Racial anger has become indelibly connected to the American ethos. Many African-Americans, in particular, are very angry. They are angry because they feel that the American dream has alluded them. They are angry because they are constantly being judged, harassed, and discriminated against because of their race. After such hopeful beginnings in the Great Migration, many find themselves held prisoner in unwholesome ghettos. White racism created a cycle of poverty in northern urban ghettos constructing with it a de facto segregation that remains.

A result of African-American ghettoization was the denial of meaningful upward mobility. This was a unique element of American urban history. Other ethnic groups–like Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Asians, and others–all fared better in the upward mobility trek than the African-American. The ghetto became the unavoidable symbol of the failure of white America to overcome its racial divisiveness. As the African-American ghetto rapidly declined throughout the twentieth century and industrialization took hold, likewise the African-American businessman and skilled craftsmen disappeared from the American city. By the 1930’s and 1940’s, the goods and services once provided by a neighbor were supplanted by mass retail outlets. This trend continued until today. In spite of affirmative action, federal job training programs, and ameliorated relationships with predominantly white unions, the number and proportion of African-American skilled workers continued to decline. The declination of the African-American skilled worker assured that the black community would continue to hold the lowest economic level of American society.

There were African-American enclaves in white suburbs but whites by far were the majority presence in American suburbs. As African-American intellectuals like Fulwood remind us, money and education do not mitigate fully white privilege and white racism.

The African-American community is not without its strengths–witness the great Harlem Renaissance–but all these strengths were constantly compromised by institutional racism manifested by almost all aspects of northern urban white society. Ethnicity, class formation, political power–all of these forces were overshadowed by racism. Racism was not competing with ethnicity and other forces–it was overwhelming them all!

May 17, 1954, Brown vs. The Board of Education, was a momentous day in the history of the world: a nation voluntarily acknowledged and repudiated its own oppression of part of its own people. Martin Luther King and nonviolence passive resistance allowed the protestors to retain their “innocence.” King’s vision is truly a moral vision undaunted by racial parochialism.

In the late sixties, suddenly a sharp racial consciousness emerged to compete with the moral consciousness that was part of earlier civil rights issues. Whites were no longer welcome in the movement, and a vocal “African-American power” minority gained control of the movement. It was from this phase–the black power phase–that black separatist organization arose.

There was a time, when African-American Americans expected to solve the racial problem. Now, after the violence of the last thirty years, it is difficult for Americans even to discuss the topic. The problem is that Americans sought racial not moral power which led the African-American Community into a series of contradictions: Moral power precluded racial power as a means to power. The civil rights movement sought equality by demanding that racism cease to be a significant category. Now, the Black power movement was demanding that race must be a ubiquitous category. Thus, black power, grasping for political and economic power not justice, became itself unjust.

By the 1990’s, the marriage of race and power was secure. Equality was no longer a goal: empowerment was. Now the movement wanted a piece of the pie. The Black Power movement encouraged a permanent state of rage and victim-hood.

By the 1980’s, the politics of difference (Shelby Steele’s term) led to an establishment of “grievance identities.” Now the African-American community gained identity according to grievances committed by the dominant group. They sought to document the grievances of their group, testifying to its abiding alienation. African-American and whites alike were punished for not recognizing and accepting this litany of grievances.

Much of the black community’s world view grew out of this feeling of anger and alienation. Listen to the rhetoric of a black leader, Cenie J. Williams, Jr. “The thrust of Black people in the late 50’s and in the 60’s for Black power is viewed by our racist oppressors as a most serious challenge to the continuation of the white power dynamic in this area of the world and indirectly throughout the world.” Dr. Farris Page, an African-American psychologist at the Children’s Home Society, discussed adoption of black children by white families: “I have a young child who’s in a school with only two or three black kids to a class and the impact is very, very tremendous. . . The issues of race and color and hair are prevalent for black children in black homes. And they’re going to be magnified in a white home. . .” Dr. Page implied that racism is a dominant category. Clearly this rhetoric exhibited a politics of difference and rage.

Within the Civil Rights movement and the Black community in general was a profound discouragement. In African-American communities there was no doubt a loss of any optimism concerning the future. Racism had taken its toll.

