Class trumped race. The old Negroes and these newer Negroes were as different as black and white. And when housing began to be desegregated in the late 1940s, many in the black middle class saw their chance to escape the cramped confines of the ghetto. The newcomers were rural blacks: “In the rural South, where most of these young people’s families came from, children were considered part of a responsibility,” Timuel Black explained. “They could slop the hogs and they could milk the cows and gather the eggs and pick cotton. They were an asset there. They were a liability here.”
Those who blame the poor for their own poverty always point to the exceptions. And, indeed, strong leaders and positive role models have always been found here. Elaine Rhodes was raised in the Robert Taylor Homes. She became a teacher and a community activist, and she stayed in the neighborhood. In 1972, she started teaching baton twirling to young black girls who later named their troupe the Twirling Elainers, which still performs at church functions, family reunions, graduations, and other events in the community.
Elaine’s goal was to instill discipline and generate pride within a group much more likely than not to be single parents and poor. The building in which Elaine grew up is already a casualty of the demolition team. Now she lives about three miles away. I did my best to help her cook lunch for the hungry twirlers. It’s almost like Sunday dinner with friends, including a huge, delicious peach cobbler—until the conversations turn to the past, to stories of loss buried in the bricks and mortar of the Robert Taylor Homes.
“Dr. William Glasser talks about the basic things people need in life—love, fun, power, freedom, and belonging,” said Elaine. “People need to feel that someone loves them and that they belong. I make other people feel that way, and they have given that back to me. And my creativity has allowed me to think outside the environment I’m in. Love and creativity have sustained me. I really do believe that.”
Life is fast-forwarded here. Mothers bear children when they are children themselves. Tammie Cathery, whose nickname is Pooh-Pooh, bore her first child at seventeen. She’s hoping her children have a different experience, she tells me.
“My eldest daughter is thirteen,” Tammie told me. “I keep her in the house a lot. I cannot always do that, but I try to talk to her. She’s not more mature like I was when I was thirteen. I was more experienced back then than how the kids are now. I try to talk to them and get them to understand life, what life is all about, and what I’ve been through—my mistakes, my wrongdoing. I try to tell them my wrongdoing. I don’t hide nothing from my kids. I tell them everything I think they won’t know. I don’t hide nothing.”
Many young women like Tammie are struggling to make better lives, for themselves and their children, but in households in which black men scarcely feature. Where are the young black men? One in three of these women’s husbands and lovers is likely to be in prison or on probation or parole. For many of them, the first stop is the Cook County Jail.
If you are arrested in Chicago, the Cook County Jail is where you are held until your trial date is set. It’s bigger than many Illinois towns, with more than eleven thousand inmates, three-quarters, around 70 percent, of them black. It’s almost as black as Chicago’s South Side, which is 78 percent black—a perverse vocational school replacing the public school system.
When I visit the jail, Officer Clark Clemons is my guide, a mild-mannered Virgil escorting me through Hades. He takes me to see a typical medium-security block, housing 120 inmates. Most of them have been there before and will be back again.
“Fifty percent of the men who are here are doomed to be in this jail or in a prison for the rest of their lives. They’re here till they check out. One circumstance or another they’ll be here or they’ll come back. And that’s sad,” Officer Clemons tells me, but “the state has a problem too. When a person commits a crime, we the public are the first ones to say, put them in jail.”
If this is not cruel and unusual punishment, then I don’t know what is. The clang of the cell door must trigger a living nightmare for these men. And most people stay here between two and eight years, often “graduating” to prison to do more time. Even if released, many end up back here, starting the process all over again. Why would anyone do anything to return to this hellhole? I asked to talk to one of the inmates. Officer Clemons introduced me to thirty-six-year-old Kalais Chiron Hunt, alias Eric Edwards.
“It’s hell in here,” Kalais tells me, “but you have to understand something. I was always intelligent; I just didn’t use the intelligence that God gave me.”
Why not? I wonder. It’s a question of role models, he tells me.
“If I was seeing like, let’s say, a fireman every day, then that could be a role model. I’m not saying there wasn’t firemen, but they wasn’t around in my neighborhood; they didn’t actually live in my neighborhood. If a fire broke out, the firemen would come from a station that’s not in my neighborhood to put the fire out. If the ambulance driver come to my neighborhood, he would come from another place; he wouldn’t actually live in my neighborhood. I wouldn’t wake up in the morning and come outside to play and see a fireman on his way to work or see a policeman on his way to work. I’d see a drug dealer. I’d see someone stealing something.”
Kalais is sharp and quick and witty: in another world, he could have been a successful entrepreneur, a lawyer, or a doctor. Instead, he has been in and out of jail for the better part of his life.
