Resentment is building in the nation's black urban ghettos
There is a rising tide of bitterness in black America. It existed well before the vicious race riot last month that killed 16 people and sent ugly plumes of smoke into the night skies over Miami. But the violence caught the attention of white America—and that fact too causes further black cynicism. Black leaders, echoing their pleas of the riot-punctuated 1960s, are asking once again: Do we have to burn our own neighborhoods in order to be heard?
The black voices are angry. "I go out there and see these houses all boarded up. I see some gutted. I see vacant lots and weeds," says Congressman Louis Stokes of Cleveland. "I see these guys standing around doing nothing. I feel so helpless, so hopeless. We're passing from one generation to another a group of people who are hopelessly locked into a permanent underclass."
"In the '60s, young blacks were looking up; they were coming out of the shadow of segregation; they were saying, 'I am somebody,' " recalls the Rev. Thomas Kilgore, who heads a predominantly black group of 218 activist clergymen in Los Angeles. "Now they don't feel that way. The black community does not have the kind of hope it had then."
"It is no wonder young black youths are predisposed to riot," says Ed Irons, a black professor of banking and finance at Atlanta University. "Even when the economy is going strong they don't get hired. You can't attribute this to anything but institutional racism. America does not want to face this. At some point it is going to explode."
An Associated Press-NBC News poll taken after the Miami riot found that 53% of Americans fear that there will be more racial riots in other cities this summer. At the same time, 84% of the whites thought blacks were better off now than ten years ago. But they are wrong, and that is precisely the point; it is the key factor underlying the growing frustration in the ghetto. Despite the programs that raised so much hope, despite the brave talk by politicians about rescuing the cities, despite the thousands of success stories that seem to prove the contrary, urban blacks have been slipping farther and farther behind whites.
In the decade of the 1970s, blacks gained on whites in only one broad area: education. As of 1978, the median for blacks had reached 11.9 years of schooling; it was 12.5 for whites. Yet even these statistics are misleading in one important sense: the quality of public schooling that the blacks are getting in most major U.S. cities has sharply declined. Says Bernard C. Watson, a black vice president of Temple University in Philadelphia: "The education too many children receive in these classrooms is nothing short of a national scandal, an absolute disgrace."