During the Bicentennial Celebration Chief Justice Thurgood Marshall had some sobering words for America:

In this bicentennial year, we may not all participate in the festivities with flag-wavering fervor. Some may more quietly commemorate the suffering, struggle, and sacrifice that has triumphed over much of what is wrong with the original document [the U.S. Constitution], and observe the anniversary with hopes not realized and promises not fulfilled.

The overall failure of the American welfare system has been terribly disillusioning to the African-American community. Legal barriers between the races no doubt fell in the last thirty years. But, in many ways African-Americans are worse off today than they ever were.

Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Johnson’s The Great Society failed on one hand because they ignored the most fundamental need of all disadvantaged people: employment. But, on the other hand, I think that they failed because these programs were not able fundamentally to change the American character. The welfare state was devastating to the African-American community because it fostered dependency. It broke down the infrastructure that sustained the African-American community without replacing it with an efficacious alternative.

Welfare has done more than this. It masked the real problem: racism. Racism is attacking is most vulnerable and important victim to date: the African-American family. Racism, ironically, used entitlement programs to claim more victims. The fact is, economic progress is not enough. It will never be enough. Until human hearts, and systems of injustice are changed the African-American situation in American will not be significantly improved. Welfare, then, has only served to delay real racial progress and reconciliation.

The African-American family has been devastated primarily by the loss of the nuclear, two parent family. By 1994 the figure of illegitimate births grew to 40% and, an even more alarming figure, 27% of pregnancies were aborted. “Now, I don’t care what your position was, whether you’re pro-choice or anti- that’s too many,” President Clinton told the National Baptist Convention U.S.A. Having a baby out of wedlock was “simply not right,” he said. “You shouldn’t have a baby before you’re ready, and you shouldn’t have a baby when you’re not married.” The welfare state, by removing initiative and by rewarding illegitimacy encouraged single families. Absent fathers, single families, are more fertile ground for dysfunctional family development. The loss of fathers in African-American families because of welfare dependency has had the most devastating effect on the black community.

“Children who do not live with a mother and a father are more likely to be high school dropouts, more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol and more likely to be dependent on welfare than children who live with both biological parents,” Human Services Chief Louis Sullivan said in October, 1994. Psychologists pointed out that fathers were not simply substitute mothers. Fathers tended to be stronger disciplinarians than mothers and that was particularly true for boys. Boys were much less likely to develop good self-control when fathers were not present. But, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moniyhan pointed out in 1965, a man, already suffering from his failure as a provider, was further demeaned by becoming dependent on the woman who gets the welfare check. As a result, many African-American men turned to violence to gain self-esteem. Roughly 40 percent of young African-American men ages 17 to 35 were in prison, on probation or on the dole.

Of course the real victims were children. Single households statistically were usually poorer than two parent households. In 1993, 46.1% of the 8.8 million female-headed families with children lived in poverty, compared with only 9.0% of the 26.1 million married couple families with children. Of 1.6 million families headed by unmarried men only 22.5% lived in poverty. Out of 69.3 million children younger than 18, 15.7 million–one in four–are poor. Most of these poor children were illegitimate and illegitimacy was approaching an 80% rate in some inner-cities. Most of these families were African-American families. This fact was not lost on many blacks.
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The Great Depression was a pivotal event in the African-American family history because it spawned the great American welfare state. The welfare state would be another “great disappointment” for the African-American community.

The first child of the welfare state was the New Deal. The New Deal was a mixed blessing to most blacks and eventually proved to be a disaster. Clearly federal economic intervention–the welfare state–failed the African-American community.

With the rise of the positive liberal state the African-American community allied itself with the American liberal agenda. The black community looked now to the federal government as its savior. It was not until the late 1960’s that the many African-Americans abandoned this basically humanistic agenda in favor of a black nationalistic agenda. Within many parts of the African-American community it was too late. Welfare dependency had demoralized, impoverished, and devastated the African-American community like nothing ever had. The New Deal represented a new way of doing business: the federal government assumed the major role of taking care of the American poor, of which African-American representation was a disproportionate part.

