America Behind the Color Line

by Henry Louis Gates

  What I’m doing today in integrating the Church of the Reconciler is not typical in Birmingham. We are a multicultural, multiracial United Methodist congregation. It’s radical. There’s nobody else doing this in Birmingham. Despite all the press about the New South, nobody else is doing it. Come let us make money together, and let’s don’t go to church together. Let’s don’t go to school together. You might live near me if you’re as rich as I am, but don’t stand in your front yard, please.

  There’s one black minister in a white church here, and there are a few black members, but not many. They have additionally been serving another church that was totally white, so everything is on the back of that black minister. He has to be white; he has to carry all that burden as the pastor. There’s not any power sharing with the community or interest in sharing the power of building an inclusive experiment. I have two sons who are Methodist preachers, and they’re both with churches here in Birmingham that are completely white. My older son is married to a Methodist preacher who is one of the pastors of First Methodist, a predominantly white church. I think they may have some African-American members, but it’s not an interracial congregation. So as Dr. King said, eleven o’clock on Sunday remains the most segregated hour in America. And that’s still pretty much the case in Birmingham.

  Yet integration has to come to Birmingham, because if we don’t integrate, we don’t know one another. If we don’t know one another, we’re afraid of one another. If we’re afraid of one another, we’re gonna hate one another. And if we hate one another, James Baldwin’s message in The Fire Next Time will cease to be prophecy; it will be realized. Integration is necessary for life, not just for Birmingham but for the world. If we can’t integrate in Birmingham, they’re not going to be able to integrate in Jerusalem, and we’ve got to learn how to love enough to do that. Not to change you or change me, but for me to be able to love you and you love me even though we’re different, and for us to have the strength that comes from that, so we can address the problems of the world.

  This is going to happen only through work. Hard work. Time will not solve it. Building churches that go through the healing process, that work through the separation of black and white, will help solve it. Suffering. Suffering. If Dr. King came back from the grave right now and took a tour of Birmingham, he’d be sad. I haven’t done the statistics, but I bet when he preached the sermon on the American dream, he was talking about the number of black children who were in integrated schools and the number of black children who were in poor, low-quality schools. The quality of a school in America is still determined by whether it’s white or black, and he would be very sad about that. He would also be brokenhearted that the black leadership in America is not continuing his struggle for justice and inclusiveness, but has gone after the greed thing as the form of integration. Bad. Bad. Learning to be as greedy as us white males.

  Dr. King would also be devastated by the poverty in America today. Poverty in America is atrocious, and it’s being hidden. He would be deeply devastated by the prison system and by what’s going on in the prisons, and by the number of black men and women that are in prison and the unbelievable abuse they’re receiving. He would be terribly devastated, without question. The percentage of women in prison in America who are black has gone up about 800 percent since the federal drug laws brought on mandatory sentencing in 1986. That’s compared to a 400 percent increase in the number of all women in American prisons since 1986. The number of black women in jail rose twice as fast as the number of women prisoners from the population as a whole. A third of black men in America are in prison, on parole, or on probation. The percentage of black men in jail in America is eight times what it was at the height of apartheid in South Africa. And it’s still legal in America to have slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment is still legal. Slavery has been eliminated except in the punishment of a crime. All those work gangs in the prison constitute slavery. They make you a criminal, then they make you a slave.

  My daddy was a manager of the Norton plant in Huntsville. The way they dealt with the labor issue in Huntsville was to make sure the guy that was stirring up the labor trouble got hired at the Redstone Arsenal, got a big job that pulled him out of the way. All the black leadership was getting the big jobs; they’re moving into the white system. So the American dream becomes the equivalent of being white American, of having what white America has, not the vision of justice and human dignity for all people. Come, let us make money together. And you use the criminal justice system to keep the poor and the blacks down.

  We have a black mayor, we’ve got a black city council, we have black people everywhere in Birmingham. But that’s not progress. Power is not in the elected officials anymore. It’s in the same place it’s always been. One of the real pains of my journey in Birmingham has been seeing our elected officials made out to look like fools all the time, ’cause they’re elected by the populace but the populace has no power. The black elected officials have no power to do anything, so they become the pawns of the same power structure. They’re just a different color; the same kinds of things get done.

  That’s how it was with the Metropolitan Gardens. It’s the best public housing community in Birmingham, probably the best in the southeastern United States. It was torn down, and the people who lived there dispersed. It’s the same thing that took place in South Africa, same thing that’s taking place in Israel. They didn’t sell the property to yuppies; they gave it to yuppies. They gave it to contractors to build a new public housing community that is inclusive and mixed income. But they used the Greater Birmingham area as the basis for determining the city’s median income. They came up with $35,000, $40,000, when the real mean income of the city is much lower. The average income of the population that had been there was six thousand. So everybody who lived there is excluded from moving back there.

