For hundreds of years the quiet sobbing of an oppressed people had been unheard by millions of white Americans-the bitterness of the Negroes' lives remote and unfelt except by a sensitive few.

White America must see that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. That is one thing that other immigrant groups haven't had to face. The other thing is that the color became a stigma. American society made the negro's color a stigma, and that can never be overlooked.

For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation -and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop.

The price that America must pay for the continued oppression of the Negro and other minority groups is the price of its own destruction.

But it's a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

Today Negroes want above all else to abolish poverty in their lives and in the lives of the white poor. This is the heart of their program. To end the humiliation was a start, but to end poverty is a bigger task.