by Jon Meacham
Black writers had generally left the South as soon as possible. The strain of creation and constant exposure to petty insults and legally encouraged humiliations proved too great. But their departure impoverished those they left behind. I realized this more fully when I arrived in Jackson to live and discovered Margaret Walker, the author of For My People, already there, a natural force, creating work under unimaginable pressures and by doing so keeping alive, in the thousands of students who studied under her, not only a sense of art but also the necessity of claiming one’s birthright at the very source. I do not know if, in her case, settling in the South was purely a matter of choice or preference, but in the future—for other black artists—it might and must be.
And so, ten years after the March on Washington, the question is: How much has the mountain of despair dwindled? What shape and size is the stone of hope?
I know it is annoying this late in the day to hear of more “symbols” of change, but since it is never as late in the day in Mississippi as it is in the rest of the country I will indulge in a few:
One afternoon each week I drive to downtown Jackson to have lunch with my husband at one of Jackson’s finest motels. It has a large cool restaurant that overlooks a balalaika-shaped swimming pool, and very good food. My husband, Mel Leventhal, a human-rights lawyer who sues a large number of racist institutions a year (and wins) (and who is now thinking of suing the Jackson Public Library, because a. they refused to issue me a library card in my own name, and b. the librarian snorted like a mule when I asked for a recording of Dr. King’s speeches—which the library didn’t have), has his own reasons for coming here, and the least of them is that the cooks provide excellent charbroiled cheeseburgers. He remembers “testing” the motel’s swimming pool in 1965 (before I knew him)—the angry insults of the whites as blacks waded in, and the tension that hung over everyone as the whites vacated the pool and stood about menacingly. I remember the cold rudeness of the waitresses in the restaurant a year later and recall wondering if “testing” would ever end. (We were by no means alone in this: one of the new black school-board members still lunches at a different downtown restaurant each day—because she has been thrown out of all of them.) It is sometimes hard to eat here because of those memories, but in Mississippi (as in the rest of America) racism is like that local creeping kudzu vine that swallows whole forests and abandoned houses; if you don’t keep pulling up the roots it will grow back faster than you can destroy it.
One day we sat relaxing in the restaurant and as we ate watched a young black boy of about fifteen swimming in the pool. Unlike the whites of the past, the ones in the pool did not get out. And the boy, when he was good and tired, crawled up alongside the pool, turned on his back, drew up his knees—in his tight trunks—and just lay there, oblivious to the white faces staring down at him from the restaurant windows above.
“I could swear that boy doesn’t know what a castration complex is,” I said, thinking how the bravest black “testers” in the past had seemed to crouch over themselves when they came out of the water.
We started to laugh, thinking of what a small, insignificant thing this sight should have been. It reminded us of the day we saw a young black man casually strolling down a street near the center of town arm in arm with his high-school sweetheart, a tiny brunette. We had been with a friend of ours who was in no mood to witness such “incorrect” behavior, and who moaned, without a trace of humor: “Oh, why is it that as soon as you do start seeing signs of freedom they’re the wrong ones!”
But would one really prefer to turn back the clock? I thought of the time, when I was a child, when black people were not allowed to use the town pool, and the town leaders were too evil to permit the principal of my school to build a pool for blacks on his own property. And when my good friend a teenager from the North (visiting his grandmother, naturally) was beaten and thrown into prison because he stooped down on Main Street in broad daylight to fix a white girl’s bicycle chain. And now, thinking about these two different boys, I was simply glad that they are still alive, just as I am glad we no longer have to “test” public places to eat, or worry that a hostile waitress will spit in our soup. They will inherit Emmett Till soon enough. For the moment, at least, their childhood is not being destroyed, nor do they feel hemmed in by the memories that plague us.
It is memory, more than anything else, that sours the sweetness of what has been accomplished in the South. What we cannot forget and will never forgive. My husband has said that for her sixth birthday he intends to give our daughter a completely safe (racially) Mississippi, and perhaps that is possible. For her. For us, safety is not enough any more.
I thought of this one day when we were debating whether to go for a swim and boat ride in the Ross Barnett Reservoir, this area’s largest recreational body of water. But I remembered state troopers descending on us the first time we went swimming there, in 1966 (at night), and the horror they inspired in me; and I also recall too well the man whose name the reservoir bears. Not present fear but memory makes our visits there infrequent. For us, every day of our lives here has been a “test.” Only for coming generations will enjoyment of life in Mississippi seem a natural right. But for just this possibility people have given their lives, freely. And continue to give them in the day-by-day, year-by-year hard work that is the expression of their will and of their love.