Relief giving served the larger economic and political ends of America. FDR, for instance, saw all America benefitting if the poor and destitute benefitted. This view prevailed in the American political mind for half a century. Within the last few years, this thesis has been seriously challenged by black intellectuals. Relief arrangements were initiated or expanded during occasional outbreaks of civil disorder to placate the disgruntled masses. Social welfare, as it was conceived and implemented in American history was not much different from other governmental initiatives. It was a way to control, to placate, to appease. This fact became increasingly evident to the African-American community in the late 1960’s.

President Franklin Roosevelt never envisioned that things would go so far. Welfare was originally intended only for widows and divorcees. Frances Perkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s labor secretary, nearly excluded unwed mothers on moral grounds. At the time on one imagined that illegitimacy would burgeon as it has. No one thought that the government will ever intervene so strenuously as it has over the last thirty years. Personal accountability and social responsibility could not be passed on to the state. The results of trying to do so were disastrous.

There were great promises, though, that the African-American community implicitly embraced. The black community placed its future in the American political, legal, and social welfare systems. The previous generation had gone to the city to seek justice; this generation was putting its future in the hands of the federal government.

While many African-Americans were helped by government programs, like President Johnson’s Great Society, gains were short-lived and inadequate. African-Americans received less assistance than they needed. The government never attacked the real cause of African-American poverty: racism. Housing, job, and social opportunities were being sabotaged by racism. Entitled programs delayed genuine racial progress by masking the real problem.

For the African-American community, at least, the New Deal was woefully inadequate. The Welfare State did not provide sufficient employment or housing, but it stimulated hope in abundance. That was the rub. When, in the late eighties, the black community discovered that the welfare state had devastated its care-giving infrastructure it was furious.

The effect of the positive liberal state was disastrous on the African-American community. Some scholars–many of whom are African-American–are offering an almost “doomsday” appraisal of American society. They argue that our social welfare policies are moving the African-American community toward a sort of “dystopia”, defined in Webster as a situation “in which conditions and the quality of life are dreadful.” Murray reminded us in an October, 1993, Wall Street Journal article “The Coming White Underclass” that the Negative Liberal State–at least in the area of welfare reform–has been an unmitigated disaster. Murray recalled that when New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his 1965 warning about the disintegration of the African-American family, 26 percent of African-American births were to unwed mothers. Today, the figure among African-Americans soared to 68 % and that figure was even higher in innnercity neighborhoods (where it was almost 80%). As a result, as John Perkins also argued, African-Americans were literally killing themselves.

From 1932 to 1995 the social welfare system became a runaway juggernaut. We spent over $5 trillion since 1965. If all this money had given us happy, healthy families, it would have been worth it. But the opposite was true. It consigned untold millions of children to lives of bitterness and failure. This has been particularly true among African-American families. The failure of the welfare state again generated anger among the African-American community.

It was in the ghetto where most African-Americans found themselves moving into the welfare web. The central core of the American city remained the entry point for black immigrants. Decaying structures, slum conditions, massive unemployment, African-American ghettos became underclass colonies for African-Americans. To the African-American, the ghetto represented a shattered dream. It also became a hothouse for unhealthy, welfare dependent, single parent African-American families.

Among African-American activists, by 1968, there was an open admission that the African-American family was in very serious trouble. It has only gotten worse in the last thirty-five years.

Many urban black families were devastated by racism and attempts to remove racism–like entitlement programs. In spite of the fact that the government provided unprecedented resources for children, the well-being of African-American children declined over the last thirty-five years.

The primary cause of broken African-American families has been the disappearance of a two parent household. Three out of four teenage suicides occur in households where a parent has been absent. Eighty percent of adolescents in psychiatric hospitals come from broken homes. Tracking studies indicate that five of six adolescents caught up in the criminal-justice system come from families in which a parent (usually the father) has been absent. In 1988 a government survey of 17,000 children found, according to one analyst, that “children living apart from a biological parent were 20 to 40% more vulnerable to sickness.

The reasons for the demise of many African-American families were multi-faceted and complicated. Whatever the reasons though, the net result was even more black rage.

