Problems of the Negro Movement
Kahn, Tom
Tom Kahn was assistant to Bayard Rustin in organizing the March on Washington, and previously helped organize Youth Marches for Integrated Schools in 1958 and 1959. An active participant in...
...Even the most rigorously enforced FEPC would be inadequate to this end, as inadequate as "equal opportunity" in apprenticeship programs...
...Meanwhile, the majority of Negroes—trapped in ghettoes, under-educated, unemployed, underemployed, or unemployable—will be subject to new disintegrative forces, to new forms of racial-economic separation and alienation...
...Besides, the Council of Economic Advisors estimates that 70% of current business investment in plant and equipment is for modernization and replacement (read: automation) rather than expansion...
...Professor Killingsworth makes a more profound criticism of the taxcut in terms of the structural or class character of unemployment: Despite a steady (but slow) improvement in the average educational level of the work force, the change in the pattern of demand for labor has created a large surplus of poorly educated workers and serious shortages of certain kinds of highly educated workers...
...It is important to take steps to provide for more apprenticeship training programs and more opportunities for the employment of apprentices...
...Status quo propagandists are desperately trying to serve up a "new Negro"—an upper middle-class professional type, urbane and bourgeois, an ideal next-door neighbor— to symbolize an alleged Revolution in American race relations...
...In California alone, for example, collective bargaining agreements are said to provide for about 100,000 apprentices, but employers are willing to employ only about 21,000 this year...
...It may be argued that these specific disappointments are overweighted, that they are taken out of context, that they should be balanced by a recitation of victories...
...The voter-registration drives of Southern Negroes will help undermine racist power at its source...
...A total of 27,593 construction men were unemployed last month...
...Young states, We do not advocate the firing of a white worker to employ a Negro— nor do we subscribe to the notion that until there is full employment for all Americans, the Negro must carry the brunt of the unemployment...
...This is the situation confronted by workers with the least education because of the inadequate expansion of the unskilled and semiskilled occupations for which they are qualified...
...And overt discrimination seems less a part of it than the weight of centuries of past discrimination combining with portentous economic forces that are themselves color-blind...
...2) Manpower retraining and education on a massive scale is indispensable to achieving and maintaining full employment in a technologically revolutionary society...
...At the year's end, President Johnson announced that the employment of nonwhites in salaried posts has gained 23.5% in a general rise of 13.8% in nonwhite employment...
...2) "unquestionably the fact of lesser qualifications" among minority groups—a problem which the Manpower Development and Training Act would help meet in the short run, although in the long run we need a vastly improved school system such as could only result from the kind of Federal action embodied in the National Education Improvement Act of 1963...
...These tendencies should be explicitly and vigorously encouraged by the liberal-labor-Negro coalition in 1964, traditional party loyalists notwithstanding...
...Who will benefit from "preferential treatment" in the absence of basic, government-spearheaded economic reform...
...It is not sufficient in the present context to say "White man, move over," without having an answer to "Move where...
...Joseph Lyford, op...
...As A. Philip Randolph has pointed out, We complain because the building trades have no room for Negroes, but the real trouble now is that these unions are designed for profit through scarcity...
...Gunnar Myrdal and others have pointed out that our economic growth will be stymied by a shortage of skilled manpower...
...increasing technological unemployment has caused some stirrings in the labor movement...
...Meanwhile, Southern cities seem to be emulating their Northern counterparts: industrialization has undermined the comparatively integrated housing patterns...
...The task is not easy...
...Between 1940 and 1959, the drop in the number of American farms was 397 but the number of farms owned or operated by Negroes was cut more than /2, from over 700,000 to less than 300,000...
...Among those graduating from high school in 1960, only 7% were Negroes...
...We still have a long way to go...
...In Philadelphia, 38 elementary schools have Negro enrollment of 99...
...At least theoretically, these mechanisms could eliminate the more glaring disparities in employment and income between Negroes and whites with comparable high-education backgrounds...
...Address before Conference on Employment Security, Michigan State University, October 26, 1963.] Like Myrdal, Killingsworth emphasizes the need to improve the quality of the labor supply, and wryly observes that "While the Administration urgently presses for the $11-billion tax cut, we are actually spending around $100 million this year for manpower retraining...
...A Negro cannot be given preference over a white if no jobs exist for either of them...
...According to William Whyte, Within 14 to 16 years, if present population trends are arithmetically projected into the future, Negroes will be in the majority in Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Chicago, and St...