Blacks are coming home from the North. My brothers and sisters have bought the acres of pines that surround my mother’s birthplace. Blacks who thought automatically of leaving the South ten years ago are now staying. There are more and better jobs, caused by more, and more persistent, lawsuits: we have learned for all time that nothing of value is ever given up voluntarily. The racial climate is as good as it is in most areas of the North (one would certainly hesitate before migrating to parts of Michigan or Illinois), and there is still an abundance of fresh air and open spaces—although the frenetic rate of economic growth is likely to ugly up the landscape here as elsewhere. It is no longer a harrowing adventure to drive from Atlanta to Texas; as long as one has money one is not likely to be refused service in “the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.” The last holdouts are the truck stops, whose owners are being dragged into court at a regular rate. Police brutality—the newest form of lynching—is no longer accepted as a matter of course; black people react violently against it and the city administrations worry about attracting business and their cities’ “progressive” image. Black people can and do vote (poll watchers still occasionally being needed), and each election year brings its small harvest of black elected officials. The public schools are among the most integrated in the nation, and of course those signs “White Only” and “Colored” will not hurt my daughter’s heart as they bruised mine—because they are gone.
Charles Evers, the famous mayor of Fayette, is thinking—again—of running for the Mississippi governorship. James Meredith is—again—thinking of running for the same position. They make their intentions known widely on local TV. Charles Evers said in June, at the tenth commemoration of his brother Medgar’s assassination, “I don’t think any more that I will be shot.” Considering the baldness of his political aspirations and his tenacity in achieving his goals, this is a telling statement. The fear that shrouded Mississippi in the sixties is largely gone. “If Medgar could see what has happened in Mississippi in the last few years,” said his widow, Myrlie Evers, “I think he’d be surprised and pleased.”
The mountain of despair has dwindled, and the stone of hope has size and shape, and can be fondled by the eyes and by the hand. But freedom has always been an elusive tease, and in the very act of grabbing for it one can become shackled. I think Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr., would be dismayed by the lack of radicalism in the new black middle class, and discouraged to know that a majority of the black people helped most by the Movement of the sixties has abandoned itself to the pursuit of cars, expensive furniture, large houses, and the finest Scotch. Th
at in fact the very class that owes its new affluence to the Movement now refuses to support the organizations that made its success possible, and has retreated from its concern for black people who are poor. Ralph Abernathy recently resigned as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference because of lack of funds and an $80,000.00 debt. This is more than a shame; it is a crime.
A friend of mine from New York who was in SNCC in the sixties came to Mississippi last week to find “spiritual nourishment.” “But I found no nourishment,” he later wrote, “because Mississippi has changed. It is becoming truly American. What is worse, it is becoming the North.”
Unfortunately, this is entirely possible, and causes one to search frantically for an alternative direction. One senses instinctively that the beauty of the Southern landscape will not be saved from the scars of greed, because Southerners are as greedy as anyone else. And news from black movements in the North is far from encouraging. In fact, a movement backward from the equalitarian goals of the sixties seems a facet of nationalist groups. In a recent article in The Black Scholar, Barbara Sizemore writes:
The nationalist woman cannot create or initiate. Her main life’s goal is to inspire and encourage man and his children. Sisters in this movement must beg for permission to speak and function as servants to men, their masters and leaders, as teachers and nurses. Their position is similar to that of the sisters in the Nation of Islam. When Baraka is the guiding spirit at national conferences only widows and wives of black martyrs such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Queen Mother Moore can participate. Other women are excluded.
This is heartbreaking. Not just for black women who have struggled so equally against the forces of oppression, but for all those who believe subservience of any kind is death to the spirit. But we are lucky in our precedents; for I know that Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman—or Fannie Lou Hamer or Mrs. Winson Hudson—would simply ignore the assumption that “permission to speak” could be given them, and would fight on for freedom of all people, tossing “white only” signs and “men only” signs on the same trash heap. For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle, and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged. And that is also my experience with the South.
And if I leave Mississippi—as I will one of these days—it will not be for the reasons of the other sons and daughters of my parents. Fear will have no part in my decision, nor will lack of freedom to express my womanly thoughts. It will be because the pervasive football culture bores me, and the proliferating Kentucky Fried Chicken stands appall me, and neon lights have begun to replace the trees. It will be because the sea is too far away and there is not a single mountain here. But most of all, it will be because I have freed myself to go; and it will be My Choice.
A Hostile and Welcoming Workplace
The Rage of a Privileged Class, 1993
ELLIS COSE
The evening had been long and the dinner pleasant, with hosts who were a portrait of success. Their suburban home was spacious and tastefully furnished. Their children—three away in college and two in elementary school—were academically accomplished, popular, and athletic. Both parents held advanced degrees from Harvard and were well respected in their fields. For two whose beginnings had been fairly modest, they had more than ample grounds for contentment, even conceit.
As the husband and I sat nursing after-dinner drinks, his cheery mood progressively turned more pensive, and he began to ruminate on his achievements since earning his MBA. By any normal standard, he had done exceedingly well. Within years after graduation, he had risen to a senior position in a national supermarket chain. Shortly thereafter he had taken a job as manager of a huge independent supermarket and had used that as a base from which to launch his own business. He had thought the business would make him wealthy. Instead, he had gone bankrupt, but in the end had landed on his feet with yet another corporate job.
