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Chicago's blacks have never enjoyed so much political clout. Now 40% of the city's population, the 1.2 million blacks helped defeat the late Mayor Richard Daley's selected heir, Michael Bilandic, and thus gave Jane Byrne a tenuous hold on city hall in 1979. A black will probably run for mayor in 1983. Blacks head the city's finance committee and the school board, and the city police department is now 23% black.
But the recent political gains have created little social or economic progress. The dropout rate in high school for blacks is 55%. More than a third of the city's black population is below the national poverty level ($6,700 for an urban family of four). Unemployment for young blacks is put at nearly 60%. The mayor's office recently estimated that 586,000 of the city's teen-agers and adults qualified for federally created jobs: there are exactly 68,700 to be given out this year. To make matters worse, in the past decade Chicago has lost at least 500,000 jobs to the suburbs and the Sunbelt—most requiring the kind of unskilled manpower that attracted Southern blacks to Chicago in the first place.
"There is a new kind of poverty here," says John McDermott, a white editor and publisher of the Chicago Reporter, a monthly newsletter on racial issues. "What we have is a group permanently unemployed and permanently dependent. There is a growing social chaos within this group, complete social isolation. Their only window to America is the television set."
LOS ANGELES: UNEASY TRUCE
In the city that endured the Watts riots of 1965, in which 28 blacks and six others were killed, only an uneasy truce prevails between nearly a million blacks and two traditional sources of racial friction: the police force and the school board. The fact that Mayor Thomas Bradley is black has helped to moderate the clashes, but the City of Angels is no heavenly haven for its blacks.
To its credit, Los Angeles is taking steps to curb what blacks claim has been a quick-triggered police department.
The five-member police commission has insisted that it will exercise its right to review departmental decisions on complaints against police and to appoint an independent special hearing officer in particularly sensitive cases. Concedes a member of the police commission: "There is apprehension among blacks about confrontations with the police. Within some segments of the black community, the hostility is as great now as it has ever been."
Black attitudes toward the white-dominated school board that acquired a conservative majority in elections last year may be even more hostile. The new members contend they have a voter mandate to fight all plans for busing students to achieve better racial balance in the schools, despite court orders to the contrary. Charges the Rev. Kilgore: "It's a totally politicized board that couldn't care less about educating black children."
On another trouble point, John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League, cites reductions in community services required under California's Proposition 13, particularly a virtual freeze on hiring any new city and county employees. Protests Mack: "Black people are still just trying to get their feet in the door, and now it's being slammed shut again."
WASHINGTON: DUAL SOCIETY