  This may appear very clever politically, but you can’t keep doing that without someday incurring massive violence. You cannot do it. You cannot continue to relocate poor people who live in areas with the greatest concentration of poverty and crime—shove them out, use the police to keep them out, and criminalize them if they come in. The legal aspects of things are very different from the real power. Public accommodations are pretty well integrated. You can go just about anywhere you want to. But you’re not gonna have any power sharing.

  Jesus said, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s why it’s important for the congregations to be mixed. Because until you’re together in worship and in community, you don’t know how to love. Until you can love somebody who’s different than you are, you don’t know how to love. Racial integration is a schoolhouse of love. If all you do is be with people like yourself, you don’t even know what Jesus was talking about. You don’t know what love can be or what it is being until you’re placed in the situation where you can’t ever do anything right, where you’re at cultural odds, caught between the culture and the counterculture, and you discover you can still love across those gaps.

  Many well-educated black people choose to live in predominantly black neighborhoods, with other well-educated black people. Well, nothing is more wrong with that than white folks choosing to live in white neighborhoods with white folks. It’s segregation, and it will breed supremacy and inferiority. It cannot but do that.

  Segregation is still a sin. Human beings ought to be able to interact together equally and freely. We can be as black as we can be and as white as we can be and we can love one another and we can care. You can care for my children and I can care for yours with all the passion of our heart. And until we can do that, then we’re headed down the road to hell.

  We hear so much about the New South, so much about the new Birmingham. We hear that Birmingham has shed its skin, has turned the corner. There’s a new horizon. Well, all right. It is new. It is very new, very good. We have started an interracial church in Birmingham. That’s it; that is the new. Of course, we’re not primarily considered interracial anymore. We
’re a church for the homeless, and so we’ve been categorized as the church for the poor.

  Finally, thank God, on May 22, 2002, a jury convicted Bobby Frank Cherry of first-degree murder in the killing of the four girls in Birmingham in 1963. Thomas Blanton, Jr., was convicted in 2001. And so it is a new Birmingham. Richard Arrington Jr. Boulevard runs all the way from the crest of Red Mountain to the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Complex, and it encompasses about twenty-five city blocks in the heart of downtown Birmingham. It’s been a battle, a horrendous battle. And Birmingham knows that Birmingham cannot exist if we don’t first deal with the racial issue and then put forth that better image. We work hard at an image. We spend a lot of money on image and sharing that image and sharing that history. King said the thing he feared the most was going from a small ghetto to a bigger one. In Birmingham, there’s a big black ghetto, except for the city center.

  We want to let people know that people who are different can love one another and worship together and be in church together. You can write all the books you want to about this, you can do anything else you want to, but if you haven’t got money, it doesn’t mean a thing. We have a black and white church; rich and poor church. We have to work on both race and class issues. Racist attitudes have never been addressed theologically in Birmingham. The Southern Methodist and Southern Baptist Churches still hold the theology of America, not just in the South but throughout America.

  Over the years, I’ve turned to four spiritual friends who help sustain me. I read and listen to Martin King’s sermons, and they never dry up. A second friend is John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. A third is the great African-American theologian Howard Thurman, whose book The Strange Freedom has nurtured me. And then William Stringfellow, a lawyer, a layperson who worked in Harlem in a ministry similar to mine and who was a great theologian even though he was not trained as a theologian. I spend a great deal of time with these guys. I live with them. I interact with them. And I ask them a lot of questions.

  I got a call from the Promised Land at midnight one night. I answered the phone and it was a couple and they said, Preacher, we’ve got an apartment with carpet on the floor. Our kid is in day care. I’m enrolled in the community college, and there’s public transportation here; we don’t even need a car, Preacher. And they called from the Promised Land. It was a dream. There’s still no landlord-tenant bill in Alabama. Our constitution is still the same old constitution. Change is slow, but it’s happening. Scott Douglas went to Huntsville to a meeting on constitutional reform, and that’s wonderful. It’s a beautiful thing. In twenty or thirty years from now, race relations in the South will be better. A lot better. It’s different now; it’s better. They haven’t killed me; they don’t kill people who stay with it. Right, now. All right. That’s a big thing. I honor that big thing. It is a huge thing. The laws are better. If a black couple goes out together in Birmingham, nobody’s gonna lynch them anymore out in these hollows. But they better be careful. It’s sad, but it’s for real.

  I did a wedding for a mixed couple—black man, white woman, married right here in the church—and they suffered massively. It was probably three years ago. The woman had a baby boy from a previous relationship with a black man. They were living in an apartment and the landlord would not fix the gas leak and the kid got CO2 poisoning. They called me, and I had to carry the child to the hospital ’cause their car was broken and the guy where they’d had it in the shop wouldn’t fix the car because they were an interracial couple. Now, that was a black mechanic, and he wouldn’t fix the car because the black man was married to a white woman. The man’s rage was unbelievable because of the experience that he had, suffering like that. They finally bought a ticket to California and left Birmingham.

