To do so, each state legislature must conduct research to identify exploitative companies, and proceed with legislation to recover what amounts to stolen assets. Recovery is separate from reparations, and relates to stolen property. While the process for reparations may coincide with recovery, each must be viewed distinctly. For example, based on the investments that were made with that stolen property, reparations deal with injury over time and opportunity lost. If today I were to take $50,000 from you and hold it for twenty years, you would lose your house, you would lose your property, you would be unable to send your child to school, and your world would come apart. If you catch me twenty years later, I cannot just pay you; there must be recovery and restitution for the robbery. That is a real issue for African-American people, and it must now take on the dignity, if you will, of legislative action. It cannot just be seen as something that the mad people on the margin talk about. The fight for research, recovery, restitution, and reparations must be systematized, as was the process which robbed so many for so long. The process must be mainstreamed.
Another example of historical continuity is the connection between the Revolutionary War fought by enslaved Africans in St. Domingue and the expansion of America. In 1799, the French general Napoleon ordered an army to St. Domingue to put down a rebellion by colonized slaves. Waging and winning a war of attrition over several years, the enslaved Africans eventually established the first republic in the Western Hemisphere and named it Haiti. We now know that the defeat of the French armies in St. Domingue, Napoleon’s most prized possession overseas, was a major factor in his decision to sell the Louisiana territory to the United States.
The land from this purchase, extending from New Orleans up to Montana, doubled America in size. Without the Louisiana Purchase, America would not have been able to expand westward. Likewise, railroads would never have been built. Later, the U.S. government, under the Railroad Act, gave away all railroad properties—thousands of acres, six miles extending on either side of the tracks—to whites only. Consequently, the prosperity of the South, the settling of the West, the building of the railroads, all were triggered by the work and deeds of Africans and Chinese, whether they were coming from Africa or from the Caribbean or China. Thus, the exploitation of race has been a huge factor in the development of America.
In many ways, the tentacles of oppression that suck the blood and energy of African Americans are still real though less obvious. For example, every day, the media projects African Americans as less intelligent than we are, less hardworking, less patriotic, and more violent. In some sense it helps set a certain negative, limited parameter of our human value. We speak of the humiliation of police profiling, but the more basic profiling for the masses of our people is much more humiliating. African-American people, like me, pay more for insurance. We pay more for our home mortgages, we pay more for bank loans, and we pay more for our automobile financing. Predatory exploitation is a multibillion-dollar industry driven by race. In some cases, entire zip codes are used to exclude; sometimes they use other schemes, such as “payday loans.” But if we pay more for less, and get fewer services, and live in stress, then we do not live as long.
If I were writing a Freedom Symphony in four movements, the first movement—the dominant movement—would reflect the abolition of slavery as an institution, by law, although we had no educational rights and no economic rights. The second movement would be about the end of legalized racial segregation, which was another phase of economic exploitation. The third movement would be about access to the right to vote for all citizens, a movement and struggle unto itself. But one can be out of slavery, out of legal segregation, have the right to vote, and still starve to death, because none of those movements dealt with the economic infrastructure. They were all about our legal status; about changes to the law. None of them put forward any plan for economic recovery or economic restitution or economic restructuring.
American “apartheid” was ended as a matter of law, but unless one has some plan to offset the economic denial and exploitation, then the racial denial continues. Therefore, the fourth movement of the Freedom Symphony is the quest for economic restructuring, restitution, and recovery. It is the mastery of the financial system under which we live. By and large, the wealth of this country is within the private sector, which represents 80 percent of all jobs. That is why in the fourth movement of the symphony, we must now become shareholders and not just sharecroppers.
Being a shareholder in America’s growth and development requires personal responsibility. Personal initiative and discipline, punctuality, a thirst for educational excellence, valuing preparation over pregnancy, and abstinence from mind-altering drugs have to do with will. However, the structural crisis afflicting African Americans cannot be ameliorated exclusively through the agency of individual will. For example, if you have a size 9 foot and a size 8 shoe, individual initiative and manipulation of your toes will not keep you from damaging your feet. There’s a structural context for your individual efforts, and in time, walking with a size 9 foot in a size 8 shoe will increase your pain so much that you will give up; you will just stop walking. You’ll spend your time trying to anesthetize your pain, whether with drugs or other forms of gratification. You will figure that since you cannot change the structural context, short-term fun is easier than preparing for your future. For the economically exploited and oppressed, life is not worth fighting all the time. Some rationalize they will never possess a size 9 shoe for their size 9 foot, and relinquish hope.