...Despite the unprecedented March on Washington (which did prompt addition of Part III and FEPC to the civil rights draft of the House Judiciary Subcommittee), Congress slumbered, the Attorney General compromised, and prospects for a strong bill dimmed...
...By contrast, the demand for a massive federal works program can be a natural rallying point for virtually all the unemployed...
...The reason for this, of course, is agricultural mechanization, which has hit Negroes hardest...
...The Economic Status of Negroes, p. 16.] Generally, the long-term unemployed are more likely to be the victims of technological change, while the short-term unemployed may be seasonal lay-offs, retrainees, or seekers of better jobs...
...The ugliness is evident in the housing itself...
...The differences within the parties are sharper than between them...
...We have given preferential treatment to the G.I...
...Negro youth have a vested, if unarticulated, interest in economic planning...
...They would raise the national unemployment rate to 8.8...
...Slum schools—white or black—have always been inferior, robbing youngsters of motivation...
...In the words of the New York Times, "Unemployment of these proportions, were it general, would be a national catastrophe...
...Moreover, since 1955 the jobless rate among Negro teenagers has risen faster than the rate for white teenagers—up about 60% among Negroes, compared with a 30% rise for white teenagers...
...Most of the Negroes' gains were in clerical jobs where wages are generally lower than in manufacturing...
...The operational sterility of the "equal opportunity" principle has given rise to the "preferential treatment" slogan...
...Yet they are so fundamental that they must reassert themselves through any veneer of optimism imposed upon them...
...It scarcely represents the decisive Federal intervention in the school system that is required to deal with the national education scandal...
...To some Negro militants this course will seem to blur the special interests of the civil rights movement...
...Social dislocation," in Bayard Rustin's phrase, has been the Negro's most effective weapon in recent years...
...Nor is a program answering this question enough...
...In Chicago, 81% of the children in the Negro schools were on double session as against 19% of the "mixed schools" and 2% of the white schools...
...In New York, only 50.3% of the teachers in the Negro and Puerto Rican elementary schools were fully licensed as compared with 78.2% in white schools...
...But the past year has shown that militance alone does not produce enough results, that it is no substitute for fundamental analysis, that it is not in itself productive of jobs, housing, and schools...
...Walter Reuther and other labor leaders most prominently associated with the shorter workweek demand have indicated that they do not consider it a full-employment panacea, but see it as part of a program including a tax cut, public spending, and a liberal monetary policy...
...Institutions mold attitudes more than attitudes mold institutions...
...But the problem is that the new atmosphere of the 60s is due primarily to the dramatic impact of the civil rights movement itself—not to a broad social-reform movement of which Negroes are part...
...Not until the March on Washington did the move ment project a clear set of economic demands...
...I have no intention here of taking the Secretary to task, since his article did not require him to offer solutions to all the problems related to Negro unemployment...
...To list the companies most commonly associated with "preferential treatment" policies is to indicate expanding industries in need of skilled manpower...
...Again, the civil rights organizations will not ultimately be able to enlist and maintain the participation of the Negro masses on the basis of a middle-class integrationist ideology...
...The present national commitment to education is totally inadequate to meet even these "normal" rates of growth, let alone the special needs of depressed areas...
...The fact is that bussing and related devices may be well-intentioned, but they are makeshift, stopgap measures which raise more questions than they answer...
...While a handful of idealistic white parents may "take the chance," most, in a twist on James Baldwin, would ask, "Integrate into what...
...Yet a transformation is precisely what they have considered as the sine qua non of integration—whether as a precondition or as an aftereffect...
...Often steeped in liberal rhetoric, it proclaims its impotence in the face of the "impersonal" and "objective" historical forces that are transforming our cities into ghettoes...
...For Negro youth the prospects are especially bleak, since they constitute 21% of all high school dropouts...
...means very simply that earnings are increasing for whites at a faster pace than for Negroes...
...Before retraining could reach maximum effectiveness, the primary and secondary school systems will have to be radically improved...
...Toward Equal Opportunity", American Child, Nov., 1963.] These remarks are an excellent point of departure for an evaluation of government programs in the field...
...4. Negroes constitute a growing percentage of all workers in most of the declining job categories...
...They were essentially correct but sketchy, and have since been pretty much forgotten...
...The more education and training they require, the more they are characterized by an excess of labor demand over labor supply...
