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So begins a chapter called "Bronzeville" in Black
Metropolis, by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, a study of
the Chicago ghetto published in 1945. It's impossible to stand
at the same corner today without wondering what went wrong. There's
hardly ever any bustle at Forty-seventh and King Drive (as South
Parkway is now called), especially during the day. The shopping
strip still exists, though as a shadow of what it obviously once
was, and there are heavy metal grates on virtually every storefront
that has not been abandoned. Many of the landmarks of the neighborhood
-- the Regal Theater, the Savoy Ballroom, the Hotel Grand, the
legendary blues clubs -- are boarded up or gone entirely. The
Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments, a large complex that Drake
and Cayton called "a symbol of good living on a relatively
high income level," is a housing project populated by people
on welfare. Prostitutes cruise Forty-seventh Street in the late
afternoon. In cold weather middle-aged men stand in knots around
fires built in garbage cans. Drake and Cayton's idea of the corner
as the heart of a "Little Harlem," where one might
glimpse Lena Horne or Joe Louis -- or white people -- sitting
in a restaurant, seems ludicrous.
I recently spent some time in and around the black sections of
Chicago: the South Side, roughly eight miles long and four wide,
the single largest black neighborhood in America, of which Forty-seventh
and South Parkway used to be the nerve center; and the West Side,
a few miles away, a smaller and rougher area. It wasn't just
at Forty-seventh and King Drive that the decline of the ghetto
over two generations was striking. This is something that black
people in Chicago talk about frequently, wondering why the working-poor
neighborhoods where they grew up became terrible. Many others
wonder the same thing, and they are weary of the standard explanations
for the ghettos, which are intellectually neat but don't seem
to fit the magnitude of what has gone wrong. It stands to reason
that there is another answer to the terrible question of the
ghettos. During my time in Chicago I became convinced that there
is one.
When Drake and Cayton were writing, virtually all black Americans
lived in segregated areas, though not necessarily in the urban
North. By the sixties, when race relations had become a central
national concern, the northern ghettos had received a large influx
of migrants from the South, and they were portrayed as overcrowded,
desperately poor slums stunted by racism. Today, after years
of efforts to end poverty and discrimination, the ghettos are
worse, much worse, than they were in the sixties. A few blocks
from Forty-seventh and King Drive is a housing project called
the Robert Taylor Homes, a two-mile-long row of 28 sixteen-story
buildings housing more than 20,000 people. The four-block stretch
of the Robert Taylor Homes between Forty-seventh and Fifty-first
Streets has the distinction of being the poorest neighborhood
in the United States. In the forties the strip of land where
the Robert Taylor Homes now stand was the poorest part of the
traditional black belt in Chicago, but it had many fewer residents
and was just the bad part of the neighborhood. Today the project
dominates it physically and demographically.
The City of Chicago has defined a "community area"
on the South Side that contains both Forty-seventh and King Drive
and the Robert Taylor Homes, and its statistics show not just
how bad off the neighborhood is but how much worse off it has
recently become. In 1970 thirty-seven percent of the population
of the area was below the poverty line; in 1980 the figure was
51 percent. In 1970 the unemployment rate was 9.5 percent; in
1980 it was 24.2 percent. In 1970 forty percent of the residents
of the neighborhood lived in families with a female head; in
1980 the number had grown to 72 percent. In 1980 of the 54,000
residents 33,000 were on welfare. Experts agree that all of the
numbers are even worse today.
For a decade after the burst of attention paid to ghettos in
the 1960s there was a feeling that blacks were steadily moving
up in America. The distance between black and white incomes was
continually narrowing. Black education levels were rising sharply.
Middle-class blacks were becoming more and more visible on television
and in public places. There was a long string of black "firsts,"
especially and most impressively in elective politics.
In the past few years there has been a steady stream of news
indicating that at the same time there was another side to the
story: a way of life in the ghettos utterly different from that
in the American mainstream. One statistic had a tremendous impact
on the public perception of black progress: starting in the late
seventies, the U.S. National Canter for Health Statistics began
to report that more than half of black babies were born out of
wedlock, up from 17 percent in 1950. Today the figure is thought
to be 60 percent nationwide; in Chicago it is 75 percent. Urban
school systems have become increasingly segregated, with a large
gap in achievement levels between black and white schools. Black
unemployment is nearly triple white unemployment. Black crime
rates have soared -- in Chicago, which is less than half black,
about four times as many blacks as whites are arrested for violent
crimes. The infant mortality rate, which is considered one of
the basic indicators of how advanced a society is, is rising
in the ghettos.
