The Press: The U. S. Negro, 1953

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Economist Gunnar Myrdal reported: "Negroes are in desperate need of jobs and bread, even more so than of justice in the courts and of the vote." This definition of the Negro's needs is today strikingly out of date. ^ For most Negroes, the problem is no longer jobs, but better jobs; for many, it is no longer bread, but cake. The Negro wage earner today makes four times as much as in 1940 (compared to the white wage earner's 2½ times as much). The Negro's average yearly income is still only a little more than half of the white average, but ten years ago it was about 35%.

¶ The forces that kept the Southern Negro from voting—intimidation and the poll tax—are largely beaten. The South has more than 1,000,000 registered Negro voters (compared to 300,000 in 1938), and there could be half a million more if Southern Negroes were politically less apathetic.

¶ The Negro gets justice in the courts, although in some Southern courts he still has to fight for his right (affirmed by the Supreme Court) to be heard by mixed juries. The big issue today is no longer justice in the courts, but justice in daily life, i.e., the fight against segregation.

¶Negro college enrollment is up 2,500% over 1930.

¶The life expectancy of the male Negro has gone up from 47 years in 1920 to 59 years. In the same period, the white's life expectancy has risen more slowly, from 56 to 66 years. With improving living standards, the gap between the white man's and the Negro's life span is closing.

Prosperity: Cadillacs & Babbitts

The signs of Negro prosperity are everywhere. On the rooftops of Manhattan's Harlem grows that bare, ugly forest of TV antennae which has become a new symbol of middle-class achievement. On the outskirts of Atlanta are shiny new Negro housing developments (financed by Southern whites), with built-in washing machines. Yet the streets of Harlem are still largely slum streets, and a few blocks from the Atlanta apartments stand the old clapboard huts with outdoor privies. Where should one look for the real direction of the Negro economy?

U.S. business, for one, has its eyes fixed eagerly on the TV antennae and the washing machines. U.S. Negroes today have an annual income of $15 billion a year—almost as much as the national income of Canada, or more than the value of all U.S. export trade. Negro publications, whose advertising columns were until recently dominated by hair-straighteners and skin-bleachers, are now agleam with four-color ads of all the national brands—a dusky glamour girl smiling above a pack of Luckies, Negro men of distinction sipping Calvert, a Negro executive praising Remington typewriters. (Most advertising agencies now have special Negro market consultants who see to it that ads will sell and not offend Negroes.)

The Negro is a good customer. He wants to feel that he can buy the best. Swift & Co. does not advertise its ordinary fowl in Negro publications, but the more expensive Swift's Premium ("The dream chicken that came true"). Several Negro families often pool their savings to buy an expensive car and drive it on alternate days. On Harlem's Lenox Avenue, Cadillacs are so commonplace that nobody turns to look at them any more (a situation which one resourceful driver met by having his Cadillac's top