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But the pupils who manage to survive in the system are doing better than a decade ago. The percentage of black high school graduates who go on to college (31.5%) has nearly caught up with that of the whites (32.2%). With 11.6% of the total population, blacks now provide 10% of the total college enrollment. True, the many black colleges are still inferior to many white ones, and about half of black college students attend traditionally black institutions. But Watson concedes: "The fortunes of black Americans seeking higher education have improved dramatically. Only a fool or a charlatan would deny that there has been progress."
That improvement actually fuels some of the current black restlessness. While the American dream has long envisaged education as the gateway to the good life, blacks have discovered that the more they gained on the whites educationally, the more they seemed to fall behind economically. To be sure, some of the best-educated blacks have broken into high-income classes. Between 1970 and 1978, for example, the number of families making more than $25,000 grew twice as fast among blacks as it did among whites. Yet only 13.4% of all black families earn that much, compared with 29.5% for whites.
More ominously, black family income in the past decade actually fell relative to that of whites, from 60% of the white level in 1969 to 57% in 1979. One striking reason was that the proportion of white families containing more than one income earner climbed in that period from 53.6% to 55.4%, while the number of black families with more than a single wage earner fell from 57.2% to 46.2%. Black women who head their families had a 5.2% unemployment rate in 1969, but 12.9% were jobless in 1979, and the recession will certainly increase that figure considerably.
To make matters worse, women now head 30% of all black households, a fact stemming partly from the rate of illegitimate births; it is six times as high among black women as white. One startling example: 42% of Chicago's births in 1978 were out of wedlock; 80% of the mothers were black. The welfare rate of black women heading families is a devastating 50%.
Politically, the blacks have made substantial strides in the past ten years. There are black mayors in Los Angeles, Washington, Detroit, Atlanta and New Orleans, and black councilmen and black judges in respectable and growing numbers across the nation—some 4,600 black elected officials in all. But housing is still abominable, health care uncertain and, despite some reforms, too many big-city blacks, particularly the youths, view a white policeman as their natural enemy. The discrimination may be as direct and blatant as a racial slur, or as amorphous and difficult to fight as the hiring record of white employers: the unemployment rate among blacks with college educations is higher (27.2%) than that of white youths who are high school dropouts (22.3%).
In the wake of the Miami riots, Joseph Boyce, TIME's Atlanta bureau chief and a black who was once a Chicago police officer, reported on the status of blacks in his city and elsewhere in the South. Said Boyce: "Blacks are like artifacts in a room seldom used. They are dusted off periodically for a look, especially after a riot, then replaced in the cabinet. The doors close again until the next time."
NEW YORK: BUDGET SQUEEZE