All the data show that most drug users and pushers are white. In 2001, 86 percent of all the rural arrests were white; 71 percent of all urban arrests were white. Yet about 54 percent of American men in jail in 2002 were black and about 19 percent were Hispanic. The majority of those in jail now are black and brown, and poor, without adequate legal representation. Once you are caught in that system, it tends to recycle itself, because that system is the epicenter of HIV/AIDS, and it is the epicenter of drugs. You leave there slicker, because you learn the science of the system. You leave there slicker and sicker. You get more drugs in than out, so you leave there slicker and sicker and you return quicker. If we broke up recidivism alone in jails, you’d have to close down half of that industry today.
It would mean losing a lot of jobs. We would have to turn that institution into a library. The Cook County Jail budget today is bigger than any Historically Black College or University in America, including Howard, Morehouse, or Florida A&M. None of those schools have a budget as big as the Cook County Jail budget. It is ridiculous, but it is real. In the last ten years, half of all public housing built has been jails, mainly for black men committing nonviolent drug-related crimes.
That is why I am saying that it is simplest to study harder while young. We have also got to study harder on the structural forces that are undercutting spiritual opportunity. When the right wing could not reverse the Supreme Court decisions on education, they started planning to undercut the educational system. When I was growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, you had your black high school, Sterling High, and you had your two high schools for whites, Parker and Greenville. The right wing could not stop the Brown v. Board of Education decision, but they started taking big churches and turning them into white, private Christian day academies. That became a way to keep black and white education separated. Then they went from there to various formulas and charter schools, and as they began to take teachers away and students away, they reached a stage where they want to take funding away through vouchers. Those who opposed desegregation contend that race is not currently a factor in segregated schools, rather property real estate tax formulas. Either way, the result is the same: a tale of two schools.
You have a terrible imbalance based upon the real estate tax base, and it ends up being separation by mostly race and class. The gap between the all-black high schools of the 1950s and the all-white high schools of that period was not as great as the gap between today’s high schools in poor neighborhoods and those in more affluent neighborhoods. Then, the all-black school received books three years after the all-white school did, but basically the same books. There was a kind of parallel. But the new vertical class-race gap based upon real estate funding is wider than the old horizontal race gap was a little more than fifty years ago. Now it has the indignity of not only race exploitation but class exploitation, and rural white youth as well as black inner-city youth suffer from lack of an equal funding formula. The children of Appalachia are suffering from lack of an equal funding formula, but it does not make it any less unfair that in addition to blacks, and in addition to Hispanics, rural whites and Appalachian whites are not getting a fair deal. It just means that they, too, are getting less than the promise of the American dream.
Life is some combination of nature and environment. There is nothing wrong with our nature, but there is something wrong with our environment, and we tend to underestimate environmental opportunity. The fact is that in America the black and brown youth have less access to equal education today, less access to health insurance today, less access to a job today, less access to promotions today, less access to mortgage lending at a fair price today, and less access to risk capital to go into business today. We must not underestimate the structural forces that impinge upon our nature and upon the way we behave.
For example, in Chicago, there is a young man from a big housing project who graduated 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.
So this young man is “floating” money to the city. As a result of the lack of payment by the city, his employees’ union takes legal action to attach his bank accounts because he is not paying his union dues on time, and they charge him a 15 percent penalty. The government is on his back because he is not paying his taxes on time. He cannot get a “bridge loan” from the bank because he has bad credit. He had to fight to get the contract in the first place, and now he has to fight to get the money for the completed contract. Even when he gets the money, the government penalty for paying his taxes late has wiped out his profit margins. The penalty for paying the labor union dues late has wiped out his profit. Again that’s structural; that is not something wrong with him. City, county, and state governments are notorious for paying people late. When you pay them late, you pay a penalty, but when they pay you late, you’re lucky. You just suck it up.
The class divide between poor and middle-class blacks was not created by African-American people or by Hispanic people. The fact is, without the banning of discrimination in places of public accommodation that was part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, without the right to vote, without affirmative action, even African Americans who are in the middle class would be living in poverty. And most of those in the new African-American middle class are government employees in one form or another. They are firemen, they are police, they are teachers, they run for state government, they run for the federal government, they get contracts from city, county, and state governments. Most of the black middle class is heavily dependent upon government.
Dr. King did not die so that we have two classes of black people. But he did make it clear in his last campaign, the Poor People’s Campaign, that America cannot lift one ethnic group out of poverty without working to lift all of them out. We have been amazingly successful, over continuing odds. We do have more doctors today. We do have more lawyers. We do have more businesses. We have more of all of that, and the increase in these areas has been in proportion to the extent that equal protection under the law was enforced. The lack of more blacks coming up from the bottom, the lack of more poor Appalachian whites having insurance, is not the brewing of the black employed class, the government-employed black middle class. No. That’s what must be destroyed, the notion that somehow because blacks have finally got a job teaching or a government job they have the power to end structural dislocation. The idea is an insult to our intelligence.