...But corporate profits are already at an all-time high...
...Similarly, whites entered the $6,000-and-over category at a faster rate than Negroes...
...As the pace of school desegregation diminished in the South, the courage of James Meredith threatened to become a tokenistic mockery...
...In the clerical and sales categories, 90% of the Negroes were trained as stenograph-typists...
...If such a program is to succeed, in its economic or social goals, it requires democratic central planning...
...it is no longer needed...
...The higher birth rates prevalent among the Negro rural immigrants to the city means a rapid growth in Negro school enrollment...
...Andrew J. Biemiller, director of the AFL-CIO Department of Legislation, has estimated by purely arithmetical calculation that another million jobs would result from each hour cut from the standard workweek...
...Accordingly, he called for the selection of 100 depressed areas, as a start, as centers of an educational crash program...
...Even now we designate certain geographic areas as depressed and disaster centers, and their people entitled to special help because of joblessness and acts of God...
...Invisible Army of the Unemployed" Just as the dollar gap between Negroes and whites is widening, so is the unemployment gap...
...The separation of the Dixiecrats from the Democratic party would deprive them of the political power they wield on the national scene...
...War production created a shortage not only of skilled workers, but of semi-skilled and unskilled workers as well...
...critics of the "affluent society" seem to be more numerous...
...Meanwhile, there is the danger that the emphasis on preferential treatment sows the illusion that Negroes can make progress in a declining economy, and diverts attention from the real nature of the unemployment problem...
...Not only discrimination but also strong economic reasons have prevented Negroes from moving into the suburbs...
...But under new political leadership genuinely committed to "getting America moving again," such a program could be cast in radically different terms: not as "make-work," not even merely as an assault on unemployment, but as a crusade for the physical and social reconstruction, literally the rebuilding, of the nation...
...We have not yet created this broader based party we need so badly, and because we do not have this party, with its commitments reaching into every community of the United States, it is uncertain what way legislation and political events will go in the next year, and in the next four years, and perhaps in the following eight years...
...Some economists object that a public works program would have a "make-work" or "handout" air that would demoralize workers...
...The latter is perhaps the most distinctive development in race relations this year...
...While space does not permit extensive analysis of these proposals, the major criticisms of each may be briefly outlined as an argument for the massive federal works program...
...The civil rights movement has entered a critical period...
...Instead of illuminating the basic issues, the two major parties adopt similar platforms...
...To a large extent, this will be a constant problem...
...For all of them, unemployment is worsening in frequency and duration...
...In New York City, for example, about half of the nonwhite renters and 40% of the nonwhite homeowners live in substandard housing...
...Occasional area conferences are not enough...
...The benefit of general economic expansion and technology, therefore, have only trickled down to the Negroes, putting more of them into wage and salary jobs...
...The problem is that "purely arithmetical calculations" are wide of the mark since manhours are not exactly interchangeable units...
...That vision sees the civil rights movement as the only dynamic force for social change in this country today...
...So long as we have class unemployment and Negroes are disproportionately concentrated in the lower job categories, only full employment can keep them engaged in the economy...
...The bottleneck in the supply of workers at the top of the educational ladder would seriously impede the continued economic expansion that is essential to reduce to tolerable levels the shocking rates of unemployment that we find today at the middle and bottom of the educational ladder...
...In a recent article against "discrimination in reverse," Secretary of Labor Wirtz cited the "three causes of minority group unemployment today": 1) "The present shortage of jobs in the economy as a whole for all workers" —for which he proposed no solutions...
...So long as Eastland is senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a Democratic majority in the Senate means he is chairman of that committee...
...This is not to say that the struggle lacks sympathy among other segments of the population...
...This would retain the consumer purchasing capacity for workers in those situations where the nature of the cybernation process is such that x men would do essentially the same work which x plus y men used to do...
...Between 1960 and 1970, high school enrollment will have grown from 10 to 15 million...
...For the Subcommittee's recommendation of commission-enforcement machinery, the full Committee substituted a more costly, prolonged court-enforcement procedure...
...The segregationist practices of the craft unions are well known and among the ugliest chapters in labor history...
...It has been estimated that one out of every 10 Negro men in the U.S...
...To be sure, full employment does not guarantee the equitable integration of the Negro into the economy, but it is a precondition...
...Especially ominous is the long-term unemployment rate among Negroes...
