Bearing Witness: A Message From the 431 Exchange
Our mission at The 431 Exchange is to reinvigorate the all-out fight against poverty. As the founders of the Adult Education Center believed, this will not only come by educating the poor, but also by educating those who hold the levers of wealth and power.
Adult Education Center graduate Lisa St. Julien, 1972.
We see and acknowledge the deep pain that is driving the protests around the country and the world. We would also like to urge our friends and supporters to use the political process as a force for lasting change. The achievements of the Adult Education Center could not have been possible without the actions of the individual students, teachers, and businessmen who took part in an experiment focused on providing equal employment opportunities. But it could not have happened without legislation enacted on a political level: the Manpower and Training Act of 1962 and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Unfortunately, by the end of the 1970s, history shows that the political will to make further progress in the War on Poverty was under attack and weakened.
Here is additional historical context:
In 1968, the director of the Adult Education Center and three of its graduates appeared before a sub-committee chaired by Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma. Senator Harris was one of the co-authors of the bi-partisan Kerner Commission report commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson to determine the reasons for the widespread rioting of the summers of 1965 through 1967. President Johnson and others believed the rioting was caused by Black militants. The Kerner commission found no evidence of that, but instead pointed the finger at white supremacy, an utter lack of equal employment opportunities, and ineffective job programs. Here is one excerpt from the Kerner Commission Report:
A study of the aftermath of disorder leads to disturbing conclusions. We find that, despite the institution of some post-riot programs . . . In several cities, the principal official response has been to train and equip the police with more sophisticated weapons.
- The Kerner Report (1968)
Two decades later, the former Senator Harris co-authored The Millennium Breach, a study commissioned by the Eisenhower Foundation as a follow-up to the findings of the Kerner Report. Unfortunately, the Millennium Breach found a still-fractured society where the disparity of wealth between the rich and poor had grown. The authors tried to pinpoint the causes:
We also need to expose the lack of morality and democracy in the policy of the 1980s, which lingers today. Giving to the rich and taking from the poor is not just failed economics but also failed morality. So is a policy of spending more on prison building than on higher education. The “free market,” “open competition” ideology of supply-side naysayers is a purposeful lie. In practice, corporations today try to maximize market share, acquire the competition and use their profits to hire lobbyists who buy votes in legislatures and during campaigns. The result is a “one dollar, one vote” democracy more consonant with Al Capone's morality than with the traditional American concepts of fair play and “one person, one vote.”
- The Millennium Breach (1998)