Teaching is a noble profession. Black men and women can leave their humble conditions in getting an education and end up teaching at Harvard or some other Ivy League school, but they will not make enough to lift the masses. The government-driven middle class has tried to lift itself. They at best will get their own family up. The young man in Chicago who has nine hundred employees, many of whom are ex-convicts who otherwise could not get a job, is about to lose his business because the city owes him money and because those nine hundred employees have families. And they have home mortgages. Again there is yet another trap, because he is lifting as he climbs, but if he cannot climb, he cannot lift.
I do not want to make any excuse for people who do less than their best to reinvest. Even honeybees have reinvestment sense, and a honeybee doesn’t have a human brain. There are no Harvard-graduate bees, there are no doctor honeybees, and there are no trainer honeybees. Yet a brainless honeybee, driven by buzz or instinct or whatever honeybees are driven by, gets its nectar from a flower and doesn’t just fly away and say, I am satisfied. Even the honeybee has enough sense or instinct to drop pollen where it picked up nectar and then fly away. It knows that at one point its supply will become empty. And if it flies back and didn’t drop pollen and the flower’s dead, the honeybee dies. The h
oneybee understands the law of regeneration, or of reinvestment.
There are a significant number of African-American churches today that are getting into community development and reinvestment. They are purchasing property, or they are building life centers; they are teaching economic literacy classes; they are forming partnerships with the private sector and with other nonprofits to revitalize inner-city neighborhoods and create thriving communities. African-American churches comprise the single largest purchaser of land in black America today, and the largest builder of houses.
This is what you see happening with the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City. The new 64,000-foot shopping center is a church-driven CDC (community development corporation). Likewise, what one sees with the work and with the congregations of Reverend James Meeks of the Salem Baptist Church of Chicago and Reverend Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and Bishop Eddie Long of New Birth in Georgia and others is emblematic of a newly emerging African-American middle class, through its church structure buying land and engaging in entrepreneurial activities. Entrepreneurship can reduce the poverty among 40 percent of black children only when the system works with the entrepreneur, not against him.
Just as it takes a village to raise a child, sick villages will raise sick children. Connected villages raise connected children, and disconnected villages raise disconnected children. I would think that another of the big challenges today is the issue of churches retreating from their duty to even the playing field. The Scriptures say that “faith without works is dead.” Faith is a substance that things hope for, and evidence of things unseen. Dr. King’s tradition was in effect saying that we live in our faith, our belief system, but we live under the law. People of faith must fight the law. Our theology must be about changing public policy as well as private habits. We had faith and religion in slavery. But until the law changed, the shackles wouldn’t come off. We had religion at the back of the bus, but there was also a sign up front that said coloreds sit in the rear and whites up front and those who are violent will be punished by law. People of faith must fight for public policy. Faith cannot just be internal, personal, and private.
Moses marching to Canaan was a public policy march. Joshua marching round the walls of Jericho was a public policy march. Jesus challenging Rome was a public policy struggle. Daniel resisting Nebuchadnezzar was a public policy struggle. So our churches must not just admire Dr. King; they must follow him. They must revive a theology that inspires the quest for equal opportunity through shared economic security and empowerment.
TIMUEL D. BLACK
Looking Back, Looking Up
Tim Black’s family has lived in Chicago since 1919. They were part of the first Great Migration north, preferring the dangers of Chicago race riots to the terror they left behind. He talked to me about three generations of African Americans, from the “self-contained colored world” of the first migration to an era of vulnerability, in which African Americans lost “the protection or the wisdom and support of those who had left the old community.”
I’ll be eighty-four years old next December. When I was a kid, I hung out in the streets, with my mama nagging me every night. Sometimes I’d come home drunk and stay out there with people like Redd Foxx. I knew him well. You’d have to be out on the street with Redd to really know how bright and quick he was. Redd was a Du Sable High School graduate. He played the dozens on the street. Now if you were foolish enough to play the dozens with Redd, you were gonna get crucified. You were gonna have to hit him, because he was so quick and so colorful and so artistic that when he could get to talking about your mama, that was just the beginning. He could take your whole ancestry. Guys like Billy Eckstine hung out on the same streets. They knew I was dumb, so they wouldn’t ask me to do anything wrong. In fact, they would stop me from doing anything wrong. They liked me, and they’d say, Shorty, I’ve got something for you if you want it. They weren’t looking down on us; they were just appreciative of us.
I briefly went to Xavier University in New Orleans on a basketball scholarship. I saw all those pretty girls, and I knew I wasn’t going to be serious about school. So I came back home. After I returned from World War II, I went to Roosevelt University. I was in the social sciences. I was concentrating primarily on cultural anthropology and sociology, but I found that even after obtaining my master’s degree from the University of Chicago, it was hard to find a job as a black anthropologist or sociologist. That master’s was intended to prepare people to teach at least at a two-year college level, from where they’d hopefully go on to teach at a four-year college. I was in the master’s program from 1952 to 1954 and the doctoral program from 1954 to 1956.