Still, he was not at all pleased with the way his career was turning out. At Harvard, he had always assumed that he would end up somewhere near the top of the corporate pyramid, as had most of his white peers. Yet shortly after graduation he had begun to sense that they were passing him by, so he had opted for the entrepreneurial route. Now that his business had failed and he was again mired in the upper layers of middle-management, he found it galling that so many of his white classmates had prospered with such seeming ease. A considerable number had become corporate royalty, with seven-figure compensation packages, access to private planes, and other accouterments of status and power about which he could only dream. Despite the good life he had, he felt he deserved—and had been denied—so much more.
In the course of conducting interviews for this book, I heard that complaint again and again—not always with the same degree of bitterness or the same doleful sense that opportunity had permanently slipped away, but always with a sadness born of the conviction that for black superachievers success not only came harder but almost invariably later and at a lower level than for comparably credentialed whites.
Wallace Ford, a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, is characteristic. Comparing himself to whites with similar skills, experience, and education, Ford concluded, “I should probably be doing more than I’m doing now.” At the time he was New York City’s commissioner for business services and, though only in his early forties, had already held a series of impressive-sounding positions: president of the Harlem Lawyers Association, first vice president at Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., president of the State of New York Mortgage Agency, and others. Still, by his lights, he had underachieved, whether because of “bad luck, bad decisions, race,” or “a combination of all three,” he wasn’t sure. But wherever the primary fault lay, he was certain that race had played a role.
“It’s always a factor somewhere,” said Ford. “It may not always be up front. It may be in the bushes, or lurking in someone’s mind, but it’s always there.” Not that in the circles he frequented people were likely to vent racial animosities freely. “But you look at a situation and say, I know. By having gone to places like Dartmouth and Harvard . . . working with the governor, working with the mayor, [working with] people who are moving up . . . you realize that there’s no magic.” Yes, some of the stars who had briefly flickered near him before shooting high into the sky were brilliant and extremely well educated, but never so bright that he was “blinded from across the table.” So he found himself asking: Why can they do fifty-million-dollar deals with little more than projections on the back of an envelope? And why were others, blacks who were “offering to give up mom, dad, and all their kids,” able to get only crumbs? “You realize that a lot of it has to do with a lot of factors—race, who you know. Certain people are accorded the opportunity to do X. As you go up the ladder, much is made available to a few.”
Even the few blacks who get near the top, who become senior executives in Fortune 500 companies, must ask themselves why they are “not next in line to be chairman [or] CEO of the whole thing,” Ford surmised. Just as those brainy blacks who went to top law schools and then found themselves woefully underemployed must ask themselves: Why? “My mind cannot accept the fact that of all the [black] people I went to law school with, only half a dozen of them have achieved partnerships in any of the New York law firms.”
In his alumni publications, Ford reads of so many whites succeeding so spectacularly, and he wonders why does it not seem to happen for blacks: “With degrees up and down the line, you get jobs, you get opportunities, but you can’t achieve any pinnacle that you might think you’d like to compete for.” The result is frustration and confusion. “You usually end up suspecting that race is a factor,” but the truth is difficult to know. “People aren’t saying, ‘You black son of a bitch.’ ” The only real solution, Ford muses, may be for blacks to start more businesses themselves.
Such pessimism from one blessed with so many advantages may strike many readers as strange. But among those of Ford’s race and cla
ss, his perspective is widely shared.
Darwin Davis, senior vice president with the Equitable Life Assurance Society, came along at a time when opportunities such as those enjoyed by Wallace Ford were all but unimaginable for blacks. After getting his bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Arkansas in 1954, he returned to his hometown of Flint, Michigan, marched into General Motors headquarters, and inquired about a job. He was told politely but firmly that applications for the management training program were not accepted from “colored people.” Devastated, Davis went into the army, then got a master’s degree in education and went on to teach mathematics in the Detroit school system. Ten years later, when America’s cities erupted in riots, corporations began to open their doors to blacks; Davis got a job at Equitable and did well there. Still, for all the barriers thrown in his way, he believes that those now making their way through the corporate labyrinth may be having an even rougher time. “They have even worse problems because they’ve got MBAs from Harvard. They went to Princeton. They went to all these places and did all these things that you’re supposed to do. . . . And things are supposed to happen.”
Instead of “things” happening, instead of careers taking off, blacks are being stymied. They are not running into a glass ceiling, says Davis, but into one made of cement and steel. So many young people of his son’s generation have about them an “air of frustration” and are surrounded by a wall of gloom “that’s just as high now as it was thirty years ago.”
Davis’s observations are similar to those of management consultant Edward Jones, whose surveys tapped into the frustration raging among black graduates of the nation’s top business schools—apparently not a phenomenon that the schools themselves have chosen to explore. Calls to the public relations departments of several of them, including the business schools at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern, elicited a curious sense of incuriosity about how their minority graduates were faring in the outside world. No one had any idea, I was told again and again, of how well black business graduates were doing relative to whites. But the research being done in the area, carried out largely by black scholars, tends to confirm the perceptions of Ford, Davis, and Jones.