It may be too late for Kalais, but some young men, all juvenile offenders, are being given a second chance. I visited the Evening Reporting Center at the Westside Association for Community Action. Instead of going to jail, these teenagers have been sentenced to the Pretrial Service Program in the Department of Probation and Court Services of the Cook County Division of Juvenile Justice. After three weeks they will be reassessed. Gang rivalries disappear here, replaced by counseling, homework with tutoring, recreation, socializing, nurturing. It’s three times cheaper to keep a young man on this program than to send him to jail, and it has a 91 percent success rate.
Seventeen-year-old Jason Smith entered the program after being arrested for possession of a loaded semiautomatic handgun. First arrested at the age of twelve, he had been a member of a gang and dealing since he was thirteen, and had quickly climbed the drug hierarchy. Around the time he turned fifteen, he was given his own “set.” I asked him what that meant.
“A set is a street, sometimes by a school, sometimes by a neighbor’s house, where a person’s spot to sell drugs is designated by gang members. I was out there on the set with three or four guys I had grown up with,” he said. “By the time I was sixteen years old, we were making about $10,000 a week from the crack house in Evanston, between the ten of us. Sometimes I’d go home with $1,000 a day. I started buying clothes and spending money on girls and more expensive cars. I helped my family with the rent and continued buying drugs to sell.”
Jason feared he would probably end up shot or in jail before long, but instead, he ended up before a judge who sentenced him to the Pretrial Service Program. There, something “buried within” helped him turn his life around—to the extent that he is now completing a bachelor’s degree in business and works as a probation officer with the Illinois Circuit Court of Cook County.
Gangs, drugs, teenage pregnancy, the breakdown of the family, white racism, lack of role models, bad choices, nihilism, instant gratification: these are the explanations that the people from the South Side themselves give for the causes of a seemingly inescapable downward spiral of hopelessness that has become synonymous in America with the inner city, despite the fact that most people here are decent, hardworking, responsible—fighting against odds that would have crushed me. It is intolerable—or it should be—that anyone lives like this in America in the twenty-first century. How do we change this?
My generation was raised to seek freedom through education, to use the schools and literacy to “beat the white man at his own game,” as our parents put it. Now, with segr
egation outlawed, with more equal opportunity in education available than we could scarcely dream of, whose fault is it? The ethos of education and self-help that was drummed into my generation sometimes seems as far away from here as the mass migration of hundreds of thousands of poor southerners that turned this part of Chicago into a black metropolis. A concerted assault on all of these problems is the only way to stop the rot in our inner cities. But welfare and other social safety-net programs have been cut dramatically in the last few years. And without federally and state-funded support programs, especially job training, these residents have very little chance of escaping the cycle of poverty.
No one has done more in the past thirty years to generate hope and aspiration among inner-city citizens than the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Jesse’s message is filtering through. Hope is alive, even here. But the problem, he laments, is that “people who are living with low roofs on their dreams develop lifestyles to match.”
I attended graduation ceremonies at Chicago’s famous black Du Sable High School. The students come from some of the most deprived backgrounds in America, but they have thrived. This is more than a commencement: it is a victory in a war against terror. Armed with diplomas, the students have embraced Frederick Douglass’s message that the road from slavery to freedom is paved with education—that education is the blackest thing one can do.
Walking through Du Sable’s Hall of Fame, I saw politicians, scientists, entertainers, and community leaders—even Nat King Cole went to school here. So did Mayor Harold Washington. A small, determined minority will always transcend their environment, against the odds, with a strength of will that few of us in more privileged backgrounds can imagine.
But how much hope do today’s students feel about their future? Dr. Emiel Hamberlin, a teacher at Du Sable for thirty-six years, expresses hope tempered with realism.
“I suppose I could get very upset about finding out that a student has dropped out because she’s pregnant or another is in the Cook County Jail because he’s busted for selling drugs,” Dr. Hamberlin told me. “But then I look at the students as they’re walking through the hall, as they’re sitting in the cafeteria and in my classroom, and I wonder, if I was in this community, which one of them would I be? Just which one would I be? If I was dealt a hand of an environment that is so negative, that draws so much energy away, that actually reinforces their negativity so well, and they are successful being negative, then how can I offset it with being positive?”
The bricks and mortar at the Robert Taylor Homes are coming down, a housing project so horrendous that only its destruction could fix it. But can a healthy culture grow on this fallow ground? Racism, economic discrimination, poor medical facilities, substandard schools, drugs, crime, violence: beyond the bricks and mortar, these are the forces still alive and well in the ghetto. In the end, our lives are determined by the choices we make. No white racist forces you to get pregnant at sixteen, or to sell or use drugs. What separates the graduates at Du Sable from the “vocational students” at the Cook County Jail? When we figure that out, can we bottle and sell it? Can a different culture flourish here, where the hopes and dreams of each individual have a chance to grow? Only if we as a society at long last destroy the structural forces of racism and job discrimination that curtail the choices and possibilities of the people who live here. Our people have always had to fight against and conquer tremendous forces arranged against us. We have done so through sheer willpower and an almost naïve belief in the power of education and in the principles upon which this democracy was founded, believing—against the odds—in the promise of an unfettered future. Only if each person here embraces the best of the black tradition, and takes refuge from this culture of chaos through education, deferred gratification, and hard work, can we, too, claim our stake in the American dream. For in the end—despite all of the various explanations—there can be no other way.
