A raid on an after-hours "blind pig" bar in Detroit, a scuffle between a Newark cabdriver and the police -- these were the flash points 20 years ago as the summer of 1967 erupted into the Fire This Time. Ghetto despair gave way to grotesque destruction: 43 dead in Detroit, 26 killed in Newark, injuries and arrests in the thousands. By September more than 100 cities had been scarred by rioting, an alphabetical roster of shame that stretched from Atlanta, Boston and Cincinnati to Tampa and Toledo. National Guardsmen patrolled the streets, and a federal commission probed the causes.
Out of the ashes came pious promises from politicians and the rhetoric of renewed resolve. "The only genuine long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack -- mounted at every level -- upon the conditions that breed despair and violence," proclaimed President Lyndon Johnson. No one seriously thought the inner city could be transformed overnight. But few were cynical enough to envision what actually happened: an entire generation would pass as life in the black ghettos of a rich nation went from bad to almost unimaginably worse.
"You tell me what went wrong," asks Jonas Walker, 33, at the end of another long summer's day of hanging out on a street corner in Liberty City, a ghetto north of downtown Miami. "We got civil rights, we got welfare," he says. "But look around here." For emphasis, he kicks at a pile of empty beer cans littering the sidewalk. A high school dropout, Walker gave up his last job, bagging groceries, two years ago. "When I was growing up in Mississippi, we were poor all right, but we didn't have the madness," Walker recalls. "Now we're just stuck here in this poor-ass ghetto, watching Oprah Winfrey on TV and listening to the damn gunshots at night."
What went wrong for the 4 million black Americans still trapped in festering inner-city ghettos? Why do one-third of all black families remain mired in poverty? Why is the jobless rate for black teenagers 40%? Why are 60% of all black children born out of wedlock? And why has the American ghetto become a self-perpetuating nightmare of fatherless children, welfare dependency, crime, gangs, drugs and despair?
Theories abound, but answers remain elusive. Perhaps the most promising approach grows out of the work of Black Sociologist William Julius Wilson of the University of Chicago, who popularized the concept of the underclass in his 1978 book The Declining Significance of Race. Wilson and his philosophical allies reject the simplistic single-factor theories of cause and effect, which range from the permissiveness of welfare to the pervasiveness of racism. Instead, they stress the ever widening social and economic gap between ghetto residents and the rest of American society, both white and black.