Newspaper Page Text
April, 1967
THE MAROON TIGER
Page 11
Reprinted from Time Magazine
WHAT THE NEGRO HAS-AND HAS NOT—GAINED
T HE new factor in U.S. race relations and politics that has
come to be known as backlash is more than merely the
reaction of some white people to Negro rioting or cries of
“black power.” The attitude of many white Americans is in
fluenced by the belief that the Negro has made great gains in
a relatively short time, and that he now would do better to
stop agitating and consolidate what he has won. At the same
time, much of the new black militancy is a result of frustra
tion over what many Negroes consider their snail’s pace of
progress. Beneath the passion and the rhetoric, these two op
posing views pose a root question about the state of the Ne
gro in the U.S. today: just what advances have—and have
not—been made by the nation's 21 million Negroes?
The fact is that Negroes have progressed farther and fast
er than any minority in the history of the U.S.. or almost any
other nation. Considering that the drive for full equality did
not really begin until after World War II and did not achieve
the sanction of law until the Supreme Court struck down the
old “separate but equal” doctrine in 1954, the gains have
been nothing less than remarkable. Though whites still earn
far more than Negroes ($7,170 per family compared with
$3,971), Negro income has risen 24% since I960 v. only
14% for whites. Today, just over one in five Negro families
earns more than $7,000 yearly, a figure that puts them firmly
in the middle class. The Negro has enthusiastically partici
pated in the U.S.’s steadily increasing material prosperity:
nine out of ten Negro families own one (or more) televi
sion sets, two-thirds have automatic washers and more than
half own cars. Negroes own 50,000 businesses and, while
most of them are small groceries, beauty parlors or mortu
aries, the nation has about 40 Negro millionaires and many
thousands who are more than comfortably affluent.
Practically all of the gains have been made by the grow
ing Negro middle class, which still constitutes a minority of
the Negro population. That is the heart of the problem, for
it leaves behind the lower-income, semiliterate Negroes,
notably the families that are below the Government’s $3,000-
a-year poverty line. This class contains 60% of all the na
tion's Negro youths, the very people who are in the vanguard
of desire and disorder. While the income of the middle-class
Negro rises, that of this great mass of Negroes is actually
declining. During the 1960s, median family income for Ne
groes has dropped from $3,897 to $3,803 in Los Angeles’
Watts, from $4,346 to $3,729 in Cleveland's Hough district.
This great disparity has created a profound hostility be
tween the low-income Negro and his more affluent, well-
educated, middle-class brother. Demoralized, alienated and
apathetic, the slum Negro is bitterly jealous of those he
scornfully calls “white niggers.” The middle-class Negro, on
the other hand, is troubled by the riots and the chants of
"black power,” which he knows hurt his cause. The gulf be
tween the two is widened by the fact that the better-off
Negro tends to demonstrate too little concern for those he
has left behind. Almost alone among all U.S. ethnic groups,
Negroes have no significant charity supported by their own
people for their own people. The number of Negroes on the
public-welfare rolls is increasing, and one-third of the na
tion's spending for public aid, education and housing (or an
estimated $3.5 billion in all) goes to Negroes, who consti
tute only 11% of the U.S. population.
Most of the Government’s ney/ antipoverty programs are
directed toward the 2,800,000 poor Negro families. In many
ways, they get more attention than the 9,100,000 poor white
families, which are tucked away in such areas as the Appa
lachians and the Ozarks, the southern Piedmont, the Upper
Great Lakes region and the Louisiana coastal plain. Half
the people in the Job Corps and most of the preschoolers in
the Head Start program are Negroes. By the latest official
measure, poverty has been declining with equal speed among
both whites and Negroes—about 3 1 % a year—but the Ne
gro seems to have made more dramatic gains because he had
greater ground to make up. The proportion of poor families
among Negroes fell from 52.2% in 1959 to 43.1% in 1964,
while that among whites declined from 20.7% to 17.1%.
The Government figures that if all Negroes could be brought
up to the average white American’s level of affluence, em
ployment and education, the U.S. economy’s output would
climb by $27 billion a year, equal to 4% of the gross
national product.