...The civil rights movement, as a first step, should make its economic demands explicit...
...A bill extending the program and adding 93,000 workers was signed by President Johnson in December...
...Most important perhaps is the increasing tension between the Dixiecrat and liberal wings of the Democratic party...
...Among them: what judgment should be rendered of a society that would rather dislocate its children than reorganize its cities...
...What do the tenants themselves think of public housing...
...About 297 of the very long term unemployed in September, 1962 were Negroes compared with 21% in September, 1961...
...However, the struggle against discrimination in apprenticeship programs, though vital, cannot solve the problem of Negro employment...
...In 1962 service-industry jobs numbered 36 million, as against 20 million goods-producing jobs (non-farm...
...corresponding figures for white women are 22.3% and 17.3...
...These are the occupations that are expanding most rapidly...
...But unless this occupational distribution is radically altered, disaster looms for the Negro community...
...This is true not only of blue-collar industries but of agriculture as well...
...Nonetheless, college graduates constitute only 3.5% of the non-white adult population, and it is likely that, because of skilled manpower shortages, this group will make the most rapid progress in the period ahead...
...Because purchasing power has not kept pace with productivity, actual production has been limited, and so has the demand for labor...
...If there is any correlation between enforcement of these laws and the Negro unemployment rate, it is likely to be inverse (major urban centers tend to have politically liberal administrations and high ghetto unemployment rates...
...Here the white power structure is a harder target to pinpoint...
...To educate youth for tomorrow's jobs, we must know what tomorrow's jobs will be...
...These benefits automatically produced high acceleration in income change, but were restricted tightly to lower occupational classifications...
...Daniel Bell, The Post-Industrial Society (unpublished...
...Still, the foregoing review suggests that its causes may persist...
...Institutional patterns of racism have scarcely been altered over the past decade, despite the increased militance of the Negro community...
...When one considers that the total population in this district is equal to that of a good-sized independent city, the magnitude of the problem is appalling .. . What is equally clear is that an educational crash program in 100 depressed areas is barely a pilot project when measured against the need...
...Largely because of automation, productivity (output per manhour) increased 20.2% between 1956 and 1962, while workers' purchasing power grew only 15.2...
...Also, the European recipients developed new forms of social and economic planning to allocate the aid and to lay the foundations for relative full employment, while Americans continue to rely for their social services on private agencies to a degree unknown in any other contemporary society...
...A causal relationship may be suggested: energy for local protest activity was diverted into and exhausted by preparations for the gigantic March...
...In Chicago, 87% of the Negro elementary school students attend virtually all-Negro schools...
...Nor are educationally disadvantaged youth likely candidates for training in skilled jobs...
...James J. McKenna, president of the Building Employers of New York State, says this will mean 4,000 on-site construction jobs statewide...
...And largely because our society has never guaranteed the right to work, most of the unemployed have not yet fully perceived that they are victims of social injustice...
...Unemployment among Negroes is at least 12%, but there is no mass movement of the unemployed with which the civil rights movement could forge mutually reinforcing links...
...The Economic Status of Negroes, Southern Regional Council pamphlet, pp...
...broadcast as a central slogan, it drives a wedge between Negroes and those whites who stand most to gain from a political alliance for economic reform...
...A number of proposals have been advanced to solve the problem of unemployment...
...The suburban movement has been going on for decades and certainly predates the 1954 Supreme Court decision...
...there has been no change in income differential between...
...But such analysis can lead to—must lead to—the formulation of dramatic economic demands that express real needs, arouse popular support, and stimulate greater awareness of basic issues...
...Where people choose to live is determined primarily by the location of job opportunities, just as where their children go to school is determined primarily by where the parents live...
...why assume that tax savings would be invested when available capital is not...
...If these students can transfer to the unemployed (particularly the youth) a degree of the spirit they acquired in the Negro struggle, we may be on the verge of a new student movement...
...But if No Job Exists...
...A major reason for the absence of activity among the nation's dispossessed stems from the very nature of class unemployment...
...Already, "the technical requirements of all high status jobs are such that a person who has failed to complete his [secondary] education has already lost out for a place in the society ahead...
...Many blue-collar workers are beyond retraining, e.g., miners, laborers and other unskilled workers over 40...
...It follows, then, that the broad range of problems con fronting the Negro must be solved by the civil rights movement—or they will not be solved at all...
