The Making of African America

by Ira Berlin

  At the forefront, occupying positions of community leadership and pressing the case for equality, was a solid class of working people: factory operatives along with schoolteachers, civil service employees, and petty proprietors, as well as laborers and domestics. They distinguished themselves not so much by the size of their bank accounts, but by their dress, deportment, and associational memberships that together made a visible claim to respectability. That claim was sometimes reinforced by residence, as members of the black middle class—much like their white counterparts—separated themselves from the poor, as they nurtured their claim to middle-class decency.

  The strongest evidence of respectability derived from church membership. The most prestigious black churches had pedigrees that dated back to the early nineteenth century with the emergence of freedom in the North. These long-tailed institutions with established congregations supported all manner of organizations, from schools to boys and girls clubs, debating societies and reading rooms, and even so-called intelligence offices that functioned as employment bureaus. Their prestige attracted some newcomers from the South, but their formal, high-toned services discomforted others. For these men and women, Holiness or Pentecostal congregations, often operating out of storefronts, became the churches of choice. Their ministers, many Southern born, professed a muscular Christianity and dispensed with the staid decorum and intellectualized gospel that the new arrivals found objectionable. Religious choices not only spoke to the gap between Old Settlers and new arrivals but also to the differences within a society of growing complexity, as upwardly mobile black men and women gravitated to churches that claimed greater respectability. If the ghetto represented in interracial terms a separation of the races, it also manifested in intraracial terms a separation of the classes.60

  The ghetto was not only a complex institution, but also a changing one. Following World War II, the black inner city underwent its own transformation, as the black population grew in number and density. While blockbusting real estate agents sent skittish white homeowners fleeing to the expanding suburbs, federal policymakers, joined by redlining bankers and mortgage brokers—both determined to maintain racial homogeneity—kept black people penned in decaying urban neighborhoods, denying them access to homeownership in the new suburbs by endorsing race restrictive covenants and rejecting would-be black homeowners applications for mortgage insurance. “If a neighborhood is to retain stability,” declared the official Federal Housing Administration’s handbook, “it is necessary that all properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social class.” While federal policymakers removed the racial rules from their FHA handbook in the 1940s, they continued to enforce them for another twenty years, quietly maintaining the principle of “racial compatibility.” Other federal programs, most prominently the GI Bill, which offered returning soldiers financial help to become part of a nation of suburban homeowners, were similarly color-coded. Denying black veterans access to these loans left them and their families locked in the meanest part of American cities. In the decades following the war, the level of urban residential segregation increased until the indexes of dissimilarity—which measured the degree of segregation—reached 90 percent, meaning that almost the entire population would have to move to achieve a random distribution of whites and blacks.61

  Other changes reshaped African American life in postwar America. While black people could do little to break the vice grip of residential segregation, their growing political presence and economic prosperity stoked the struggle for equality. White supremacy—weakened by legal assaults—began to waver. In 1948, the Democratic Party included a Civil Rights plank in its platform, and President Harry Truman issued an executive order desegregating the army.62 While the fiercest battles remained to be fought in the South, black Northerners provided much of the political leverage against the old order and reaped some of the benefits as well.

  Centuries-old employment practices that had throttled the advancement of black people withered under the glare of national publicity, the enforcement of long-ignored antidiscrimination laws, and the imposition of affirmative action programs. Employers who once openly rejected black applicants hurried to hire at least a token black man or woman to demonstrate their commitment to a newly invigorated egalitarianism, or at least to comply with federal—and sometimes state—law. The rush to meet the new ideal allowed some black women to find a place behind a reception desk, and some men gained access to a clerkship, but tokenism itself soon became exposed as a form of obstructionism. Between 1940 and 1960, the number of black women clerical and sales workers increased from less than 2 percent to almost II percent. Employers, who once denied black workers any sort of visibility lest they too be tainted, suddenly placed black men and women in the most visible positions. Banks, hotels, and department stores advertised the presence of black tellers and clerks. A black receptionist became de rigueur in many corporate offices.

  New openings greatly expanded the black middle class. Black stock-men and charwomen emerged from the back rooms and basements and took their places on sales floors or offices as salespersons, bookkeepers, and accountants. A growing number of black teachers, black police officers, black social workers, and black real estate agents swelled the ranks of those who did not have to labor with their hands. Between 1940 and 1960, the proportion of black men and women employed in white-collar jobs doubled.63

  During the 1960s, the long-term changes set in motion by the third great migration and by the immediate effects of the Civil Rights movement decisively altered the economic structure of black society. The number of black men and women working at white-collar jobs increased by 80 percent over the course of the decade. The proportion of black men working in professional and managerial positions more than doubled during the 1960s. By the end of the decade, the share of the black population nominally defined as middle class increased from one in eight to one in four. A general prosperity allowed large numbers of black people to escape the confines of menial labor. If the years accompanying World War I had seen black men and women enter the industrial working class for the first time, the 1960s witnessed their arrival in the American middle class. No longer confined to the old positions of clergy, postal or social workers, teachers, or a variety of petty proprietors, middle-class black men and women could increasingly be found working alongside white architects, engineers, physicians, managers, and other professionals. Some struck out on their own to become successful entrepreneurs. The structure of black America began to approach that of white, even if its wealth did not.

