America Behind the Color Line Read online

  Where are we as a people, at the dawn of the twenty-first century? I wanted to pursue answers in a documentary film series for PBS, by conducting interviews with famous African Americans and with not-so-famous African Americans. It has long struck me as curious that African Americans often speak differently—more colorfully and openly—when talking with each other behind closed doors, as it were, than they do in interracial settings; more spontaneously, say, in barbershops and beauty parlors, in church socials and their living rooms, than they do in the pages of sociological studies or in polling data. I wanted to capture that more spontaneous and less inhibited voice on film, and in transcriptions of my interviews, printed as the text of this book.

  Du Bois wrote famously in 1903 that a racist experience when he was a schoolboy in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, had led him to the realization that African Americans conducted their lives in America behind a “veil”:

  Then it dawned upon me with

  a certain suddenness that I was

  different from the others; or like,

  mayhap, in heart and life and

  longing, but shut out from

  their world by a vast veil.

  I had thereafter no desire to

  tear down that veil, to creep

  through; I held all beyond it

  in common contempt, and lived

  above it in a region of blue sky

  and great wandering shadows.

  In this series, I wanted, on a modest level, to provide a window, a peephole, through that veil, a veil that still, far too often, separates black America from white.

  To do so, I traveled the country interviewing African Americans from Harvard to Harlem, from Wall Street to Watts, from the Lincoln Memorial to Memphis, from Fort Benning, Georgia, to Atlanta, the home of the black middle class. I walked the streets of Chicago’s South Side and interviewed residents of Chicago’s infamous housing project, the Robert Taylor Homes. I ended my journey in Los Angeles, where the fantasy world of Hollywood stands in stark contrast to the painful realities lived each day by the residents of Los Angeles’s South Central neighborhood. In Los Angeles, the two black worlds of class and consciousness collide, sometimes bizarrely, but always in splendid living color.

  As I talked to Black America all across America at the beginning of the twenty-first century, one thing became very clear. Everybody’s a CEO. Everybody’s talking about entrepreneurship, products, markets, and market share. It’s all about getting the most out of people, empowering, creating wealth.

  The critique of the Southern economy during slavery is that it focused entirely on growing staple crops and the suppression of what would otherwise be a market for food, clothing, housing, and other consumer goods. An ill-trained, ill-fed workforce had no incentive to produce a good product; neither was this workforce allowed to exercise consumer choices. What these interviews reveal is that apart from the moral case against slavery and the moral case against unequal civil rights, there is a damning business case against slavery, if the business case is defined as wealth creation and profitability. Economic historians may argue among themselves whether the slave system was economically efficient or inefficient, profitable or unprofitable in the long run, but the achievement and diverse economic accomplishment of blacks up and down the economic scale prove just how misguided those are who idealize the South as an economically cost-effective enterprise.

  Colin Powell confirms that African Americans are becoming more and more economically successful. But Hollywood actress Nia Long states a more important truth: “Black people generate enormous amounts of money for the American economy.” The success of black entrepreneurs and businesspeople around the country proves without a doubt that picking cotton was never the best way to generate that money. Young black kids have a new entrepreneurial spirit, Russell Simmons observes. “They’re doing it. It’s happening right now. That’s all they’re talking about. Getting money. Owning companies. They’re not talking about how brilliant they rap; they’re talking about how much money they’re making and how they’re making it. Legal money.”

  Willie W. Herenton, mayor of Memphis, Tennessee, for the past twelve years, speaks proudly of the economic successes of his city, the eighteenth largest in America, with $60 million in reserves, a double-A bond rating, a strong and vibrant financial center. “We have great purchasing power,” he explains, but the next step is converting that purchasing power to wealth creation within the race. Tammie, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of six who used to live in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, talks about the importance of targets and objectives and a diversity of options. If she were in charge, she says, she would find out what her fellow residents are aiming for, “what they do to set their goals, and see what they need to get to their goals.”

  Jesse Jackson states, “When one considers the economic origin of America, it was Africa and her people who subsidized America’s development. After all, two hundred years without wages is an African subsidy to America, redefining what party is ‘creditor,’ and which is ‘debtor,’ in the African-American relationship.” But while slavery “was woven into the fabric of the country,” can we now critique it on other terms? What is the legacy of slavery— in purely economic terms, enforced servitude, labor without pay—for today’s young people, poised to enter the workforce? The question has never merely been one of work and lost wages. The black work ethic is not the problem. As John Singleton puts it, whatever field you’re in, success is a matter of being able to work in the field you choose and being able to back it up with blood, sweat, and tears. The problem, Franklin Raines explains, is that “having excluded such a big piece of the workforce, such a big piece of society, from being productive has hurt the country. We’ve taken all these kids who could be out creating something and we made them all dependent and put them in jail. Well, it’s not just the cost of the jail, it’s also the loss of what their productivity would have been in the economy. We’ve got to get that message through, but getting that message through the color divide is very hard.” Ought we, as Jackson suggests, to wholly restructure a system that allows Russell Simmons to create the wealth he does? Yes, as Lenora Fulani explains, we need to educate black youth in how best to participate in this structure, but the goal of wealth creation and economic success is not in itself bad. Why shouldn’t black America want to live in the Big House?

