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This great disparity has created a profound hostility between 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 between 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 nation's spending for public aid, education and housing (or an estimated $3.5 billion in all) goes to Negroes, who constitute only 11% of the U.S. population.
Most of the Government's new 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 Appalachians 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 31% a year—but the Negro 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, employment 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 because 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 opportunities have opened for skilled and semiskilled Negroes in the past few years.