America Behind the Color Line (48 page)

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 honeybee 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

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.

If you had gone to Tuskegee or Fisk or Howard and you were dark and you had some money, then you fitted in. If you were light-skinned, like Earl B. Dickerson and that group of people—in other words, if you looked white— they figured eventually you would struggle into the money. They figured white people didn’t have no right to be poor. So we had lawyers and doctors and businesspeople living in the area along with maids and janitors and unemployed people and working-class people. It was a whole self-contained colored world.

In my block there was Dr. Dawson, brother of the late congressman William L. Dawson. There were many others whose names I can’t recall. There was Bob Carroll, whose father associated with the big ministers in New York and in Europe, and they would come to his house and we would meet them. I’d be looking at Dr. Dawson and I would say to myself, I can be like that. We played together, Dr. Dawson’s son and daughter and all those people. We played basketball and softball, and we were equal.

The change in the character of the community began to come at the beginning of World War II, December 7, 1941, when there was again a need— as there had been during World War I—for cheap labor. The restrictions on certain potential immigrants from Europe then made jobs available for well-trained Southern young men and women of that period. They flocked north because there was very little work for them in the South, given the kind of training they had.

That was the first flood of primarily young African Americans, male and female, and the start of the second Great Migration. As World War II went on, it gave rise to inventions, particularly in the field of agriculture. Agriculture became more mechanized. One example would be the invention of the cotton picker, which meant that the labor of the people who had worked in the fields of Mississippi and Arkansas, in the tobacco fields and other places, was now unnecessary. So the people of the second Great Migration were mostly from the rural agricultural South. They came to Chicago with less training and less motivation. They had been isolated in these areas of the South in the cotton fields and tobacco fields and other large plantation-like places. They’d been denied the opportunity for education, and their reading ability was scanty. The wave of new immigrants, pushed off the land in the South, came north with almost no context. They didn’t have relatives already living in the North, and they brought with them a different culture. Many times their hopes and dreams were not that big. They’d heard of the Promised Land of Chicago, where there were plenty of jobs, a diversity of job opportunities. There was a saying during the first migration, when my mother and father came north: if you can’t make it Chicago, you can’t make it anywhere. That meant that if you got without a job in one place, the stockyards, for example, you’d go to a steel mill or some other place. It was very open to colored labor, to cheap labor.

But even if you were skilled, as my father was, you could not get a job that surpassed that of a white person. And very few colored people could get into the craft unions. Very few of the bricklayers, the painters, and decorators. In fact, I gave testimony on this before Adam Clayton Powell’s committee in Washington, D.C., on the issue of the exclusion of blacks from the opportunity to get into apprenticeships. It had to be based on your lineage, on your uncle or your papa or someone in your family. It was very select. And so blacks hadn’t got in, even though many of the blacks from the South had experience in the crafts, like the sheet metal workers.

The people in the first migration, though they had been the children of slaves, stopped in places like Birmingham before they came to big cities like Chicago. Many people don’t realize that in the first migration, more black people moved from the rural South to the urban South than moved from the South to the North. They were urbanized even though they may not have been urbane. They became urbane through the experiences that were cited to them by the friends they met in the urbanized North. They were pretty sophisticated politically, particularly. It is important for people to know that the first black American to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the twentieth century was Oscar Stanton De Priest, from Chicago, in 1928. He was elected to the Seventy-first Congress and the two succeeding Congresses.

There was a political sensitivity in that group who comprised the first migration. My mother told us that my father would put his gun in his pocket and go vote in Birmingham. He was considered a “crazy nigger.” There were a few like that. My mother persuaded my father to leave the South and come to Chicago, because she feared for his safety; she dragged him into the city, practically.

The reason my father got away with his attitude in the South, I was told, is that my family name, Black, derives from the family name of Hugo Black. According to the oral history of my family, all of my grandparents were born in slavery. When I was about six years old, my father told my brother and me that his own father was a slave in the home of Hugo Black’s father in Alabama. It was customary in those days for slave masters to impose their family name on their slaves so that people would know who owned them. Thus my father was considered a Hugo Black “nigger.” And there was some favoritism toward my grandfather and his family because of the relationship with the Black family— a relationship that was respected by the larger, hostile white community. During their lifetime, my grandfather and my father continued to have communication with Hugo Black and his family in Alabama.

Here’s a little sidebar in connection with that story. When Hugo Black was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1937, I went to my dad in anger. I had just graduated from high school and thought I knew something. When I said to my dad—who didn’t care for white people at all, particularly white men— “The president has nominated an ex–Ku Klux Klansman,” my dad put a cigar in his mouth and said, “He’ll be all right.” I thought my dad had gone crazy. But Hugo Black turned out to be one of the most liberal Supreme Court justices on all issues. He was a very unusual man.