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There was one demand by Miami's black leaders, though, that the Justice Department was powerless to meet: the dismissal of Reno, 41, as Dade County's top elected law enforcement official. A Harvard Law School graduate and, ironically, a member of the N.A.A.C.P., the 6-ft. 1-in. woman won election in 1978 with considerable black support, piling up 74% of the vote. She has vowed to seek re-election this fall, even though Mayor Ferre has urged her to take a leave. She stoutly defends her handling of the McDuffie case, insisting: "I assigned some of the best prosecutors on my staff. We did everything possible. I was bitterly disappointed at the outcome."
The efforts of federal and local officials to ease Miami's tension were not helped at week's end when Miami Police Chief Kenneth Harms restored the officers who had vandalized the cars to the force, sending them to a "stress program" for officers who had not lived up to department standards. Several hundred officers gathered in the streets to protest Mayor Ferre's reference to "a couple of bums" in the department.
Were conditions in Miami unique, or could similar frustrations among inner-city blacks boil up into riots elsewhere? Very few street-savvy leaders in any large U.S. city were ready to declare that their own ghettos were safe from eruption.
One reason for the uneasiness of many experts on race relations is that there is no tidy relationship between the relative progress of blacks and outbreaks of rioting. The decade of the '60s marked some of the greatest gains ever made by U.S. blacks, both economically and in the enforcement of laws breaking down racial barriers in jobs, housing, schools and public accommodations—yet it was also a period of racial clashes.
By contrast the '70s, with far less national attention given to racial is-isues, was a decade of relative racial peace. Yet while many blacks scored personal breakthroughs of various sorts in the '70s, the overall status of blacks slipped relative to whites. Looking back at the decade, Vernon Jordan, president of the National Urban League, conceded: "More black people find themselves in better circumstances than at any time in our history. It would be dishonest to claim otherwise.
Blacks in high positions have proliferated. Blacks are in jobs never before open to us. Blacks are in schools and colleges that never allowed us through their doors." Jordan nevertheless argued that "the myth of black progress" was a "dangerous illusion" because it does not apply to "the vast majority of black people."
Between 1970 and 1979, for example, the percentage of black families classified as middle income dropped from 12% to 9%. The average income of blacks slipped three percentage points farther behind that of whites (from 60% to 57% of white income). Black unemployment in the same decade rose from 8.2% to 12.6% —which is twice that of whites. And as the U.S. faces a recession, black unemployment is expected to climb higher. Among black teen-agers in large cities this summer, the unemployment rate may reach 50%. The only consolation in such alarming statistics is that joblessness alone rarely triggers a riot. If it did, says Newark Mayor Kenneth Gibson, who is black, "every city in the country would be in flames."