  For every Vernon Jordan who says, “The one thing that we know is that white people like money, and that’s why they sold us and bought us. It had to do with money. It had nothing to do with humanity; it was about money,” there’s a Chris Tucker: “What people gotta realize is—and I understand it, and it’s fine—movie companies want to make a lot of money.” Everybody’s fighting for their job, he explains. The balance sheets have to look good. “I’d like to be in a position where somebody could bring me a script and if it’s good and I can do it, I would get it done, or take it to the studios and get it done,” said Chris. “We’ve gotta start opening doors; we gotta open them for ourselves. But to begin with, you gotta get through a narrow door.”

  This book is the result of these interviews, collected in the four parts that make up the film series. Above all else, I wanted these dialogues with African Americans to speak eloquently, as it were, for themselves, in an unmediated manner, providing a rare glimpse of black people reflecting to themselves on the challenges and ironies of their lives behind the veil, some thirty-five years following the death of the last great civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr.

  PART ONE

  Ebony Towers

  When I was growing up in the fifties, I could never have imagined that one of Harvard’s most respected departments would be a Department of Afro-American Studies and that twenty professors would be teaching here at the turn of the century. Our experience at Harvard is just one instance of a much larger phenomenon. Since the death of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968, individual African Americans have earned positions higher within white society than any p
erson black or white could have dreamed possible in the segregated 1950s. And this is true in national and local government, in the military and in business, in medicine and education, on TV and in film. Virtually anywhere you look in America today, you’ll find black people. Not enough black people, but who can deny that progress has been made? In fact, since 1968, the black middle class has tripled, as measured by the percentage of families earning $50,000 or more. At the same time—and this is the kicker—the percentage of black children who live at or below the poverty line is almost 35 percent, just about what it was on the day that Dr. King was killed.

  Since 1968, then, two distinct classes have emerged within Black America: a black middle class with “white money,” as my mother used to say, and what some would argue is a self-perpetuating, static black underclass. Is this what the Civil Rights Movement was all about? Can we ever bridge this black class divide?

  What does the success of this expanding middle class—W. E. B. Du Bois’s Talented Tenth, the college-educated black person, even now only 17 percent of all black Americans—mean for the progress of our people? Is this economic ascent the ultimate realization of Dr. King’s “dream” of integration? How do we continue to expand the size of the middle class? And most scary of all, is this class divide permanent, a way of life that will never be altered?

  Writing in the New York Times on May 31, 2003, Jack Bass, author of Unlikely Heroes: Southern Federal Judges and Civil Rights, quoted from an interview with John Minor Wisdom, “the legendary jurist and scholar,” which Bass had conducted just four months before the judge’s death at the age of ninety-three in 1999: “He told me he was uncertain which was more important,” Bass wrote: “how far blacks have come in overcoming discrimination, or ‘how far they still have to go.’ ” This question arose in another form in an amusing, signifying interplay between the titles of William Julius Wilson’s The Declining Significance of Race (1978) and Cornel West’s best-selling Race Matters (1993). There can be no doubt that “race” is far less important as a factor affecting economic success for our generation than it was for any previous generation of African Americans in this country. Still, there can be little doubt that the fact of one’s blackness remains the hallmark of our various identities in a country whose wealth, to a large extent, was constructed on race-based slavery, followed by a full century of de jure segregation and discrimination in every major aspect of a black citizen’s social, economic, and political existence.

  I decided to talk with some of the most remarkably successful African Americans of our generation who—because of opportunities created to one degree or another by affirmative action—have been enabled to excel in positions of authority that our antecedents could scarcely have dreamed of occupying, or even aspiring to hold. Had they become the Putney Swopes of our generation? I could think of no place more appropriate to begin than at the offices of the U.S. secretary of state, General Colin Powell.

  Since 1963, we’ve had seventy-five black congressmen and congresswomen, two U.S. senators, a whole slew of mayors, and two Supreme Court justices, but only in the last few years have we penetrated the heart of executive political power in Washington. Just a generation ago, the idea of a black president was a joke we’d tell in barbershops. We figured that a black man could be king of England before he’d be elected president of the United States! Yet today one of the most important political figures in the world is a black man, a man fourth in line to the presidency. Many people think that he would have easily defeated Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election.

  General Colin Powell grew up in the Bronx, the son of working-class Jamaican immigrants. He joined the army after college and saw combat in Vietnam. Like many of us, his career benefited enormously from affirmative action. He rose rapidly through the ranks, becoming a five-star general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He commanded our troops in Desert Storm. As national security adviser to two presidents and now as secretary of state, General Powell is the most powerful black person in the history of the American government and is one of the most powerful people in the world.