...Long-term joblessness among Negroes results from discrimination in hiring and inadequate training and inadequate manpower development...
...Segregated schools are inferior schools, North or South...
...1] Under the original terms of the Act, one-third of the applicants under 25 were rejected on grounds of illiteracy—an added handicap for Southern Negroes, who have a disproportionately high illiteracy rate.* Racist state officials are a stumbling block, since the states are responsible for approving the training programs...
...Summing up the effect of present Federal housing programs on the Negro, Charles Abrams, President of the National Committee Against Discrimination, declares: Thus urban renewal which displaces minorities oppresses more than it benefits them and the requirement of relocation is no more than a frail pretext for appeasing conscience...
...Negroes with some college training are found in service and laborer jobs in numbers five times greater than whites with similar training...
...Twenty-five states already have laws against job bias...
...cit.] The civil rights organizations may be at an historic turning point...
...Another reason for a special effort arises from historic considerations...
...Only intelligent planning can create neighborhoods that are racially, culturally, educationally, and economically integrated...
...While Killingsworth has not made a racial breakdown of the "invisible army," he has emphasized that its members are educationally disadvantaged...
...3) direct financial relief...
...An active participant in the civil rights movement since his high school and college days, he wrote the pamphlet Unfinished Revolution in 1960, is on the editorial board of New America, and now works for the Workers Defense League...
...It was also a record year for civil rights legislation on the state level...
...In a rational and humane society, conscious of its own developing needs, participants in a reconstruction program would be accorded the respect reserved in the past for the financially successful...
...3. The industries and occupations where the Negro's gains have been greatest have either declined or shown relatively little growth over the past decade...
...Not only is the dollar gap widening, but the relative income gap has remained virtually constant for almost a decade...
...It does not affect the structure of the labor market or of the industries doing business with the government—certainly not as much as government spending policies...
...Of the millions of housing units whose mortgages were insured by the Federal Housing Administration since 1934 and the Veterans Administration since 1944, less than 2% has been available to nonwhite families...
...The decline in the goods-producing industries was paralleled by a 6.2 million jobs increase in the service-producing industries...
...Rather it saw in the AFL-CIO an apparently overbureaucratized and complacent institution, itself tainted by racism...
...Forty-seven per cent of all public housing units in the country are occupied by Negroes, and more than 80%/o of all public housing is segregated...
...There are enough of these establishments to accommodate everybody...
...The alternative is the present political stalemate...
...The intellectual blackout has lifted...
...A great many of the intense needs and problems evident in so many Negro communities are the results of exclusion based on racial discrimination...
...The image is not utterly unreal, and to the extent that it upsets humiliating stereotypes and whets the aspirations of Negro youth, it is desirable...
...3) "the harsh ugly fact of discrimination"—which Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1963 are aimed directly at eliminating...
...The latter conditions are the more likely ones as cybernation becomes more sophisticated...
...One fourth of the dollars involved go to the corporations to stimulate investment...
...Daniel Bell predicts that By 1970 with the demand for unskilled labor shrinking, relative to the total labor force, and the substantial majority of workers in white-collar or highly skilled blue-collar jobs, the relative disproportion between whites and Negroes in the low-skilled and service jobs—despite a rise in the levels of Negro education—may be even greater...
...John Kenneth Galbraith recently declared that our best schools should be in our worst slums, where they are most needed...
...In Cambridge, Md., whether or not the leadership's strategy was sound, there was defeat...
...Only one out of five Negro families earns $6,000 or more, as compared with one out of two white families...
...It is in this light that one must therefore view the Department of Labor's new standards outlawing discrimination in the apprenticeship programs it certifies...
...they cover 41 17, of the Negro population...
...Young argues that This idea of temporary special help now being called for is not new to our society...
...What is the psychological effect on a Negro child who leaves the ghetto every morning for a bus ride through the tree-lined streets of the white neighborhood (where the "better," integrated school is likely to be), is taught by a "better" (read: white) teacher in an integrated classroom, and then returns to the ghetto in the late afternoon...
...Government and business play the larger roles—and at this point, the government's role is probably more potential than actual...
...This harsh fact cannot be obscured by dramatic progress in the integration of public accommodations...
...Yet 63,000 jobs is not anywhere near the 2,000,000 jobs which the Manpower Research Office estimates will be needed each year to offset advances in technology...
...of the National Urban League...
...The median pay of the Negro worker has remained stuck at about 55% of the white...