By the 1990’s, within the African-American community the marriage of race and power was secure. Equality was no longer a goal: empowerment was. Now the movement wanted more than a piece of the pie–they wanted to be in charge. After so much misery and given the failure of the white church to address the needs of the African-American urban community, who can blame them? The Black Power movement encouraged a permanent state of rage. “Anytime you make race a source of power,” a Black Power leader wrote, “you are going to guarantee suffering, misery, and inequality. . . we are going to have power because we are black!” Many African-Americans today, influenced by black nationalism, argue that the distribution of power in American society has become the single issue of overriding importance to the upward progress of African-Americans. From 1965 to the present every item on the black agenda has been judged by whether or not it added to the economic or political empowerment of black people. In effect, Martin Luther King’s dialogue of justice for all–whites and blacks–has been cast into the conflagration of empowerment. The triumph of black nationalism made black anger an indelible part of the racial reconciliation quest.

Today, the politics of difference has led to an establishment of “grievance identities.” The African-American community has documented the grievance of their group, testifying to its abiding alienation.

While predominantly white colleges and universities now enroll a majority of the more than 1.3 million black college students, the fact is there is not much race mixing really occurring. Racism divides and conquers still. “We have a campus of 25,000 students and there is no mixing across cultural and racial lines . . . even during a campus rally for racial unity all the blacks cluster together and all the whites cluster together.”

No one can deny that the Civil Rights initiatives in the 1960’s bring substantial improvements to the African-American community. As a result of these encouraging developments, many black Americans developed what some historians call a “black revolution in expectations.” African-Americans no longer felt that they had to put up with the humiliation of second-class citizenship. This progress was short lived and incomplete. White privilege–who basic underpinings are based on the myth of racial homogeneity and white superemacy–mitigated all progress.

The results of a recent Time/CNN poll revealed that 70 percent of black respondents agreed that the radical racist Farrakhan “says things the country should hear,” 63 percent agreed that he “speaks the truth,” and only 34 percent see him as a racist. It deeply troubles me that this purveyor of death and hatred has so much credibility. I fear, though, that the blame lies in the lap of the white church. We have not provided the leadership and resources in the urban setting that the black community so desperately need. In fact, with our propensity to white privilege, our inability to take responsibility for our sin, has driven many moderate African-Americans into the arms of separatism and divisive nationalism.

Increasing numbers of black middle class professionals are embracing a nationalistic/separatist agenda. Despite its very evident prosperity much of America’s African-American middle class, in 1999, is in great pain. The cry is not for two automobiles, a manicured lawn, or a house in suburbs. The cry is for justice.

As a member of the white community I grieve that I have been a part of driving my African-American brothers and sisters into nationalism and separatism.

In the next chapter we will examine a contemporary and devastating development in the African-American community which has been another demon of racism: the failed welfare system.

One of the most vigorous targets of racism is the American urban black family. And for good reasons. The black American family, as well as the black American church, have been the cornerstone of African-American society for centuries.

The 1960’s marked a shift in resistance: from non-violence to violence, from gradualism to immediatism, from desegregation to separatism. Clearly this shift, that exists today, marked a new challenge for racial reconciliation proponents. In the middle 1970’s fully 30% of black Americans felt that violence may be necessary to bring change and 8% were sure that it would be necessary. Very little has changed in twenty years. Similar studies and articles today confirm those fears among many African-Americans.

Today, the African-American community increasingly feels betrayed and short-changed by American culture. In fact, the General Baptist Convention of North Carolina is on record supporting African-American churches of all denominations establishing and operating separate Christian schools. In other words, the General Baptist Convention in North Carolina abandoned assimilation on “Christian” grounds rather than racial grounds exclusively.

The African-American poet Langston Hughes wrote in his poem “A Dream Deferred:”
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
–Langston Hughes

The Black Panther Party of Self Defense was an organized movement designed to spread a message of pride and empowerment to African-Americans. Their tactics were openly aggressive, and violent if necessary (as contrasted with the National Association of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference). They wanted immediate results and were not willing to wait for legal and legislative processes. The Black Panthers wanted revolution not gradualism. The Black Panthers did not allow radical whites to belong to their organization–an uncharacteristic phenomenon for any Black Power movement. Black power advocates were calling for educational segregation.