The real struggle has to be about structural change. Why are we so good as African-American people in golf, football, basketball, baseball, track, and tennis? These sports require the most of any human being in terms of correlating more than cognitive skills. To be a professional athlete, you must be the best in the whole world, exceeding others of whatever race, class, or religion anywhere. Why are we so good in these endeavors? Some would say because African Americans have an athletic genetic superiority. The answer is rooted in the structure of American society. Whenever the playing field is even and the rules are public and the goals are clear, we can advance to the next level. Who becomes the best basketball player in Boston is determined by objective criteria: who gets the most rebounds, shoots the most points, makes the most assists, and plays the best defense. Who becomes president of Harvard University is very subjective. Anyone who watches a basketball game can see how the players handle the ball. The president of Harvard is chosen behind closed doors.
African Americans do not do as well in situations where decisions subject to cultural influence are made in private. We do better when the playing field is even. In some sense, we are making more progress in the army than in the society as a whole, because at least if you have more stripes than the other person, they must respect status that is born out of the structure of stripes and bars and leaves.
The mission of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition is to defend, protect, and gain civil rights, by leveling the playing field in every aspect of American life and spreading peace around the world. The point, it seems to me, is that America has too quickly defined the civil rights struggle as having ended back in the days of civil rights protest and activism. What is Rainbow’s objective? It is to even the playing field. Is there even access to medicine? No. Is there even access to who may be a judge? No. Is there even access in who may run for governor? No. Is there even access in who will receive construction contracts? No. Most of the field in America is yet uneven. Where the field is uneven defines our agenda.
The most basic step within the goal of economic restructuring is access to education, because strong minds bring strong change. Think about the slavery system. The slave owner had the right to rape the woman on his property, anytime he wanted. Had the right to hang the black man for trying to escape brutal work conditions, or for striking a white man, or for lying with a white woman. African Americans lived under degrading conditions and under the slave owner’s rights. Wouldn’t let you go to church, his
rights. If a slave master were caught teaching you to read or write, even he could be punished, because even in slavery, they knew that strong minds break strong chains.
Maybe the most disappointing aspect of our struggle today is that there is a generation of young African Americans who no longer see getting an education as defiance, as rebellion—who no longer understand that the right to learn is a revolutionary act. To learn is an act of defiance, because there is so much strength in education. To the extent that we accept mediocrity and do less than our best academically, while exceeding the norm in athletics, we are accepting an equation we cannot settle for if we are to catch up to other Americans.
If you compare Neuqua Valley High School in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois, to a high school on the South Side of Chicago, for example, you view the imbalance in the American public school system. Neuqua Valley High is forty-five minutes outside Chicago, in a suburb called Naperville. It has a 14:1 student–teacher/staff ratio. It has a Library Media Center with more than twelve thousand books. The library has thirty-six networked computers. The school has cushioned carpets. It has a pool and several gyms. Some of the veteran teachers earn $72,000. Real estate brokers refer to the school in newspaper ads. On Sundays, local churches rent space in the school and the community sponsors programs using the gymnasia and one of two Olympic-sized pools. In other words, what you have is a school industrial complex, as opposed to a jail industrial complex. In that environment, students tend to rise to expectations.
People with education take the roof off of their dreams. They say, “Why can’t I be president of Harvard? If Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter can be president of the United States, why can’t I be? Why can’t I be a U.S. senator?” The people who are the most educated are the most likely to raise those questions. Not always, but most often. Giving up on education is a mind-flipping process. That is why I try to lay out the movements of the Freedom Symphony and their impact on the oppressed and the oppressor. If one stage is to end slavery, that is the movement as the oppressed defined it. That was not “the thing” for the slave masters; that was the thing for the oppressed. If the movement was to end legal segregation, that was not the movement for the segregator; that was our movement. If the thing was to get the right to vote, oppressors were not in agreement. Today there must be a movement for access to capital, industry, technology, and economic recovery. If that becomes the thing to do, then we begin to raise economic questions having to do with historical continuity. The militant thing to do today is to find out how much pension monies there are in each state, and whether common people may share in those monies. The militant thing to do today is to find out which insurance companies had race-based premiums and how much do they make and in what do they invest. The militant thing to do today is to fight for our share of education, because education is one of our strongest weapons. Let us not forget that if we are going to even the playing field, those most likely to even that field are those who have the equipment to do so.
People who are living with low roofs on their dreams develop lifestyles to match. We hear about how many black women get pregnant and get abortions. We do not hear as much discussion about how many white women get pregnant and get abortions. This type of focus always assumes that something is wrong with the behavior of black people. Many poor people smoke cigarettes. Most poor people have poor dietary habits. Most poor folk do not take regular exercise. The things that middle-class people do, most poor people, who are black, do not do. There is a culture of poverty. The more that people are educationally and financially liberated, the more their behavior changes. That is why the movement of getting access to capital, industry, technology, and economic recovery has become the big challenge.
I grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, living in legal segregation, but I did have an infrastructure of support. I had parents and teachers with high expectations, because in segregation there was the sense that we had to prove we could win against those odds. My family moved “up to the projects,” and we bought a car at the same time—private transportation. My father purchased a 1948 Hudson in 1957. But it was our car. The point of it was, we moved to the “other side” of town.