I got caught up in the Civil Rights Movement, and I’ve never regretted it. Professor Allison Davis, my adviser in the doctoral program, used to call me up every week because I was the only black guy in the program, and he’d ask, “When are you coming back here to finish?” I did what many people do. I finished everything but the dissertation. I tried for three years to do that. But when I was teaching in Gary, Indiana, and saw Dr. King on television, I said, ain’t no place for me to be but Montgomery. I jumped on a plane and went there. From that point on, I was suckered in. I went back to the university and I got enough history to teach at the high school level and continued in that vein till we broke the racial barriers in the community colleges. There were then two of us who were qualified teachers of anthropology and sociology as well as history. So I had three preparations. And my classes filled up.
I was born in Birmingham. My father, who was born in Jacksonville, Alabama, worked in the steel mills in Bessemer, outside Birmingham. My mother was born in Florence, Alabama, also the birthplace of W.C. Handy. But she met my father in Birmingham.
Many people of that period were leaving the South like refugees. They were running away from fear. They were running away from a lack of equal opportunity. And they were running away from the terror. So they came to Chicago as part of the first Great Migration.
My family arrived in Chicago in August of 1919, right after the race riot of July 1919. It gives some idea about what they feared. They feared staying in the South more than they feared coming to Chicago. They had riots going on all the time in Birmingham. My aunt met us in Chicago and we moved to the South Side. My grandmother was here, on my mother’s side, and we had other relatives and many friends who were already here. In actual fact, I can walk from where I live now to every house where I’ve ever lived, including the lots that are vacant now.
It was community, and I mean that definitively in terms of the spirit and the feeling of the people toward one another, though we lived in a ghetto. By that I mean we were bound by boundaries and restrictive covenants and agreements that no landlord or landowner would rent or sell to people of color at all. And so we were literally on the South Side, restricted, from about 26th Street on the north, at that time, to about 43rd Street on the south. The black population when we came to Chicago in 1919 was under 100,000, but by 1920, it was about 123,000. It had almost doubled since 1915. We all lived in this compact area, but many of the people were from the same hometowns: Birmingham, Nashville, Memphis, Little Rock, Atlanta, New Orleans, primarily the middle part of the Southern area. They had family connections and a social network. So there was a feeling of safety. The most important thing, I would say, is that they had a feeling of hope, particularly a dream of the future for their children. Parents watched their children’s behavior very closely, and were very concerned about how their children were doing in school. They felt, as my mother said, that if you stayed out of trouble and you prayed and you worked hard in school, God would take care of you and everything would be all right.
So the optimism led us to not worry about the poverty that might exist, or the hard times. Of course in the 1920s, they were still pretty good times. My sister and brother joined us, and we were growing up during that period when there was quite a bit of prosperity on the South Side of Chicago. There
was no great need to go outside the community, because even though it might cost more to stay there, particularly as it related to residences, everything else was available—not all owned by blacks, but some of it.
It was really a socially, politically, and in some ways economically self-contained world. All of the classes were represented within the black community. There were four class distinctions. And this was not to be ignored. One was pigmentation. Another was income. Another was where you worked, and a fourth was where you lived in the black community.
If you lived in the north end of the Black Belt, that was considered the lower class, even though you might have more money than someone who lived on the far end of the South Side. There were the prosperous people, like the Earl B. Dickersons and the Stratfords. Earl Dickerson came to Chicago in 1908. He was a very prominent lawyer. The Stratfords came later, after the race riot in Tulsa in 1923. Mr. Stratford was an attorney. His father had been an attorney. They were literally burned out in Tulsa. If you hung around with their children and that group, it didn’t matter whether you were of the same class. My brother was allowed to hang out with them, and I could hang in there, but I got annoyed at times with many of them.
Having money, of course, meant that you were in business, like the Dickersons, who were in the insurance business, or the Motleys, in the art business. Archibald Motley was an artist, born in New Orleans, who settled in Chicago around 1914. His nephew was Willard Motley, the writer. If you were in that class, you were considered well off. If you had a stable job, like in the post office, you were considered kind of prestigious. If you lived in a kitchenette, which there were plenty of, that was not considered so hot, because then you couldn’t have your friends over too easily, since you were living in cramped quarters. But that didn’t cause any disrespect of you. They knew why you were living in that kitchenette. You might be living in an apartment that was split up into three rather than one. And where there had been six families living in a building, you might have as many as twenty families living in that same building. You were caught by the restrictive covenants that determined where you could and couldn’t live, and so you had to make an adjustment. If you were fortunate enough to live on Michigan Avenue, for example, or Grand Boulevard—later renamed South Park—you were considered a little more hoity-toity than if you lived on Prairie or Indiana.
America Behind the Color Line Page 48