JESSE L. JACKSON
Restitution, Reinvestment
The Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., shared a story with me involving a young Chicago man from a big housing project who earned a degree from Eastern Illinois University and “escaped his environment. His wife is a doctor, he has six children, and he has nine hundred employees. He has an outstanding janitorial firm. The city of Chicago owes him $1.9 million for work his company has completed. This sort of business phenomenon is true in more places than we tend to realize. Many of our cities, counties, and states are behind four and five months in paying workers.”
Today we view slavery as a kind of blur in the history of this country. Yet America is too young for the memory of slavery to be so old. The existence of slavery is too close to be thought of as so far away. When one considers the economic origin of America, it was Africa and her people who subsidized America’s development. After all, two hundred years without wages is an African subsidy to America, redefining what party is “creditor,” and which is “debtor,” in the African-American relationship.
In telling the story of America, we focus on Ellis Island and on the immigrants who traveled here seeking economic liberation—far more than religious freedom, I might add. But we cannot understand Ellis Island in New York unless we understand Gorée Island in Senegal, because it was the wealth derived from the African slave trade that enabled America to become strong enough to attract immigrants.
Unlike other groups who came to America as immigrants, Africans were brought here and enslaved and exploited for economic ends, with the support of a national legal system. In other words, the exploitation of African Americans has been built into the political, legal, economic, social, and cultural structure of America. One cannot simply evolve out of an exploitative status that is so thoroughly structured into the institutions, laws, and culture of a nation.
It is true that immigrants were exploited, but they were able, based upon their skin color, to move beyond it and take on new identities. But because there was such degradation around the issue of race, America was built for two hundred years on African people having no rights that whites were bound to respect, and on whites being able to make full use of Africans for economic advantage. Thus, slavery was about both race and class, because while race was the ideology, greed was the driving force.
We are taught that whites basically came here looking for religious freedom. It’s not really true. Some did, but there were notices posted in Europe that said, if you will go to America, we will give you one hundred acres of free land, and free laborers. The promise of America was both free land and free labor. Europeans may have been scholars, prisoners, entrepreneurs, or oppressed— none of that mattered. No matter what the status may have been in Europe, they came here, in the main, for the promise of free land and free labor.
The existence of slavery was woven into the fabric of the country. It was woven into religion, because slavery could be rationalized as having been ordained by God. It became part of the country’s sociology, part of our scholarly institutions, our politics, our culture, our literature. Race is a deep matter. And each time there’s been some law to change the equation politically, it has never had an economic application. Two hundred years after slavery was instituted in America, it was made illegal, but no one changed any of the economic assumptions, or any of the educational assumptions, of the system that put it in place.
As Frederick Douglass said, “. . . we became free, but then we were free to starve, free without land, free without education, free without compensation, free without reparations; just free.” Those who were “supreme,” who were “seven-fifths human,” lost nothing economically. Those who were considered three-fifths human gained nothing economically. The law changed, but the economic infrastructure did not change. People on the American political left say that poverty is a problem of the economic system. People on the American political right say it’s a problem of individual initiative. What all of those persons fail to do is deal with the matter of historical continuity. Since God started making days, not a single day has been missed.
And all things therefore are connected.
Let’s look, for example, at the matter of insurance. When our forebears were enslaved, the slave owners took out insurance policies on them. If a parent died or escaped, the slave owners collected. Insurance companies collected as well, and in turn invested the money in the burgeoning American infrastructure of the 1800s, such as railroads and cities. When American slavery was abolished legally, what did insurance companies do? Those insurance companies that would sell insurance to African Americans—and many of them would not— established race-based premiums, logged on two sets of books, one for “Colored” and one for “White.” African Americans and people of color were forced to pay more for the same insurance policies than those for whites, and more for the policy than it was worth. Consequently, insurance companies developed a system to deny or “redline” access to capital for people of color.
There is continuity between slave-era exploitation by insurance companies and present-day exploitation of African Americans by insurance companies. Therefore, a critical issue of our time is, state by state, which insurance companies maintained slavery-based policies, and which—an even larger number— had race-based policies? How much money did they make on the original premiums, and on any investments they made on that capital? These are very real questions. An analysis of the current disparities in wealth, health, education, and access to capital between African Americans and European Americans rests on historic economic exploitation of people of color in America, particularly African Americans. Thus, America must address its legal history of inequities in order that her creed of equal protection under the law and equal opportunity carries a resonance of reality.
America Behind the Color Line Page 46
