The Making of African America (28 page)

But while the black middle class gained ground at midcentury, black industrial workers lost it, as the ladder of industrial employment collapsed, and with it the possibilities of rising within the industrial hierarchy. The reorganization of the American economy left many black men and women without access to employment as factories—lured by low taxes, better roads, access to new markets, and nonunion labor—abandoned Northern cities for the suburbs, then left the suburbs for the South, and then the South for foreign destinations. Many factories closed, never to open again. Disproportionately, these were in heavy industries—automobile production, rubber processing, and steelmaking—just the industries where black workers had enjoyed a substantial presence. With these industries went the “good jobs,” and the pensions, health insurance, and security that came with seniority. Unions, into which black workers had at long last been incorporated, lost their ability to protect seniority and guard against discrimination.

The black men and women of the third great migraton, who had secured a toehold in the industrial working class during World War II and enjoyed the postwar prosperity, saw their grip slipping as the structure of American manufacturing shook in the 1960s and after. The skills of those experienced in the old smokestack manufactories did not transfer easily to the new high-tech industries. Even when black men and women had the qualifications, the new jobs had been removed to the distant suburbs, out of reach of inner-city black residents. The automation of production added to the dangers black workers—still concentrated in the ranks of the unskilled—faced. When the layoffs came, whether as a result of periodic downturns in the economy or of more permanent structural changes, black workers were the first sent home. The Civil Rights movement did little to improve the material conditions of black people in the inner city. One in three lived below the poverty line. Between 1975 and 1980, black unemployment increased by 200,000, as more and more black men and women were excluded from the labor market. The combination of ghetto residence and a sour economy locked black people in poverty.

Once again, excluded from the dynamic sector of the American economy, buffeted by the changing nature of production, and tied to the most vulnerable industries, black men and women saw their connections to regular work unraveling. Many of those who had found prosperity and security working in a unionized factory could only find hourly work flipping burgers. Deindustrialization left many black workers stranded in the inner city without good jobs and left many others without any remunerative employment. They had joined the industrial working class just when a substantial portion was being discarded as obsolete.
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The absence of regular employment and a living wage demoralized working people, particularly young men and women. Black families, which had survived slavery and segregation, frayed, as men—without access to work—had difficulties supporting their wives and children. Between 1960 and 1975, the number of black households without male wage earners increased from 22 to 35 percent. Along with the disappearance of black men from family life came a dramatic increase in the number of households with children born out of wedlock. Although adept at creating new forms of domestic life—piecing together a livelihood from part-time employment and assigning larger roles to grandparents—the absence of male breadwinners impoverished black people, particularly as household solvency came to depend upon the income of two breadwinners. Many black men and women found themselves confined to an alienated proletariat without the skills or education to secure regular employment, even when it became available. With a living wage increasingly beyond reach, some became dependent on welfare to make ends meet. Others turned to an underground economy of drugs and crime. Desperation only worsened the problem, with an increasing proportion of young men and women facing incarceration.
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The infrastructure of the inner city deteriorated along with the lives of its inhabitants. Attempts to attract new investments failed, as urban officials backed by municipal planners defined black neighborhoods as substandard blight. Rather than rehabilitate old neighborhoods, they scheduled them for destruction, a process sped up by the construction of highways designed to carry white workers between downtown employment and suburban homes. The rows of sterile high-rises—“the projects” in the lingo of the day—that replaced dilapidated but functioning neighborhoods only increased the density of the inner city and undermined stable communities. The close quarters and large numbers packed into these buildings soon denuded the surrounding courtyards, transforming them into barren waste-lands, often littered with broken bottles and other debris. Within the buildings, corridors and elevators became sites of all sorts of mayhem, so that the residents avoided them when they could, barricading themselves behind steel doors with multiple locks. Even amid these dif ficult circumstances, communities often flowered. The same barren projects that gave birth to violent drug gangs also seeded the welfare rights movement. Still, many residents, particularly those with aspirations and resources for a better life, fled. A growing number of impoverished blacks took their place.
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Changes set in motion by the Civil Rights movement—the dismantling of legal segregation and the new growth of the black middle class—allowed some black people to leave the inner city. Most moved to close-in suburbs which soon became as segregated as the inner city. The number of black men and women living in suburbs totaled some seven million by the middle of the 1980s, more than double the number a decade earlier. Those who remained in the inner city did not always resemble the respectable, churchgoing men and women who had once composed the core of black communities. Instead, many were impoverished and chronically underemployed or unemployed. Their family life was in shambles, characterized by female-headed households, out-of-wedlock children, welfare dependency, and the prevalence of drug use. Sociologists and other social scientists pointed to the spatial mismatch between work and residence and debated the so-called cultural and structural causes of the various urban disorders.
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Life in the inner city, whether in ramshackle buildings or soulless towers, gained a reputation as being rife with disease and criminality. White suburbanites—viewing the ghetto from a distance—saw it as evidence of the moral deficiency and intellectual inferiority of its residents. As citizenship was redefined by home ownership and patterns of consumption, black people—denied access to credit—found themselves excluded from the postwar prosperity. The white exodus from the city continued with ever-increasing speed at midcentury. By 1968, when a series of riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., decimated numerous black neighborhoods, black people were fully identified with urban life.

