The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  The integration of elite and heretofore largely white educational, cultural, and political organizations and institutions through affirmative action and the simultaneous collapse of factory jobs in the cities (the traditional method of achieving upward class mobility throughout the 20th century) would lead to the intraracial class divide described at the beginning of this chapter, and which the sociologist William Julius Wilson (b. 1935) would define in his seminal studies, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions, published in 1978; and The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, published in 1987. Only a relatively small proportion of the black community could take advantage of these expanded opportunities. While the lucky few were fighting for Black Power on elite college campuses, a great number of less fortunate young African Americans were overseas, battling the Vietcong.

  IN 1968, WHEN MAJOR COLIN POWELL (B. 1937) RETURNED FOR HIS SECOND TOUR OF DUTY IN VIETNAM, there were a half million American troops there. Where once African Americans had fought for the right to serve in an integrated military from the Civil War through World War II, now they were overrepresented in the nation’s armed forces. African Americans made up about 11 percent of the United States population in 1967; estimates for the number of black troops in Vietnam were anywhere from 12 to 16 percent, and even higher in combat units. Unable to escape the draft as easily as middle-class white youth, and with fewer employment options, young African American men were more likely than their white counterparts to serve in this increasingly unpopular war. This trend would continue in the years ahead: The percentage of blacks in the armed forces would rise as high as 33 percent in 1979.17

  While the African American presence in the military bespoke a lag in job opportunities for working-class black people, impressive gains in electoral politics, as we have seen, continued to buoy hopes for the future. In his book Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!, Robin Kelley reported numbers that could only be encouraging: In 1969, 994 black men and 131 black women held public office; by 1975, the number of black elected officials had grown, incredibly, to 2,973 men and 530 women. The Congressional Black Caucus was founded in 1971 with a dozen members; by 2012, that number had nearly quadrupled. The presence of black people in the halls of power, which had previously been a whites-only domain in practice even if not in theory, bolstered the community tremendously. “Black communities marched into the 1970s,” Kelley said, “with at least some hope that black political power would bring a brighter day.”18

  The African American mayor of Gary, Indiana, Richard Hatcher (b. 1933), who had won office in the majority-black city in 1967, hosted the first National Black Political Convention in 1972. In a sign that these were transitional times, every major civil rights and Black Power group attended, except for the NAACP. Although deep and often bitter political and ideological differences threatened to stall the proceedings, the 8,000 attendees from all 50 states joined in the chant, “It’s nation time!” Strangely, though, the convention failed to endorse New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm’s historic 1972 candidacy as the first African American woman to seek the Democratic presidential nomination.

  Amiri Baraka, who as we have seen gained prominence during the mid-1960s as the founder of the Black Arts Movement and then at the end of the decade as the co-leader of the major black cultural nationalist organization, brought unity to the diverse group by drafting a document that all could get behind. The Gary Declaration stated: “The American system does not work for the masses of our people, and it cannot be made to work without radical, fundamental changes…. The challenge is thrown to us here in Gary. It is the challenge to consolidate and organize our own Black role as the vanguard in the struggle for a new society.”19 The declaration’s policy recommendations—urban renewal, quality education, welfare rights, and economic opportunity—could very well have been written by Dr. King and his associates just four years before, and proved to mainstream observers that Black Power had “come of age,” as The Washington Post reported.20 It was the first step of a national black political agenda.

  General Colin Powell, Arlington, Virginia; January 23, 1991. Photograph. Jean Louis Atlan/Sygma, Corbis UK Ltd.

  As in Gary and Cleveland before it (where Carl Stokes was elected as the city’s first black mayor in 1967), the era’s greatest political gains were made at the level of cities, just as America’s cities were becoming predominantly black. By 1977—just nine years after the death of Martin Luther King—more than 200 cities, among them New Orleans, Philadelphia, Newark, and Washington, D.C., had elected black mayors, two of whom would become prominent on the national political scene: Maynard Jackson (1938–2003) in Atlanta and Tom Bradley (1917–1998) in Los Angeles, both elected in 1973.

  Yet even as these mayors took office, America’s cities were changing, a process accelerated by the national recession that hit in the 1970s. Jobs either moved out to the suburbs or out of the country completely, and white people and their tax revenue went along with them. Black people remained clustered in inner cities. The funk visionary George Clinton (b. 1941) coined a new term to describe the phenomenon in the Parliament song “Chocolate City,” an ode to the growing black population in the nation’s capital. By 1970, there were “chocolate cities” across the country: Washington, D.C., and Atlanta were more than 50 percent black; Detroit and New York more than 40 percent; and Philadelphia and Cleveland, more than a third.

  THIS TRANSFORMATION WAS TAKING PLACE AS THE RADICAL BLACK POWER MOVEMENT CONFRONTED SETBACKS that came from both without and within. By 1971, Maulana Karenga and the Black Panthers Huey P. Newton, H. Rap Brown (b. 1943), and Bobby Seale were all in jail, while Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver were living abroad or in exile. The FBI’s spying and disinformation campaign had done irreparable damage to the movement by inciting conflicts between revolutionaries of different ideologies, classes, and genders, effectively undermining any chance they might ever have had of gaining widespread grassroots membership, although their symbolic significance as advocates for black rights and full social, political, and economic equality cannot be underestimated.

