From Slavery to “Freedom” [NAACP Broadsheet c. 1972].

Controversial appeal for racial justice by the president of Notre Dame during the waning days of the 1972 U.S. presidential campaign

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Unrecorded broadsheet issued by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) reprinting Theodore M. Hesburgh’s controversial “program for racial justice,” originally published in the New York Times less than two weeks before the 1972 U.S presidential election.

At the time of the article, Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, president of the Roman Catholic Notre Dame University, was serving as chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Within days of the election, re-elected U.S. President Richard Nixon demanded Hesburgh’s resignation from the Commission.

Hesburgh’s views on solving racial issues—spelled out clearly in the broadsheet and closely aligned to Nixon’s election opponent, Senator George McGovern—conflicted with Nixon’s. Hesburgh writes:

What are the real problems that face America today? The most neglected ones are mainly domestic: poverty, welfare, urban blight and lawlessness, flight to the suburbs, unemployment, cost of living, taxes, housing, political corruption, unstable family life, education and busing, drugs, dissatisfaction among ethnic groups—to name a few. The most spectacular international performance, and ours has been truly spectacular of late, cannot bury or obscure these human problems or justify neglect in solving them. They are all, in a real sense, interlocking, part of the total organic structure and reality we call the quality of American life, or the lack of it. To the extent that they are unresolved and continue to exacerbate millions of Americans daily and mar their lives, America lives in contradiction to its highest expressed ideals of liberty and justice for all. (p[2], empahsis in original)

Hesburgh’s controversial appeal touched on such issues as the history of racism in the United States and school busing and include an extended section on education, housing, and employment.

The “business” side of NAACP’s broadsheet, its broadside-like illustrated first page offers a jarring contrast between the past and the future.

It depicts an 1853 broadside for a runaway or self-liberated slave and a photograph of black children in dire poverty. The slave is, ironically, almost in a better position than the children of 1973. He is at least on his way to freedom; they are in a mire. Will Hesburgh’s plan succeed? “The price is very high; the price of delay is vastly higher.”

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