  I asked Powell if race had been a hindrance to his career path, or even to his aspirations. He replied, “I was raised in a family that never felt constrained by their poverty or by their race . . . And I was raised in a community that had blacks, whites, Puerto Ricans . . . a melting pot of the New York City environment. So I never really knew I was supposed to feel in some way constrained by being an inner-city, public school black kid, the son of immigrants. I just went into the army and I found an organization that said, no, no, no, we’ve changed, we’re ahead of the rest of the society. We don’t care if you’re black or blue, we only care if you’re a good green soldier. And if you do your best, you watch, you’ll be recognized. If you don’t do your best, you’ll be punished. And I started out as a black lieutenant but I became a general who was black.”

  I asked him if his position as secretary of state had made his race a nonissue, had, in effect, allowed him to transcend his racial identity. “When you walk into a room,” I wondered, “if you go to Asia or the Middle East, do the people you deal with still see a black man first, before they see you as the secretary of state?”

  “Yeah, sure, but they also see the American secretary of state and they know that I’m not coming to them as a black man; I’m coming to them as a representative of the American people, as a representative of the president of the United States. I represent all the values of this country and the power of this country, its military power, its economic power and political power. Once they sit down and get past whatever color I am, they want to do business.”

  I asked Powell what he thought was the responsibility of those of us within the African-American community who have made it to those left behind, an issue that still plagues my friends and that especially worries me. “I want to continue to be a role model for the kids in the neighborhood I grew up in, and for other youngsters in America,” he said. “Not just a black role model in that stereotypical sense, but an example of what you can achieve if you are willing to work for it. And second, those of us in the African-American community who have been successful financially ought to give some of it back to the community. You can do it through scholarships, through donations, through mentoring, through adopting or sponsoring a school. There are lots of ways to do it, and everything I’ve just mentioned I have done, or try to do. You don’t have to scream and shout about it but just get it done, reach back and help these youngsters who are coming along.”

  But why do we have more of a responsibility, it seems sometimes, than our white counterparts? I asked.

  “Our youngsters need us more perhaps, for one thing,” he said. “And our youngsters are still living in a society that is really only one generation removed from racism, discrimination, segregation, and economic deprivation, and we’re still suffering from that.”

  The tension between societal factors as the causes of our people’s social and economic disadvantages, and those traceable to individual initiative or the lack thereof, would become a leitmotif within the interviews I conducted throughout the black community. I think it’s fair to say that it is the largest single point of contention within the black community itself. Like General Powell, I, too, worry about the values of certain aspects of black urban street culture and the self-destructive behavior that reinforces the cycle of poverty— behavior that helps to keep the black poor impoverished. But the inner-city culture that General Powell says holds us back is also the source of the tremendous creativity found in hip-hop culture. If hip-hop is the culture of the black poor, it is simultaneously the face and voice of American popular culture. It is also rich with a few phenomenal success stories.

  I traveled from Washington to New York to meet the king of hip-hop culture, Russell Simmons. Simmons has transformed black urban street culture into the lingua franca of American popular culture worldwide—and into a music and fashion empire that grosses more than $300 million per year.

/>   “How old were you when you became an entrepreneur?” I asked him. “When I was sixteen,” Simmons said, “I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but selling weed was one of the few options open to me.”

  “Really? When did you become legitimate?”

  “I used to give hip-hop parties when I was at City College. People would pay to get in—all the hip-hop artists, DJ Cheeba and all these guys. I had this music thing I loved, and I was lucky enough to get a job in the music industry.”

  Simmons’s career took off in 1979 when he produced “Christmas Rappin’,” by Kurtis Blow, on Mercury Records. It was phenomenally successful, and the rest, one might say, is the history of hip-hop.

  Simmons’s company, Def Jam, brilliantly punched hip-hop from the ghetto straight into the heart of middle-class, teenage white America, launching bands such as Run-D.M.C. and Grandmaster Flash. Simmons, a brilliant marketer, has branched out to fashion design. His Phat Farm label is the rage from Harlem to Harvard Square, from Watts to Westwood.

  How did he create a business based on rebellious black culture and make it as American as apple pie? Simmons’s genius was to take an underground movement and turn it into the common language of American popular culture. Where did his understanding of the entrepreneurial system come from?

  “The entrepreneurial spirit came from within me,” he said. “I was never offered a salary; they didn’t like what we did. There was never an interest in giving me a job, or even making a record deal, so we started our own company . . . I wanted to be in the fashion business. Do you think anybody wanted to hire me or give me a job? I wanted to be in the advertising business. These things had to be forged with a little bit of resilience and vision . . .

  “The independence that was forced on us by managing some part of our culture, or ideas, is the same independence that’s creating a whole new lifestyle among young black people. All I had was drug dealers, some numbers runners, and an occasional pimp. They were the entrepreneurs. Now all these young people have images. It’s true that a lot of them are hardheaded and kind of twisted and unsophisticated. That’s why they did it in the first place. You think if they spoke the King’s English, if they went to school and were told, do what you’re supposed to do, that they’d be doing what they’re doing? . . . They came from the street and they did what they had to do and they created what they’ve created.”