But they were more than urban guerrillas. They set up community-based medical testing for sickle-cell anemia and lead poisoning, registered voters, and organized food giveaway. Now blacks did not have to rely on whites for anything. All their programs promoted an old tactic first suggested by white supremists: segregation. They urged the African-American community to form a separate nation in the United States. They excluded themselves from white America.

Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan began the controversial Nation of Islam or African-American Muslims. The idea of returning to Islam as the ancestral religion of African-Americans was not new. In the 1920’s Marcus Garvey suggested that Blacks reject white institutions–including its religions and form their own. But now, Farrakhan and Malcolm X connected Christianity to white hatred. “A White Man’s Heaven is a African-American Man’s Hell” is the national anthem of the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan saw a vast white conspiracy seeking to conceal the glorious past of African-Americans and the Nation of Islam sought to set the record straight. Sharod Baker, a Columbia University student, and a member of the Nation of Islam, recently quoted, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying I hate them [whites]. They have caused me harm over and over, and I wish they are [were] dead.”

King called for reconciliation and nonviolence, assimilation and peaceful coexistence, not violence. Toward the end of his life, King shifted somewhat toward separatist tactics, but he never embraced violence. Martin Luther King, Jr., stressed the unity of society and wanted to gain those ends through non-violent means. “African-American Americans should have the same right to vote, the same access to education, and the same economic opportunities as every other American,” King argued. “They have the same goal as every other immigrant group–full assimilation into American life.” King gave both blacks and whites hope that the race problem in America could be solved. But when African-Americans saw that assimilation was not working, some embraced “tribalism”.

Another black power champion was Stokely Carmichael (mentioned above), chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

The SNCC was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, in April, 1960, at the suggestion of Martin Luther King, Jr., as a student arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The SNCC’s objective was defined as integration through non-violent protest all of which was incorporated into the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project launched in 1964. The SNCC formally adopted a black-consciousness philosophy and a separatist stance. African-American resistance was clearly defined as pro-black and anti-white. Northern white activists were expelled and the group broke with Martin Luther King, Jr. The organization faded from the public eye by 1969 but its causes were embraced by nationalistic groups. The Black Panthers, too, were disbanded by the middle of the 1970’s, but during this decade they captured the African-American social agenda and deeply impacted African-American society. Any racial discussion that speaks of “black power,” “black identity,” or “black self-determination” traces its genesis to the black nationalistic movement.

White American culture was a culture that for three hundred years dominated and controlled, not nurtured and comforted. Black nationalists now decided to wage war on that society. They felt that they had no choice.

What caused the black community to move from non-violent resistance to violent resistance? There were isolated instances of African-American violence before (e.g., Nat Turner Slave Revolt), but nothing like the violence manifested in the summer of 1968. The black community moved from non-violent resistance to violent resistance because African-Americans saw themselves in an intolerable state of shame. This violence was precipitated by the April assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., but frustration had been brewing in the African-American heart for years. Violence was inevitably seen as a course of last resort–the black community understood that it was their community that was being destroyed not the predominately white community–but it became necessary because they felt they had no choice. To the African-American community, the 1968 riots were retributive justice. To most whites this violence was a wake-up call.

African-American violence increased even more with the assassination of Martin Luther King, jr. For many African-Americans King’s assassination seemed to seal the demise of nonviolent resistance as a viable means of achieving equality for black America. But, as early as 1962, with the murder of James Meredith, African-American leaders like Stokely Carmichael were calling for a more radical response to racism. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton had a powerful vision: Pan-African nationalism and Separatism. Carmichael’s vision was decidedly political.

A similar vision arose that emphasized the cultural uniqueness of African-American culture. From this perspective, in 1966, the Black Panthers were founded by African-American nationalists Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Sympathetic to this movement included radicals like H. Rap Brown. Brown spoke with great pain and anger: “Fuck attitudes. Fuck a muthatfucka who hates me, because if I ever get him on the wrong end of a gun he’s in trouble.” “Separate but equal is cool with me. What’s the big kick about going to school with white folks?” “We stand for the transformation of the decadent, reactionary, racist system that exists at this time . . . We don’t like the system. We want to negate the system.”