America Behind the Color Line (19 page)
It’s not about black people becoming the swing element and electing candidates when white people divide their votes. I think we should be the leadership in helping to create new political paradigms in our country. The Independent Movement is made up of people who are interested in independent politics and who care about political reform, about making the process work and having more participation from ordinary people. In the black community, there are some people who are of that sentiment and some people who are not. Introducing the Independent element into the voting process makes it possible for black people to give further consideration to who they are politically. A lot of blacks are not going to go back to the Republican Party. People who have both built and are committed to the Democratic Party project that party as the place you go when you’re black. Putting a new party in the mix and raising the contradictions—the failures, in my opinion—of the Democratic Party relative to empowering our community help to make black people take themselves more seriously as voters.
We live in a capitalist society, and we sure could benefit more from it than we currently do. The system knows how to make us work for it, so we should figure out how to get something out of that. I think that’s extremely important.
The Black Belt
If the new black middle class is far more socially conscious than skeptics like the philosopher Herbert Marcuse or sociologists like E. Franklin Frazier predicted they would be, perhaps one reason for this is a keen awareness that these dramatic economic gains were enabled by the Civil Rights Movement and its by-product, affirmative action. Few of the members of the middle class whom I interviewed have any doubts that without the hard-won gains of the movement, they would not have been privy to the educational and economic opportunities that enabled them to develop their talents and abilities and excel in the broader American society. Despite their individual achievements, and the great gains that these achievements reflect, however, most still worry about, and confront, racism, and most feel that their class positions remain somewhat perilous. Perhaps the two biggest surprises— certainly to me—about the collective behavior of members of the black middle class are, first, their deep and abiding embrace of black culture and of a black cultural–nationalist social identity and, second, the desire of many to live in their
own
neighborhoods with other black middle-class people, and to do so, in growing numbers, “back home,” in the South. Reverse migration, from the North, Midwest, and the West to Southern cities such as Atlanta, is one of the most important cultural phenomena to have emerged within Black America since Dr. King’s death in 1968.
In 1963, the largest civil rights march in history took place in Washington, D.C. Washington was located where it is because at the time that it was chosen to be the seat of government, it was geographically at the center of the United States. So it has always marked the gateway to the South. I was always afraid to go to the South, because the South for a black person was the home of racism, the Klan, segregation, a litter of crosses, and the corpses of black men. But it was also the home of the Civil Rights Movement and the greatest civil rights leader of all, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was here that he gave the greatest speech of his life, in August of 1963, when he said, “I have a dream.”
The Civil War may have freed the black population of the South from slavery, but life remained a nightmare of poverty and terror. Racial segregation was the law of the land. Right up to the 1960s, most blacks in the South couldn’t vote, and they couldn’t own land even if they could afford to. Black men could be lynched capriciously, arbitrarily. My father used to joke that all Southern cities had a sign hanging at their outskirts. The sign read nigger! read and run . . . and if you can’t read, run anyway! But if the South was the repository of our people’s worst nightmares, it has always been our spiritual home, the cradle of the African-American culture.
As a result of racist terror, millions of African Americans fled to Northern cities in the first decades of the twentieth century, in search of a better life. Few of the migrants would ever have dreamed that, a century later, black people in the hundreds of thousands would be flocking back to the South. According to one study published recently in
Population Today
, 368,800 black people moved back to the South between 1990 and 1995; 233,000 left the Northeast. The South’s black population increased by 3,575,211 in the 1990s, according to researcher William Frey. That is an astonishing phenomenon for those of us who remember the horrors of the Civil Rights Movement.
I met the actor Morgan Freeman at the site of Dr. King’s famous speech to discuss this surprising development. Freeman was born in Memphis, Tennessee. As with many of his neighbors, his family migrated to Chicago when he was a boy. And yet despite his wealth and fame, he has chosen to return to the South and make his home in Mississippi.
“People asked me when I went home to live, after becoming a major persona in theater, in film, good Lord, what is wrong with you?” Freeman told me. “You can live anywhere in the world you want to. Why did you come here? And I said, because I can live anywhere in the world I want to, that’s why. This is home. This is where my roots are. This is where my parents are buried. This is where I’ve always felt safest.”