It is almost academic to ask what the Negro wants. He
wants what the white man has. To him, that means not
only possessions but opportunity and options. It means a fair
shot at the necessities of jobs, education and housing, as well
as at the intangibles of political power, social acceptance and
a sense of pride. How much of that has he gained? Here is
a balance sheet of the Negro's recently acquired assets and his
persistent liabilities, compiled from material gathered by 30
Time correspondents throughout the U.S.:
•
JOBS. The employment situation has become incomparably
better for the middle-class Negro and worse for the lower-
class Negro. While unemployment among whites has been
declining this year and is now 3.3% , Negro unemployment
has been climbing and is now 7.8% . This is primarily be
cause the jobless rate in many black slums has soared to 25%
and automation has eliminated a lot of menial and manual
jobs traditionally held by lower-income Negroes. The overall
figure nonetheless conceals the fact that countless job op
portunities have opened for skilled and semiskilled Negroes
in the past few years.
Negro employment in the professional and technical fields
has soared 130% in the past decade; the number of Negro
lawyers has increased 50% since 1950. In the South, well-
educated Negroes are being hired for the first time as clerks,
policemen, nurses in white hospitals and teachers in white
schools. Boston’s Negro newspaper has six pages of want ads
for everybody from laboratory technicians to plasma physi
cists. In Milwaukee, Chicago and Providence, corporations
have joined together to seek ways of finding more Negro
workers and executive trainees; in Minneapolis, Omaha and
San Francisco, corporate recruiters flock to interview thou
sands of Negroes at "job fairs.” A dozen recently created
personnel agencies specialize in Negroes, and almost every
Negro graduate with a good college record can count on from
three to twelve job offers.
Of course, discrimination is still far from eliminated. Some
employment agencies, for example, use codes to alert prospec
tive employers that the applicant is a Negro. The most un
yielding barriers to the Negro's advancement are put up not
by corporations but by the craft unions, which are so biased
that it is easier for a Negro to become a physician or junior
manager than an electrician or a plumber. A recent Labor
Department survey showed that in Baltimore there were no
Negro apprentices among the steam fitters, sheet-metal work
ers or plumbers; in Newark, none among the stonemasons,
structural ironworkers or steam fitters; in Pittsburgh, none
among the operating engineers, painters or lathers; in Wash
ington, none among the glaziers, sheet-metal workers or as
bestos workers.
Largely because of union bars, the incredible fact is that
since 1957 the number of Negroes at work in the U.S. private
economy has scarcely increased at all. The number of Negro
jobholders has risen from 6,721,000 to 7,747,000 during that
period, but the gains have been primarily in Government jobs.
Negroes hold 23% of the city jobs in New York, 30% in
Cleveland, 40% in Philadelphia. At the federal level, 13.2%
of the nation's civil service employees are Negroes. Negroes
sit in the U.S. Cabinet and on the Federal Reserve Board, act
as postmasters of two major cities (Los Angeles and Chicago);
six are U.S. ambassadors, 16 federal judges. In the armed
forces, the number of Negro field-grade officers (major
through colonel) has jumped since 1962 from 769 to 1,319.
•
EDUCATION. While still appreciably behind the whites, Ne
groes have made impressive gains in education, particularly
at the college level. Outnumbered by white students 30 to 1,
they have raised their numbers in colleges and universities to
225,000—far greater than the total enrollments of the uni
versities of Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland
and Switzerland put together. Almost all the Southern uni
versities now have some Negroes. Admissions officers at
such universities as California and Stanford give preference
to Negroes; like many other schools, Harvard often chooses
Negroes over whites with equivalent academic records. So
many scholarships are being offered that almost any talented,
energetic Negro youngster can get into college.
For the Negro who never gets to the college level, things
are considerably bleaker. In a recent study of 650,000
children, the U.S. Office of Education reported that, com
pared with whites, the average Negro child actually attends
newer schools and has newer textbooks but is less likely to
have modern scientific equipment or competent teachers.
The Negro needs good teachers even more than whites be
cause of greater deprivation in his family background.
Eighth-graders in Negro slum schools, for example, com
monly read at sixth-grade levels. The IQ of the average
Harlem pupil drops from 90.6 in the third grade to 87.7 in
the eighth grade. An extraordinary 67.5% of all Negroes
fail the armed forces’ pre-induction mental tests (v. 18.8%
of the whites).
Four out of five U.S. students attend schools that are
practically all black or all white. School segregation is rising
in the North because an increasing number of neighbor
hoods are becoming wholly black. Ironically, integration has
progressed far more rapidly in the South. Only 10% of the
South's 3,500,000 Negro schoolchildren attend integrated
classes, but that is twice as many as a year ago. Federal
education officials say that 4,200 of the 4,600 Southern
school districts have sent in “acceptable” plans for integra
tion. But the increase is slowing down because Congress—
(CONTINUED ON PAGE 12-COLUMN 1)