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It is hard to remember that until the 1960s ghettos from Harlem to the South Side of Chicago were beacons of hope for blacks fleeing from the rigid segregation of the Jim Crow South. Jobs -- dirty, low-paying, but regular -- were available in thriving urban industries to anyone with a mind to work and a back strong enough for heavy lifting. Although pernicious, segregation at least compelled a sense of community, with black professionals and businessmen living among those who were far less successful. "These figures served the black community well as visible, concrete symbols of success and moral value, as living examples of the result of hard work, perseverance, decency and propriety," writes Elijah Anderson, a black professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
All that changed with the successes of the civil rights movement. The breakdown of rigid patterns of segregated housing offered middle-class blacks the opportunity to move beyond the ghetto walls. "The most upwardly mobile are the first to leave," explains Walter Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University. "Then the next best, the church members and civic leaders, leave. They are replaced by those who care less. There is cumulative decay."
Where once the ghetto provided a mix of black social classes, now residents are bound together under the yoke of poverty and impoverished aspirations. In a forthcoming book, The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson argues that those who have been left behind in the ghetto have inherited not "a culture of poverty but social isolation." Inner-city residents can go weeks without encountering anyone, black or white, who is a middle-class achiever.
Take Carla Smith, 25, a welfare mother who lives with three of her four children in Passyunk Homes, a public housing project in South Philadelphia. She and her children rarely leave the four-block project except to walk to the nearby grocery and discount-clothing stores. "I'm young, but I might as well not be," says Smith. "I don't do nothing. I don't go nowhere. My partying days are over. I just stay here with my kids all day long."
Much of the recent debate over poverty has stressed the need to provide jobs and training for welfare recipients like Carla Smith. But by making welfare the crux of the problem, both liberals and conservatives have ignored the single most serious cause of the misery of the ghetto: the shockingly high jobless rate among young black men. Unskilled and ill-educated, these young men are the true victims of America's dramatic transition away from a manufacturing base. Even when there is decent-paying work available, Wilson contends that social isolation excludes the black underclass from the "job- network system" that permeates other neighborhoods. One statistic tells it all: in 1985, 43% of all black male high school dropouts in their early 20s reported earning no money whatsoever. As recently as 1973, that figure was just 12%.