I wanted to know what it is about the South that’s different for a black person than the North or the West.
“We built the South, and we know it,” said Freeman. “What I own in the South isn’t because I went and bought it. What I own is my place here, because my mother, my father, my grandmother, my grandfather . . . all the way back to my great-great-great-grandmother, who happened to be a Virginian—that’s where they had the farms . . . Traveling around the country and living in different places, I could never see that any place was any better racially than Mississippi.”
“You mean you never experienced racism as a kid in the South?” I asked him.
“Of course I experienced racism as a kid in the South. But that’s not the point. Whether I experienced racism in the South is not it. It’s where else I experienced it. I don’t care anything about experiencing racism in the South; I don’t and I won’t experience it now.”
When we were growing up, our image of the South was not that of a nurturing place. The image we were raised with of the South was as the home of the Klan, a place of racism. But “you weren’t going to find any less racism in the North,” Freeman said. “It was more painful than in the South because you were given to think in the North that oh, it’s different here. You’re free, boy.”
So will he be buried there? I asked. Yes, he told me. “My mother and father are buried right here, in front of the house. I’ve come back to my home place.”
Few of us, we agreed, can go back to our home place. “But those of us who can and do, I think will be very pleased in later years,” said Freeman, “when they sit on the front porch in a rocking chair, eat watermelon, fan the flies, and say, why did we give this up in the first place?”
I have to confess that I was surprised by Freeman’s deep affection for the South. It’s not the South of my childhood memories. To find out for myself what this “New” South was like, I decided to start at Freeman’s birthplace, Memphis, situated strategically on the banks of the Mississippi River. Memphis—home of the blues, B.B. King, even Elvis—was one of the front lines in the battle for civil rights. Dr. King staged his march here in 1968 to support the sanitation workers; it was here that he was assassinated. For many of us, the Lorraine Motel, where he was slain, is sacred ground.
Dr. King spent his last night at the Lorraine Motel. He roomed there with his friend Ralph Abernathy. I wanted to see the room, which has been left exactly as it was right after Dr. King was shot. The crushed cigarettes there are a real surprise, given our ethos today. Cups of coffee half full sit on the stand by Dr. King’s bed. The bed is still turned down, exactly as he did it when he got out of bed that morning.
Dr. King was standing on the balcony with his friends. He was shot from a little window across the street. He fell backward, and the balcony, of course, was covered with blood. There’s a famous photograph of all of his friends pointing to the window across the street as the place where the shot came from. It’s astonishing and horrific that a whole political movement, a hundred-year-old movement, could be ended with one bullet shot from that window over there. Pow. Just like that.
Dr. King’s life ended in Memphis, but did his dream of a fully integrated America die with him? I decided to ask a man who spent the last forty years fighting for racial equality in this city, Mayor Willie Herenton.
“I marched with Dr. King on behalf of the sanitation workers,” the mayor told me. “We wore a sign saying i am a man. I was twenty-eight years old and I had this sign on me. The reason we had to say we were men was because of the way we were treated. We were treated like less than men.”
After a lifetime as an educator and a political activist, Dr. Herenton became the first black mayor of Memphis. Since 1991 he’s served three terms in office, and now he’s running for a fourth. Did he ever in his wildest dreams, I wondered, think that he would be the man at City Hall?
“Obviously, I never thought I’d be on the inside of this building as mayor when I was in the Civil Rights Movement. I was outside protesting against a mayor because Memphis was a mean-spirited city. Memphis was similar to many other Southern cities at the time. I remember one evening a white man got on a bus and forced my mother and me to get up. We were at the middle of the bus and he said, hey, girl, he said, you know you’re not supposed to be sitting here. And my mother and I, we got up and we sat farther in the back of the bus. I remember the separate water fountains. I remember going in the back of restaurants. You couldn’t go in the front. You had to go in the side doors of theaters. You had to go upstairs; you couldn’t go in the front of theaters. If you wanted to try on garments for size, you could not do that if you were black.”
I asked Mayor Herenton where he was when he heard the news that Dr. King had been assassinated. “I was in a leadership training program to become principal of a school,” he said. “We were having in-service the night of April 4, 1968. And we got word that Dr. King had been shot. It was unbelievable. Couldn’t believe it . . . I remember we terminated the meeting, out of shock; sent everybody home . . .