The rise of the black middle class and the decline of black workers into what some had begun to call an “underclass” left African American society sharply divided. This division was also reflected in the profound alteration of the social geography of African American life over the course of the twentieth century, a process that defined a new sense of place for black people.
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The characterization of black society at the end of the twentieth century—new middle class and underclass—recalled earlier examinations of the effects of antebellum enslavement and postbellum rural impoverishment on black people. They vastly understated the diversity of black life in favor of an emphasis on the pathologies of the inner-city. They emphasized street hustlers over wage earners, those who invested in numbers over those who saved for the future, and those who shot dope over those who shot hoops, creating seemingly indelible stereotypes. What was clear, however, was the full identification of black life with the city, a coincidence affirmed by the regular return of black suburbanites to their old neighborhoods to attend church, dine in a home-style restaurant, or listen to music with friends in a familiar club. During the last third of the twentieth century, the inner city became what the plantation had been in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and what the sharecropper plot had been in the late nineteenth. After more than a half century of movement, black people had again found place.

The surety of place spawned a new confidence. It was expressed in a variety of ways, most prominently in a series of overlapping nationalistic movements that celebrated blackness. While some were political and demanded Black Power and others were economic and asserted black control over production and consumption, all spoke of Black Pride. Each, by turns, might connote armed self-defense or participation in partisan politics, black capitalism or the creation of a black aesthetic, the commemoration of old heroes or the creation of new ones. Clothed in dashikis, sporting Afros, and holding high, clenched fists, the new movement asserted “Black is Beautiful” in a manner that reflected ownership of the inner city.
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Once again, nothing so traced the transformation of black life during the third great migration than the evolution of black music. The migration northward and cityward altered some musical forms and created entirely new ones, a process sped up by the commercialization of various popular amusements. The spirituals morphed into gospel at the hands of Southern migrants like Thomas Dorsey. In his carefully orchestrated chorals, Dorsey, a former blues singer from Georgia who claimed the title of “father of gospel,” excised the hand clapping and foot stomping that characterized the spirituals but incorporated the spiritual's syncopated rhythms and repetitions. In the voices of Roberta Martin and Mahalia Jackson, gospel music took on a sophisticated urban patina. Although members of the rising middle class embraced the new sound only reluctantly, by midcentury gospel had found a home in the black church. An active and profitable gospel circuit had been established.
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The blues also changed as it moved north, mutating in ways that made it hardly recognizable. Leaving the rough, communal settings of the rural roadhouse, it too became increasingly formalized and stylized, less the product of improvisation and more of careful arrangement. Performed in clubs and theaters rather than crossroad juke joints, it too was increasingly structured by a growing commercial market. Performers changed, as women vocalists like “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith replaced men as the main attraction, and instrumental ensembles numbering a half dozen ousted the lone guitar, harmonica, or washboard. The music, cut to the demands of a paying audience or a 78-rpm record, was played for an audience that included whites as well as blacks—and sometimes was limited to whites.
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The commercial success of the urbanized Southern import, however, was only one aspect of the development of the blues. In the cities of the North, many black migrants found the new, stylized music unrecognizable and the setting in which it was performed uncomfortable. Yet another brand of the blues—so-called urban blues—was much more to their liking. Although a more direct import from the Southern countryside, it was no simple copy of its rural forebears, for it too had changed with the northward migration, often adding acoustic instruments and with them a new range of sounds. While it also differed from place to place—St. Louis blues had a different sound than that heard in Chicago or Philadelphia—the repertoire was much more familiar to the newcomers.
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Together the new sounds of gospel and the urban blues inspired the emergence of rhythm and blues and later rock and roll. Ray Charles and especially Sam Cooke, among the leading architects of the new sounds, were two extraordinary musical talents and shrewd businessmen who not only deftly mixed the older forms but also promoted their own music. Cooke made his own bookings and eventually established his own record label. But no one could control the pedigree of the rapidly changing musical forms, especially under the intense pressure of commercialization. R&B, with its insistent beat and infectious lyrics, was repackaged in countless ways, often to make it attractive to a white audience even when performed by black musicians, and adopted by white musicians to play to black audiences. Still, there was no denying its origins. The Civil Rights movement marched to its beat and Motown became an emblem of Black Pride.
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The commercial success of rock and roll blurred the themes of movement and place, although they remained especially clear in the plaintive wail of the blues. Blind Blake's “Detroit Bound Blues,” Bessie Smith's “Chicago Bound Blues,” and Henry Townsend's “A Ram-blin' Mind” were among the songs that expressed wrenching pain and an eager desire to leave the South, just as Lizzie Miles's “Cotton Belt Blues,” Tommy McClennan's “Cotton Patch Blues,” and Roosevelt Sykes's “Southern Blues” echoed the sense of loss that accompanied the third passage. Others—like Ben Lorre's “Roamin' Blues”—captured the continuous motion of northward movement:

But still others captured the emotional attachments to place, as in Robert Johnson's “Sweet Home Chicago”:

Indeed, no part of the migratory experience escaped the blues men and women: the aspiration for change, the frustrations of life in the North, and the desire to return home—as in Memphis Minnie's and Joe McCoy's “I'm Going Back Home.”
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Ironically, jazz—the musical signature of the third passage—only occasionally spoke the words of movement and place, but it captured their contrapuntal relationship not in its lyrics but in its instrumentality. Jazz too emerged from the plantation South and its capital city, New Orleans, where a variety of native musical traditions mixed with those of the Caribbean and then traveled north, much like the people themselves, moving in small jumps from city to city: New Orleans to St. Louis to Chicago, and then points east—Philadelphia and New York—or west—San Francisco and Los Angeles.
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