by allying with liberals.

Speaking softly but intensely, Rustin told a group of reporters that coalition of trade unions, religious groups, and students can be the spur to the faltering steps of the war on poverty. Putting the Freedom Budget into effect--the plan to spend $185 billion over the next ten years in a massive on- slaught against poverty -- should be the aim of the coalition, Rustin said.

Asked for details of his plan, Rustin said that those incapable of working should be given a guaranteed income. Those who can work, he said, should be guaranteed jobs, either in the building of socially useful institutions such as mental hospitals and highways, or in "service to humans."

"The nature of work should be redefined," he said. "Students should be paid for studying, in addition to having free tuition." Such pay would be an inducement to economically-disadvantaged students not to leave school, he said." A 16-year-old dropout who's working and making enough money to buy clothes and look nice on a date won't give that up to go back to school," he said.

The minimum wage should be made higher. Rustin added, so that all can make enough to live on. Small businessmen brutalized by the higher salaries they'd have to pay should be subsidized as small farmers are at present, he said.

Racism

Rustin also commented on the recent exclusion of Rep. Adam Clayton Powell (D.N.Y.) from his seat in Congress. "Although I questioned his behavior, I must condemn the emotional and unconstitutional behavior of congress in the matter," he said. Whether Congress excluded Powell from racist motives is immaterial, Rustin said. What matters is that Negroes interpret it as racism, he explained.

Asked if he though civil rights leaders should voice their opinions on the war in Vietnam, as Dr. Martin Luther King recently did, Rustin said that King's antiwar statement should not be judged according to its political consequences, but as a statement of principle.

Ruston is on the third day of his stay here as a guest of the Kennedy Institute