“I’d been at Mason Temple the night before when he gave his speech ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.’ That church was so crowded. It rained that night. There was a storm. It was hot inside; I could see the sweat on Dr. King’s face. The place was packed. I didn’t know it would be the last time that I’d hear him speak.
“There was no other figure like Dr. Martin Luther King,” the mayor went on. “He moved the conscience of America. And all of a sudden he’s assassinated in our city, in Memphis. This is the city where I was born. This was an event that could have occurred in any American city, but it occurred in Memphis . . . So I’ve often said that if there’s any city in America that should accentuate the values and the principles that Dr. King stood for, it’s Memphis.”
One of the most dramatic examples of how Memphis has embraced the ideals of Dr. King since 1968 is the transformation of its police force. During the Civil Rights Era, the police in the South were symbols of institutional racism, brutality, and state terror. They were the official face of white oppression. Even today I’m always frightened when I see a flashing police car speeding up behind me.
Like many black people growing up here, James Bolden was also terrified of the police. But in 1968, determined to change things, he joined the Memphis Police Department. He was one of only sixty-five black officers in a force of two thousand. Today he’s the chief.
Chief Bolden was twenty years old when Dr. King was assassinated. I asked him what the police force was like at that time. “The force was male and white-dominated,” he said. “When I came on the job, we didn’t have many aspirations of ever achieving any type of rank, because black commanding officers were practically nonexistent. There were very few black role models holding positions of rank in the Memphis Police Department. Blacks had certain areas of the city we could patrol and others we couldn’t, even as a police officer. The areas we were assigned to generally were occupied by the black community, and we didn’t police outside that community.”
In 1973, Bolden founded the Afro-American Police Association to make the police a force against racism, not an example of it. He petitioned the federal government to get more blacks hired and promoted to executive positions. “Leading an organization that was trying to bring about some change within the police department,” he said, “I was not met with open arms. There were white officers who refused to ride in a squad car with me. There were black officers who would turn their backs on me, who wouldn’t speak to me because they were afraid I would bring trouble to them.”
Did he worry that maybe an “accident” might befall him from some of his white colleagues? The fear, he told me, was with him every day. “I would go to work and sometimes I couldn’t imagine getting home at night, I was so terrified . . . Who wouldn’t be when you had to face something like that and everyone working around you was wearing guns?” Because of the threats, Father James P. Lyke, a Catholic priest, stood by Bolden’s side and rode in his squad car with him.
Finally, in 1978, the federal government agreed that there had been discrimination in the Memphis Police Department. A consent decree was entered by the city, five years after Bolden had begun his protest. Today the Memphis police force is highly diverse. “Two deputy chiefs who work under my command,” said Bolden, “are African American. Precincts throughout the city are equally divided between black and white. When I came on the job, there were no women in police work. Now we have women in leadership positions in the police department. You cannot find an area within the Memphis Police Department where minorities or blacks are not represented.
“I’ve had the distinction of living through the times when we could not drink at a water fountain, when we could not go to the library on a certain day, when we could not go to a movie, and when we couldn’t eat at a restaurant,” Bolden told me. “So for anyone to say that the South has not changed, then they’re fooling themselves.”
In just thirty years, the police and the city government of Memphis have been able to make profound changes. But is that true of other institutions throughout the South?
To find out, I went to Fort Benning, Georgia, home to more than thirty thousand raw recruits. Twenty-six percent of the U.S. Army’s active-duty soldiers are black. Historically, the army was just as segregated as the police and as the society it was charged to defend. Today the army recruitment campaign boasts that its troops are “an army of one.” I asked Lieutenant Colonel Donald Sando if the army is as integrated as it claims.
“Within our battalion, I have six companies, and two of my company commanders are black. Of the six first sergeants, three of them are black. Of the five battalions here in the Infantry Training Brigade, one of the battalion commanders is black. Three of the command sergeant majors are black . . . What I can tell you from my experience, from twenty-one years of commissioned service, is that I truly believe the army is color-blind. I truly believe that I’m color-blind . . . We promote soldiers and officers based on merit and demonstrated potential.”