  Racism is an addiction. It’s an addiction to power. An addiction to privilege and supremacy, and that’s very addictive stuff. And to lay that down, to acknowledge that you’re powerless over those things, is to begin to relate to people and identify the humanity and value of every human being, and to give up what the white male God provides for you. But doing that is a lifetime journey. Recovery from racism is recovery for life. It’s a healing, a wholeness that you have to work through in order to get reconnected with human life. Crack cocaine is the flip side of racism. That’s why we have such a huge hunger for crack cocaine. People have internalized the racism, so they stone themselves, they get stoned. We even use that language. And so the racists stone people, de-humanize people, classify, categorize, and discriminate against people. Recovering from a crack cocaine addiction is the flip side of recovering from the racism addiction—from addiction to the power and privilege and domination.

  Birmingham was the center of so much hatred and so much evil. It’s a symbol for racism. So many terrible things happened here that it would be marvelous if Birmingham could symbolize the transformation in American race relations. But Birmingham as a city is not yet a recovering racist. We want to deal with the image, not the reality. We want to do the things that look good, that make us feel good. But when it comes down to walking down the street and dealing with all of these issues, we don’t want to do that. We’re a whole lot more comfortable, black and white, in our respective segregated contexts.

  CARMEN JOHNSON

  The Big House

  “What we’re finding is that when we sell to someone coming down from the North,” Atlanta real estate agent Carmen Johnson told me, “within a month or two we have their sister looking down here, their mother, and their best friend . . . Georgia now is a melting pot, and a black mecca. . . The white businesspeople here have opened the market to us. I think they have realized the power of the black dollar.”

  When I first moved to the East Coast from California, I lived for five years in Atlanta and then moved to Snellville, where I’ve been for the past seven years. Snellville is about twenty miles northeast of central Atlanta, in Gwinnett County, which is known for its school district. I’m a Realtor.

  My mother was in computers before they were widely used; she worked as a data processor at Hughes Aircraft. My father was a car salesman in Los Angeles. He was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1913. But once he moved away, he never wanted to come back because of the prejudice that existed here in Georgia.

  My father has been dead thirty years now, and he would never have dreamed in a million years that his daughters would want to move back to Georgia. But Georgia now is a melting pot, and a black mecca. It is culturally diverse. Entrepreneurs are drawn here. My sister and I own a Coldwell Banker franchise in Snellville. I don’t think I would have ever been able to own a Coldwell Banker in California. Several other black franchises have opened here in Atlanta this past year. The white businesspeople here have opened the market to us. I think they have realized the power of the black dollar. In the past year, Coldwell Banker has actively recruited minorities to come into the franchise. So with all the big corporations that have relocated here in the last twelve years, along with the highest percentage of black entrepreneurship and black-owned companies in the Fortune 500, Atlanta has drawn blacks from the North.

  The first black woman mayor in the United States was elected here in Atlanta. Shirley Franklin won the election of November 2001 and was inaugurated on January 7, 2002. We’re very proud of that. It has helped African Americans to feel very comfortable about relocating in this area and starting their businesses here. Of course, when Maynard Jackson was elected mayor of Atlanta in 1973, he was the first African American to serve as mayor of any major Southern city in the nation. And then we had Andrew Young and William C. Campbell as mayors. So since 1973, every mayor of Atlanta has been African American.

  I think Atlanta is the only place in the world with such a high incidence of black entrepreneurship. The government is predominantly minority. Therefore, it’s very easy to come in with a company and get a network among your peers here in Atlanta. The ethnic makeup is so diverse in Atlanta that it is easy for someone to come here and go into business and be successful.
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br />   People of African-American descent from the North are coming back to the South. They’re coming back for all the economic advantages we have here, like employment opportunities and the affordable cost of living, and they want to live here with other black people. I think it’s no different than in other cultures. People tend to want to be around their own for social reasons. They want their children to be exposed to their own culture. Those are the types of reasons I’ve heard from people moving down here. They want to live near family and friends from their own communities.

  And then there’s the property tax. You can get so much house down here at such a low property-tax rate that it’s a win-win for people retiring out of the North with big homes they can sell. They come down here and pay cash and live regally. Our property tax, on average, is 1.25 percent of the sales price of the house, whereas up in New York it’s 3 to 4 percent. So you could come here and have a beautiful home for half a million dollars while up in New York, for the same amount, you’d have a relatively small home on a very small lot.

  People from the North come down and ask, how much is that house again? How much land is that house on? They are so pleasantly surprised. What we’re finding is that when we sell to someone coming down from the North, within a month or two we have their sister looking down here, their mother, and their best friend. The referrals just keep coming, because once they get down here and get situated, they scope out everything for the family. Then the family starts coming down here piece by piece as they put their affairs in order up in the North. Whole families are moving down here together, and friends are too.

  I moved from California to Atlanta because of my children’s education. In California, a lot of the children don’t go on to college, and I knew that in Georgia, a higher percentage of the children do attend college. I’m very glad I made the move. Both of my children turned out to be college graduates and have a great career ahead of them. My older daughter is a computer database manager. My younger daughter did her undergraduate work at Clark, and now she’s at Meharry Medical College.