  The black middle class continued to prosper as never before. The number of black families earning $10,000 or more (in constant dollars) more than doubled the years between 1960 and 1969. The growth rate of the black middle class declined during the next decade, but it nonetheless continued to expand by nearly 60 percent over the previous decade’s total. Similar growth occurred in the years that followed, so that the number of black families earning more than $50,000 increased by a factor of two. Although its resources remained shallow and its place precarious, the black middle class—aided in part by affirmative action programs—nonetheless continued to grow steadily in the decades that followed.64

  But while the black middle class gained ground at midcentury, black industrial workers lost it, as the ladder of industrial employment collapsed, and with it the possibilities of rising within the industrial hierarchy. The reorganization of the American economy left many black men and women without access to employment as factories—lured by low taxes, better roads, access to new markets, and nonunion labor—abandoned Northern cities for the suburbs, then left the suburbs for the South, and then the South for foreign destinations. Many factories closed, never to open again. Disproportionately, these were in heavy industries—automobile production, rubber processing, and steelmaking—just the industries where black workers had enjoyed a substantial presence. With these industries went the “good jobs,” and the pensions, health insurance, and security that came with se
niority. Unions, into which black workers had at long last been incorporated, lost their ability to protect seniority and guard against discrimination.

  The black men and women of the third great migraton, who had secured a toehold in the industrial working class during World War II and enjoyed the postwar prosperity, saw their grip slipping as the structure of American manufacturing shook in the 1960s and after. The skills of those experienced in the old smokestack manufactories did not transfer easily to the new high-tech industries. Even when black men and women had the qualifications, the new jobs had been removed to the distant suburbs, out of reach of inner-city black residents. The automation of production added to the dangers black workers—still concentrated in the ranks of the unskilled—faced. When the layoffs came, whether as a result of periodic downturns in the economy or of more permanent structural changes, black workers were the first sent home. The Civil Rights movement did little to improve the material conditions of black people in the inner city. One in three lived below the poverty line. Between 1975 and 1980, black unemployment increased by 200,000, as more and more black men and women were excluded from the labor market. The combination of ghetto residence and a sour economy locked black people in poverty.

  Once again, excluded from the dynamic sector of the American economy, buffeted by the changing nature of production, and tied to the most vulnerable industries, black men and women saw their connections to regular work unraveling. Many of those who had found prosperity and security working in a unionized factory could only find hourly work flipping burgers. Deindustrialization left many black workers stranded in the inner city without good jobs and left many others without any remunerative employment. They had joined the industrial working class just when a substantial portion was being discarded as obsolete.65

  The absence of regular employment and a living wage demoralized working people, particularly young men and women. Black families, which had survived slavery and segregation, frayed, as men—without access to work—had difficulties supporting their wives and children. Between 1960 and 1975, the number of black households without male wage earners increased from 22 to 35 percent. Along with the disappearance of black men from family life came a dramatic increase in the number of households with children born out of wedlock. Although adept at creating new forms of domestic life—piecing together a livelihood from part-time employment and assigning larger roles to grandparents—the absence of male breadwinners impoverished black people, particularly as household solvency came to depend upon the income of two breadwinners. Many black men and women found themselves confined to an alienated proletariat without the skills or education to secure regular employment, even when it became available. With a living wage increasingly beyond reach, some became dependent on welfare to make ends meet. Others turned to an underground economy of drugs and crime. Desperation only worsened the problem, with an increasing proportion of young men and women facing incarceration.66

  The infrastructure of the inner city deteriorated along with the lives of its inhabitants. Attempts to attract new investments failed, as urban officials backed by municipal planners defined black neighborhoods as substandard blight. Rather than rehabilitate old neighborhoods, they scheduled them for destruction, a process sped up by the construction of highways designed to carry white workers between downtown employment and suburban homes. The rows of sterile high-rises—“the projects” in the lingo of the day—that replaced dilapidated but functioning neighborhoods only increased the density of the inner city and undermined stable communities. The close quarters and large numbers packed into these buildings soon denuded the surrounding courtyards, transforming them into barren waste-lands, often littered with broken bottles and other debris. Within the buildings, corridors and elevators became sites of all sorts of mayhem, so that the residents avoided them when they could, barricading themselves behind steel doors with multiple locks. Even amid these dif ficult circumstances, communities often flowered. The same barren projects that gave birth to violent drug gangs also seeded the welfare rights movement. Still, many residents, particularly those with aspirations and resources for a better life, fled. A growing number of impoverished blacks took their place.67