  And now some of the standard-bearers of black pride had begun to lose the people’s trust. James Brown had already disappointed fans by performing his Black Power anthem at Richard Nixon’s first inauguration, but when black America’s “Soul Brother No. 1” enthusiastically endorsed Nixon for a second term in 1972, Brown earned a new nickname: “Nixon’s clown.” In his autobiography, he explained how he defended his motives to his jeering audience: “‘You can’t change a house from outside. You have to be inside the house…. I’m trying to sell us in. I’m trying to put pressure on the government not to forget about us.’”21 Moreover, the white “silent majority” who elected Nixon was ready to stop making concessions to African Americans, becoming nervous about protecting their own economic interests as the economy began to stall and the country’s coffers shrink. The times were a-changing, and not in the positive ways that Bob Dylan’s song—which became a virtual anthem of the broad movement for social change in the ’60s—had predicted. It was a time of retrenchment. Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” social programs now came under siege.

  The post–civil rights era’s optimism and African American unity began to be splintered by growing political and class differences and new social problems. Private-sector affirmative action initiatives and government programs created just a few years earlier were ended or stripped down before they’d been given a chance to work, and affirmative action programs began to be challenged in the courts. While a small black middle class continued to make impressive progress, the urban poor found it increasingly difficult to break out of ghettos that grew more entrenched, hopeless, and dangerous in the face of a national recession and new social ills like crack cocaine and AIDS.

  The electoral gains of black people were not mirrored in their economic status. In fact, historian Robin Kelley has concluded that “one of the most
striking features of the 1970s was the widening income gap between blacks and whites.” From the beginning of the decade to the end, African Americans would suffer a major setback in income as compared to whites. The figures Kelley reported in his book Into the Fire are discouraging, to say the least. In 1970, African Americans were earning 71 cents for every dollar made by whites; by 1979, their earning power was barely over half that of whites, with African Americans now pulling in only 58 cents on the dollar.22 Advancement was supposed to mean moving forward, so why were blacks backsliding?

  THE 1950S AND ’60S HAD SEEN THE GREATEST GROWTH OF THE BLACK MIDDLE CLASS IN HISTORY, but the American economy was changing. The disappearance of heavy industry, the decline of trade unions, and the departure of remaining American industry to foreign shores disproportionately affected black workers who were just starting to get ahead. By 1978, more than 30 percent of black families lived below the poverty line, compared with less than 9 percent of white families. One reason for this unequal impact was a simple, disappointing truth: The racial barriers of the past had never been completely erased.23

  Almost two decades after the Brown v. Board of Education decision mandated racial integration, many of the nation’s public schools were still segregated in practice. In September 1974, the federal district judge W. Arthur Garrity, Jr., implemented a plan to desegregate Boston’s “racially imbalanced” public schools. Thousands of students were bused to schools outside their neighborhoods, and racial violence exploded. But this time, the anti-busing activists, who were fighting to keep black children out of predominantly white schools, mainly in an Irish working-class enclave of the city, portrayed themselves as the victims and garnered a surprising amount of support from other white communities throughout the country. Racial integration was fine, as long as it was residential, by neighborhood. And neighborhoods had become increasingly segregated racially since the mid-1960s.

  Boston turned into as potent a symbol of white racism as Selma or Little Rock. The busing situation and the violence with which it was met exposed the hypocrisy of the city that a century earlier was the cradle of abolitionism and antislavery sympathy. While Boston might be able to boast a history of antislavery politics, this did not mean the city’s residents 100 years later would be welcoming to African Americans in their neighborhoods and schools. White opponents to desegregation attacked the buses bringing black children into their neighborhoods with rocks, bottles, and racist graffiti. The schools became battlegrounds, with untold instances of arrests, injuries, and abuse.

  Boston was the iconic case, but resistance to school desegregation was fierce across the country. In many cities, whites simply deserted the public schools to avoid desegregation, moving to the suburbs or paying for private education. By 1980, white students made up only 4 percent of public school enrollment in Washington, D.C.; 8 percent in Atlanta; and 9 percent in Newark.24 Twenty-five years after the Brown decision, the goal of school integration seemed more elusive than ever.

  Despite compelling evidence that racial disparities persisted in education and employment, affirmative action policies also sparked a fierce white backlash. In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case that the use of racial quotas—setting aside a specific number of slots for a racial group—was unconstitutional. The court declared that the University of California’s efforts to increase diversity in its medical school amounted to “reverse discrimination.” Disgruntled whites, resorting to legal tactics rather than fire hoses, again portrayed themselves as the victims, as they had done in the Boston public schools, unfairly deprived of rights and opportunity.

