Apartheid. USA 1988

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February 29, 1988:

Like a line on a graph, Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio traces 20 years of race relations in this old industrial town, like an east-west passage from American dream to American nightmare.

‘In the east,’ reported Richard Bernstein in the New York Times, ‘it passes stately, affluent neighborhoods, some of them white, some now black, and a smaller number integrated. Closer to town there are districts of neat middle-class clapboard houses with small square lawns and numerous signs of do-it-yourself improvement. Once they were virtually all white, many of them have now become more than 90 percent black.’ Then Euclid Avenue plunges into a zone of urban blight as it reaches the old center city, the scene of intense race riots 21 years ago. There the hulks of abandoned brick factories interrupt stretches of dilapidated housing projects and torn-up districts of empty lots deemed by most of the city's residents, white and black alike, as places to avoid, particularly at night.

Cleveland reflects a national pattern much noted among scholars, political leaders and other citizens as the country marks the special anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report. On February 29, 1968 this Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B Johnson to investigate the causes of racial riots in the cities, warned that the country was ‘moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal.’ The Commission was headed by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois. The Report blamed ‘white racism’ for the ‘continued polarization’ of American society, and argued that only ‘a compassionate, massive, and sustained Government effort could reverse the overall trend.’

The worst case prognosis of the Kerner Report - the division of the United States into separate but unequal societies - has not come about, but the general direction predicted and the stubborn persistence of the race problem in America have endured. The country certainly has failed to become an integrated society. But it has made remarkable

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progress toward racial equality, seen most conspicuously in the expansion of the black middle-class, educated and affluent, that has taken advantage of new opportunities. The percentage of blacks earning more than 35 000 dollars a year rose in constant dollars, from 15.7 percent in 1970 to 21.2 percent in 1986, according to Government statistics.

‘The anniversary of the Kerner Report falls nevertheless at a time of great uncertainty.’ reported the Times. Racial tensions in cities like New York, on college campuses and elsewhere, seem on the increase. While legal segregation is long gone, American society is still divided along racial lines into two communities, uncomfortable, often suspicious, frequently fearful of each other. From many indications the gap between blacks and whites remains almost as wide as it was in the 1960's when the racial riots brought national guardsmen into the streets. Most dramatically, there is a mood of despair and frustration over the most terrible part of the racial picture - the emergence of a black under-class in many American inner cities that has failed to participate in the progress made by many blacks toward a greater share in life.

‘The Kerner Report, in talking about two societies moving in different directions, did not capture the fact that there were two groups within black society moving in different directions,’ said William J Wilson, a Sociologist at the University of Chicago. ‘In fact,’ he continued, ‘there are three different groups. There's a black middle class that has experienced gradual progress. There's a black working class that has had difficulty holding its economic position because it's been vulnerable to de-industrialization. And there is a black under-class that's slipping further and further behind the rest of society.’

The black under-class itself reflects a painful reality that has slowly become apparent during the passing of the past two decades. It is that the presence of a mostly black, miserable human residue, mired in hard core unemployment, violent crime, drug use, teenage pregnancy and one of the world's worst human environments, seems to be a partial, perverse

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result of the very success of other blacks. As many blacks, freed from the constraints of discrimination in Cleveland, Ohio and elsewhere, moved out of the central cities, into the great middle class, the old ghetto neighborhood became ever more empoverished, bereft of professionals, businessmen, artists, and members of cafe society, who earlier provided it, if not with wealth, then, at least, with vitality and hope. Now, black flight from the inner city has left the lower class equally alienated from main stream white society and main stream black society alike.

The inner cities, where the greatest cause of death among men between the ages of 25 and 35 is homicide, still resemble the Kerner Report description of the black ghettos. One dramatic sign of the plight of the inner city is reflected in the disproportionate effect of AIDS on blacks and whites, a disproportion attributable to the prevalence of drug use among blacks. In New York City more than 50 percent of the deaths from AIDS were among intravenous drug users and their sexual partners, a group that is 90 percent black and Hispanic. Some 91 percent of the children born with AIDS in New York, mostly contracted from infected drug addict mothers, were members of those two minority groups.^224.

224. The New York Times, from a full page report by Richard Bernstein from Cleveland, Ohio.