I remember Mrs. Sara Valena Shelton, one of my favorite teachers. I shall never forget her. When we moved, we came to her class, the middle class. Children do not quite know what teachers to avoid once their family lives on the new side of town. There were two sixth-grade classes, and one was very overcrowded, with maybe seventy students. One had maybe five students, maybe six. So this was logical to me: I should sit where there are a lot of seats. I did not know why those who had been there the year before had gone to another class. I did not know there was a class where the teacher was less likely to challenge them. Other students avoided Mrs. Shelton’s class. So Mrs. White, who was our principal, came and evened the classes out.
One day Mrs. Shelton walked in with a certain military rigidity and she said, “Good morning.” And we said, “Good morning, Mrs. Shelton.” And we sat upright. She started writing long words on the board, and we thought she thought it was the eighth grade, because they were big words to the class. Suddenly she turned and said, “I know this is the sixth grade, not the eighth, and these are no longer big words; these are polysyllabic terms. Over there is a dictionary and there is something called Roget’s Thesaurus, and beyond that toilet there is something called the Dewey decimal classification system in the library. And furthermore, I will not teach down to you. One of you little brats might run for president or governor one day, and I do not want to be made ashamed, so listen to me intently.”
When I ran for the presidential nomination in 1984, Mrs. Shelton had retired from teaching. In 1985, running on the Democratic ticket, she became one of a very few African-American members of the House of Representatives in South Carolina in the last century. The teacher who said she would not “teach down” to us was on the same party ticket as one of her former students. There was that sense of the quality of the teacher. These same teachers, I might add, who taught us on Monday through Friday also shopped at the same grocery store with our parents. They went to the same church. Even if your parents missed a PTA meeting, Mrs. Shelton would see your mother at church, and your mother would know if you were acting up at school.
Individuals dream past their reality to survive. They can stand up and say, “I am somebody!” If you have self-affirmation, you keep fighting back. If you have self-affirmation, then you define yourself as “free,” much like the enslaved Dred Scott did in 1857. If you have self-esteem, you can be a Rosa Parks, you can be a Martin King. Keep pushing forward. If you stop asserting yourself, then you will not change the structure of the laws under which you live, and that is the tension between individual will and the structural crisis. If the structure is bad, you do not change it by surrendering. You change it by acts of defiance and acts of assertion. And people who are the most likely to do that are the ones whose ambition has been cultivated by education.
We do ourselves a disservice when we underestimate lack of access to equal education, lack of access to equal insurance, lack of access to equal employment, lack of access to capital, lack of access to universities. So let’s not underestimate those things. On the other hand, I say that we all have the burden of doing our best against the odds. That is why coaches are so successful, because they cut it real hard in terms of what you must do to win. Recently, I was speaking at a school in Newark with about two thousand kids. I said to a basketball player standing near the equipment shed, can anybody dunk? Oh, we can dunk. So I said, how many hours do you practice a day? They said, about three and a half. I said, what time? Six to nine-thirty. That’s homework time; they had some superintendents sitting there. Six to nine-thirty. How many days a week? Six. I said, well, do you ever have any radios in practice? Oh no. A TV in practice? No. I said, well, suppose you were running and you get real tired, can you sit down? No. What do you do? You have to suck it up. I said, wait a minute, six days a week, four hours a day, no radi
o, no TV, no telephone. You’re good. You’re good at what you work at. That’s why we excel in football, basketball, baseball, and track, because we work at it.
Given how the culture is, if one says to a white suburban coach, this year you must coach at a predominantly black inner-city school, he doesn’t like that; he considers that to be punishment. It is the same thing if I want the physics and math teachers to go to that school. They say no, or, I am going down there but I am not sure they can learn; I am not sure their parents will help. I am not sure they have enough equipment. I am not sure I can park my car. Their cultural bias kicks in. But I submit to you that in poor and under-served neighborhoods, the same place where the athletes come from and musicians come from, scientists come from the same area, and scholars come from that same area, but the athletic entertainment dimensions are more exploitable; they are the more commercial “cotton pickers.” Therefore, there are more ways out as athlete and as singer than as scholar. There are more young black men getting scholarships who play basketball or football than there are young black men getting scholarships in medicine.
The result of what I would call the system in crisis is that there are now nearly 1 million African-American men in jail and more than 2 million black men in the criminal justice system, including those on probation and parole. There are only 625,000 African-American men in college. More young black men in jail than college. In 2002, there was a daily average of 11,200 inmates compared to about 10,000 beds in the Cook County Jail in Chicago. Most of the young black inmates there are high school dropouts. Forty percent of these young men are in jail on nonviolent drug charges. If those who are at Cook County Jail and other jails on a nonviolent drug charge were let out with an ankle or wrist bracelet and monitored, conditional upon their mastering some trade or getting a GED, America would then have more young black men in college than in jail.
America Behind the Color Line Page 47