  Changes set in motion by the Civil Rights movement—the dismantling of legal segregation and the new growth of the black middle class—allowed some black people to leave the inner city. Most moved to close-in suburbs which soon became as segregated as the inner city. The number of black men and women living in suburbs totaled some seven million by the middle of the 1980s, more than double the number a decade earlier. Those who remained in the inner city did not always resemble the respectable, churchgoing men and women who had once composed the core of black communities. Instead, many were impoverished and chronically underemployed or unemployed. Their family life was in shambles, characterized by female-headed households, out-of-wedlock children, welfare dependency, and the prevalence of drug use. Sociologists and other social scientists pointed to the spatial mismatch between work and residence and debated the so-called cultural and structural causes of the various urban disorders.68

  Life in the inner city, whether in ramshackle buildings or soulless towers, gained a reputation as being rife with disease and criminality. White suburbanites—viewing the ghetto from a distance—saw it as evidence of the moral deficiency and intellectual inferiority of its residents. As citizenship was redefined by home ownership and patterns of consumption, black people—denied access to credit—found themselves excluded from the postwar prosperity. The white exodus from the city continued with ever-increasing speed at midcentury. By 1968, when a series of riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., decimated numerous black neighborhoods, black people were fully identified with urban life.

  The rise of the black middle class and the decline of black workers into what some had begun to call an “underclass” left African American society sharply divided. This division was also reflected in the profound alteration of the social geography of African American life over the course of the twentieth century, a process that defined a new sense of place for black people.69

  The characterization of black society at the end of the twentieth century—new middle class and underclass—recalled earlier examinations of the effects of antebellum enslavement and postbellum rural impoverishment on black people. They vastly understated the diversity of black life in favor of an emphasis on the pathologies of the inner-city. They emphasized street hustlers over wage earners, those who invested in numbers over those who saved for the future, and those who shot dope over those who shot hoops, creating seemingly indelible stereotypes. What was clear, however, was the full identification of black life with the city, a coincidence affirmed by the regular return of black suburbanites to their old neighborhoods to attend church, dine in a home-style restaurant, or listen to music with friends in a familiar club. During the last third of the twentieth century, the inner city became what the plantation had been in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and what the sharecropper plot had been in the late nineteenth. After more than a half century of movement, black people had again found place.

  The surety of place spawned a new confidence. It was expressed in a variety of ways, most prominently in a series of overlapping nationalistic movements that celebrated blackness. While some were political and demanded Black Power and others were economic and asserted black control over production and consumption, all spoke of Black Pride. Each, by turns, might connote armed self-defense or participation in partisan politics, black capitalism or the creation of a black aesthetic, the commemoration of old heroes or the creation of new ones. Clothed in dashikis, sporting Afros, and holding high, clenched fists, the new movement asserted “Black is Beautiful” in a manner that reflected ownership of the inner city.70

  Once again, nothing so traced the transformation of black life during the third great migration than the evolution of black music. The migration northward and cityward altered some musical forms and created
entirely new ones, a process sped up by the commercialization of various popular amusements. The spirituals morphed into gospel at the hands of Southern migrants like Thomas Dorsey. In his carefully orchestrated chorals, Dorsey, a former blues singer from Georgia who claimed the title of “father of gospel,” excised the hand clapping and foot stomping that characterized the spirituals but incorporated the spiritual’s syncopated rhythms and repetitions. In the voices of Roberta Martin and Mahalia Jackson, gospel music took on a sophisticated urban patina. Although members of the rising middle class embraced the new sound only reluctantly, by midcentury gospel had found a home in the black church. An active and profitable gospel circuit had been established.71

  The blues also changed as it moved north, mutating in ways that made it hardly recognizable. Leaving the rough, communal settings of the rural roadhouse, it too became increasingly formalized and stylized, less the product of improvisation and more of careful arrangement. Performed in clubs and theaters rather than crossroad juke joints, it too was increasingly structured by a growing commercial market. Performers changed, as women vocalists like “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith replaced men as the main attraction, and instrumental ensembles numbering a half dozen ousted the lone guitar, harmonica, or washboard. The music, cut to the demands of a paying audience or a 78-rpm record, was played for an audience that included whites as well as blacks—and sometimes was limited to whites.72

  The commercial success of the urbanized Southern import, however, was only one aspect of the development of the blues. In the cities of the North, many black migrants found the new, stylized music unrecognizable and the setting in which it was performed uncomfortable. Yet another brand of the blues—so-called urban blues—was much more to their liking. Although a more direct import from the Southern countryside, it was no simple copy of its rural forebears, for it too had changed with the northward migration, often adding acoustic instruments and with them a new range of sounds. While it also differed from place to place—St. Louis blues had a different sound than that heard in Chicago or Philadelphia—the repertoire was much more familiar to the newcomers.73