Apartheid. USA 1988

March 7, 1988:

Newsweek magazine runs a cover-story, ‘BLACK & WHITE’: How Integrated is America?’ (pages 18-44). The principal headline reads: ‘Twenty years after the murder of Martin Luther King, blacks have gained a fragile new middle class and a troubled ‘under-class’, while the civil rights movement itself has fallen into a neglect that hurts everyone.’

‘King said in a premonitory speech the night before he was killed,’ wrote Newsweek, ‘that he was thankful; he had been allowed to go to the mountain-top and glimpse ‘the promised land’ of racial brotherhood. ‘But with his death, something of the clement and reasonable spirit he embodied went out of the civil-rights movement, never quite to be replaced. Already, the momentum had passed to the movement's important young bloods, who were raising a fiery tumult in the country's urban slums. The murder of King triggered some of the worst violence yet. Rioting erupted in 40 cities. In Chicago and Washington DC whole blocks were burned down, and from ground level in the smoke-palled ghettos it looked as if there might be no end to racial conflict.’

Twenty years and a social eon have passed. Mercifully, America today is not the bitterly sundered dual society, that the Kerner Riot Commission grimly foresaw. Nor is it King's promised land of racial amity. Rather, it is something uneasily between the two; a society less unequal but also less caring than it was in the 60's.

Newsweek quoted from James Baldwin, who had described eloquently that no group of immigrants came to America

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under the same circumstances as blacks, or endured such dehumanizing peonage. Baldwin: ‘No one in the world... knows Americans better or, odd as it may sound, loves them more than the American Negro. This is because he has had to watch you, outwit you, deal with you, and bear you, and sometimes even bleed and die with you, ever since... both of us, black and white, got here - and this is a wedding.’

Newsweek pointed to an estimated 2.5 million American blacks forming the new black ‘under-class’, or three times what it was in 1970. ‘This group generates a disproportionate share of the social pathology usually associated with the ghetto, including high crime rates. It is the crime that keeps white - and black - fear churned up, often to the point where it obscures any more useful impulse - any beginning of interest or sympathy that might lead people to see each other without rancor. For many whites, the threat of violence simply justifies their native bias.’ Another lamentable by-product of the steady climb of middle-class blacks toward prosperity is the deep class divide this caused among blacks themselves, leaving the ‘under-class’ in an underprivileged swamp of social unrest and injustice far behind them.

In another section on the work-place, Newsweek presents among others some figures. Blacks now represent 9.4 percent of all teachers in America, 18.1 percent of all social workers, and 7.4 percent of accountants and auditors. In 1987, there were 799 000 black managers and executives in the United States or 5.6 percent of the total. In 1987, blacks' median weekly salary was 78.6 percent of whites'. In 1979 it was 80.2 percent. Blacks are woefully underrepresented in many professions. They make up only 3 percent of all lawyers and 2.3 percent of all real estate salesmen. IBM has been recruiting at black colleges since the 1950's. In 1987, blacks made up 9.1 percent of the employees and 7.2 per-

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cent of the managers at IBM compared to 8.2 percent of all employees, and 5.0 percent of managers 10 years earlier.^230. Another 3-page essay is called ‘Seeing through black eyes’ and written by Vern E Smith with Mark Miller from Memphis, Tennessee. An essay dealing with religion was produced by Bill Barol with Mark Miller from Washington. ‘Soul Searching in a Pioneering Town’ was composed by

230. Newsweek Magazine, by David Gelman with Karen Springen and Karen Brailsford in New York and Mark Miller in Washington

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Daniel Pedersen. And so there are essays on education, on relations, and mixed marriages, and on the future of black and white in America. In 1963, Martin Luther King published an impassioned essay that he called ‘Why We Cannot Wait.’ The subject was segregation or American apartheid. But even at an early date King understood that his real mission was broader social and economic change. ‘In that separate culture of poverty in which the half-educated Negro lives, and economic depression rages today,’ he wrote. The solution for that, King realized, was more complicated than integrating lunch-counters. Much more complicated. If he only knew. Twenty years after his death, millions of Americans, black and white, have given up waiting altogether. The second part of the civil rights agenda - a war on poverty - has been all but lost. Worse, the moral energy to reverse the tide of battle has been sapped by complacency and an appalling game of finger-pointing. Year after year, the agony of the ‘lower class’ has been seen as the blacks' problem, the government's problem - anybody's problem but everyone's.^231.

231. Newsweek Magazine, from a report by Jonathan Alter with Karen Brailsford and Karen Springen