Occasionally a shocking event provides the outside world with
a snapshot of ghetto life: Edmund Perry, not a directionless
punk but a freshly minted graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy,
dies in a scuffle with a police officer in Harlem. On the South
Side of Chicago, Benjy Wilson, a high school basketball star,
is gunned down on the street in broad daylight by two members
of a teenage gang, one of whom is the grandson of the great blues
impresario Willie Dixon. Perry and Wilson, and Wilson's murderers,
were all from absent-father families; Wilson had himself just
fathered a child out of wedlock. This is what life is like for
the elite of the ghetto, not just the dropouts and semi-professional
petty criminals.
The way that the two versions of black life since the sixties
fit together is through the idea of the bifurcation of black
America, in which blacks are splitting into a middle class and
an underclass that seems likely never to make it. The clearest
line between the two groups is family structure. Black husband-wife
families continue to close the gap with whites; their income
is now 78 percent as high. But the income of black female-headed
families, adjusted for inflation, has been dropping. The black
female headed family represents an ever larger share of the population
of poor people in America: 7.3 percent in 1959 and 19.3 percent
in 1984.
Why, during a period of relative prosperity and of national commitment
to black progress, has the bifurcation taken place? The question
should be urgent for anyone who thinks it wrong that millions
of people in the black underclass lead destroyed lives or who,
because of the problems of the ghettos, has had to give up the
idea of an open, democratic city life built around public education
and safe streets.
There are two answers prevalent right now, both of which explain
the slide in the ghettos using the shifting of economic incentives.
The conservative answer is that welfare and the whole Great Society
edifice of compensatory programs for blacks do exactly the opposite
of what they're supposed to: they make blacks worse off by encouraging
them to become dependent on government checks and favors. Poor
blacks have children out of wedlock and don't work, so that they
can get money from liberal programs. This view is energetically
codified in Charles Murray's 1984 book Losing Ground,
which presents a series of charts and graphs showing poor blacks
becoming poorer -- and crime rising, and efforts to find work
declining, and educational achievement dropping -- during precisely
the time of the War on Poverty.
The liberal answer is built around unemployment. At the time
that the ghettos began getting worse, unemployment was very low,
but blacks, by then heavily concentrated in the northern industrial
cities, were dependent on the one part of the economy that was
falling apart -- inner-city unskilled heavy labor. In Chicago
the harbinger of the change was the closing in the late fifties
of the stockyards, which for half a century were the sine
qua non of lower-class grunt work and a heavy employer of
blacks. Chicago lost 200,000 jobs in the seventies; small shut-down
redbrick factories that used to make products like boxes and
ball bearings dot the city, especially the West Side. The lack
of jobs, the argument continues, caused young men in the ghetto
to adopt a drifting, inconstant life; to turn to crime; to engage
in exaggeratedly macho behavior -- acting tough, not studying,
bullying women for money -- as a way to get the sense of male
strength that their fathers had derived from working and supporting
families. As Murray believes that one simple step, ending all
welfare programs, would heal the ghettos, the unemployment school
believes that another simple step, jobs, would heal them. "When
there's a demand for the participation of the black underclass
in the labor force, most of the so-called problems people talk
about will evaporate in a generation," says John McKnight.
an urban-research professor at Northwestern University.
Among poverty experts the debate is raging, and though it is
quite abstruse (it is based almost entirely on analysis of government
statistics), the stakes are large. The country seems to be gearing
up for another run at the problems of the ghettos; President
Reagan has commissioned a major study of welfare reform, which
is a polite way of asking what we should do about the black underclass.
A new generation of government solutions will probably follow
-- solutions that will be aimed at either dismantling the welfare
state or expanding it, depending on who wins the debate, which
in turn will depend on who can explain most convincingly why
the ghettos have done so badly.
Copyright © 1986 by Nicholas Lemann.
All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; June 1986; The Origins of the Underclass.
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