  While those who had benefited from affirmative action programs continued their upward climb, those who hadn’t were being left further behind. And it was no longer only the gap between black and white that was alarming; that gap that we have been tracing in this chapter between the black elite and the black poor was widening dramatically as well. Disparity among blacks was nothing new; we need only recall the concepts of the Talented Tenth and the New Negro—or, more to the point, the Old Negro—to realize this. But in the face of what were supposed to be the legacies of the civil rights movement and President Johnson’s War on Poverty—increased opportunities and equality for black people across the board—this trend was expressing itself in new and distressing ways. While William Julius Wilson’s The Declining Significance of Race described the improving conditions of the black middle class in relation to the decline of the black underclass in 1978, the situation only has continued to deteriorate and the black class gap widen over the past three decades. By 1980, the economic disparities between African Americans were as great as the differences between black and white Americans. Class divisions undermined the political unity that last manifested itself in the great March on Washington in 1963.

  Ironically, as this class divide was opening, the African American experience continued to gain in symbolic stature: Black History Month was established in 1976, expanding on the effort of the historian Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950) 50 years earlier to devote national attention to black accomplishment through the creation of Negro History Week in 1926. Alex Haley’s television miniseries Roots recorded an unprecedented number of viewers in 1977 by dramatizing America’s history of slavery, once whitewashed out of national memory. One way to understand the extraordinary popularity of Roots was as a collective healing ritual just nine years after the murder of Dr. King. The audience for Roots reflected a combination of the legacy of the civil rights movement and nostalgia for its interracial coalition politics on the one hand, and the thrust of black nationalist identity politics, especially the identification of African Americans with Africa through a socially constructed, ostensibly “Pan-African” identity on the other. Alex Haley’s great achievement was to bring together these two strands, two strands that traditionally, as we have seen, were diametrically opposed. This was something of a miracle, and the program’s exceptional viewership reflects this extraordinary confluence of opposing forces. The result was the largest black and white audience ever to watch a television program about black history, before or since. Today, Roots remains the third most popular television series in American history.

  AS THE 1970S CAME TO AN END, POPULAR INTEREST IN AFRICAN AMERICANS MAY HAVE BEEN ON THE RISE, but that didn’t benefit the population at large. Once Ronald Reagan was elected president, the black underclass was essentially sidelined by policies that at best ignored them and at worst dismantled the progress that had been made in the community. As the New Right took hold, plans for urban renewal (with side effects like the demolition of some poor neighborhoods and the gentrification of others) and practices such as “redlining” (denying services, loans, or jobs to residents of certain areas) helped to lock the black underclass into inner cities decimated by cutbacks in federal aid. A national recession spurred joblessness to its highest levels since the Great Depression. Black unemployment topped 20 percent and was even higher among African American youth, leaving “ghetto” residents vulnerable to the onslaught of urban blight, gang warfare, crime, and drugs.

  The War on Poverty waged by the Johnson administration had been lost, replaced by President Reagan’s new, unfairly enforced War on Drugs. Yet despite these difficulties—or perhaps because of them—a new African American cultural movement emerged that would have a massive global influence: hip-hop. The situation was growing dire and deadly, yet in the Bronx, an embattled “Chocolate City” if ever there was one, young people were planting the seeds of a new cultural movement that would change the face of black America yet again. DJs, rappers, and graffiti artists playing to their neighborhoods would soon reach an audience much vaster than any of them could have reasonably anticipated.

  Afrika Bambaataa (b. 1957), the son of Jamaican and Barbadian immigrants, grew up in the Bronx River Projects with Black Nationalist and Black Muslim relatives. In 1971, as a result of a court mandate to desegregate, Bambaataa and other black students were bused to
a previously all-white Bronx high school. The story played out for Bambaataa as it did for so many African Americans. He got caught up in the extreme racial tensions in the school, becoming a warlord for a local gang. Fortunately, though, the teenager freed himself from the cycle of violence he’d become a part of and began honing his skills as a DJ. In 1975, after winning a trip to Africa—quite a prize for an essay contest—Bambaataa returned to the Bronx and founded the Zulu Nation, what has since become a veritable (and some would say venerable) institution.

  The Zulu Nation was about not just music but also a “way of life.” Its Seven Infinity Lessons prescribed rules and philosophies for its members, echoing the Nation of Islam and US in language and style, but with one very significant difference: Bambaataa was a proponent of integration, if not in the traditional sense (which America had come to see as being court-ordered), then in a spiritual one. Part Martin Luther King and part Malcolm X, Bambaataa, in his own innovative way, was helping to integrate the racially divided Bronx.

  His music reflected that commitment to unity. In 1981, his first single, the appropriately named “Planet Rock,” commingled the music of spaghetti westerns, the German electronic band Kraftwerk, and the Nigerian performer Fela Kuti over his own beats and scratches. Bambaataa’s mixing of black and white music in one record led to the musical and cultural coming together of the until-then divergent populations of the Bronx and lower Manhattan—black street kids and white punks from the art scene. Hip-hop historian Jeff Chang called Bambaataa “the generative figure, the Promethean firestarter of the hip-hop generation…. The iron doors of segregation that the previous generation had started to unlock were battered down by the pioneers of the hip-hop generation. Soon hip-hop was not merely all-city; it was global—Planet Rock.”25