...In strategic terms the crisis confronts the movement as a rising frustration in the Negro community, on the one hand, and a burgeon...
...Victories are harder to chalk up because more basic demands are being made on the local white power structures...
...Consideration of these obstacles is already viewed in some circles as alien to the pressing concerns of the movement...
...the Kennedy-Johnson administrations have been more sensitive to the need for reform...
...After Congress killed FEPC in 1946, job discrimination surged up and many of the newly acquired skills were lost to the Negro community through lack of use...
...There is a sense in which many urban politicians are sincere in describing these forces as "objective"—i.e., the sense that these forces are set in motion not so much by the subjective racism of specific individuals, but have to do primarily with economics...
...No party, not even the Democratic Party which elected President Kennedy, had finally brought these people together into an effective political party...
...If the spirit and dynamic of his struggle can be injected into the white "other America," then the problems of both may be solved...
...To be sure, the elimination of legalized racism does not plunge the Negro community into internecine class warfare, but it will tend increasingly to make the demands of the black bourgeoisie separate from the rest of the Negro community...
...Such discrimination is not a major cause of the present high levels of Negro unemployment...
...after World War II—in the form of free education, reduced interest loans for homes and businesses, a ten-point advantage on civil service examinations and other benefits—because he had been out of the mainstream for four or five years...
...We believe the answer lies in effective action by responsible individuals and institutions—acting privately and in concert—who will undertake a massive program to close the intolerable economic, social, and educational gap that separates the vast majority of Negro citizens from other Americans...
...In these cases, the people involved increased their income by going into a more prosperous section of the economy as a whole...
...Actually, the Washington March stimulated local marches in several areas (Long Island, New Jersey, California, etc...
...These should be combined with practical training in leadership and organization skills (writing, speechmaking, stencil-cutting, mimeographing, etc...
...Thus, despite the unprecedented growth of income among Negroes and the percentage gains made, the fact remains that income progress of Negroes has leveled off...
...Nor did this generation grow up in an intellectual atmosphere enlivened by radical or socialist ideas...
...On the one hand, urgent indignation...
...On the other hand, almost half of all tenant farmers and over 65 10 of all share croppers are Negroes...
...V To this writer's knowledge, the civil rights organizations have produced no detailed studies of the Negro's economic plight as it relates to national trends...
...The labor movement has so far failed to assume responsibility for "the other America...
...The trends are unmistakable and dangerous...
...among clerical workers, 6.7% as against 1.6...
...Others were trained as waiters and waitresses...
...Explanations of the suburban exodus as a flight of whites from Negroes—or from integrated schools—are insufficient...
...It is precisely in the professional and technical field that the job market is expanding most rapidly...
...The 10-point domestic "Marshall Plan" Young calls for emphasizes massive aid to Negroes primarily by private sources—and it is clear that the "responsible individuals and institutions" referred to are the corporations and foundations from which the NUL has traditionally derived its support...
...It tends to induce passivity, not revolt...
...Certainly a public works program carried out by the guardians of the status quo—who regard poverty as a moral flaw and people on relief as chiselers—would have the predicted results...
...A student's motivation is conditioned not only by his present environment but also by his future prospects...
...It is not often that the slogans of the most conservative civil rights group are taken up with such gusto by the more militant activists...
...The original Marshall Plan, however, was a government aid program, not a voluntary gift of U.S...
...While the broadening of demands is a step in the right direction, it does not follow that local civil rights groups can themselves, through their usual tactics, generate sufficient pressure to win these demands...
...Segregation is on the upgrade in Northern housing, despite a raft of open-occupancy statutes...
...It may appear to them as a white liberal trap to divert Negro militance into utopian fantasies...
...In the late President Kennedy's words, the policy * There are 8 million "functional illiterates" in the U.S., i.e...
...The present crisis in race relations is a measure of the tenacity with which our society has clung to racism...
...David B. Carlson, Architectural Forum, July, 1963.] Largely in recognition of these facts, the Harlem Neighborhoods Association has fought for mixed-income as against low-income housing on the former Polo Grounds site...
...Here is an obvious waste of skills that can be ascribed only to blatant discrimination and segregation...
...In the eyes of most whites, most Negroes continue to exhibit the traits associated with poverty and social disorganization—traits rendering them "unworthy" of integration...
...Since 1957 construction jobs have remained at 2.9 million...
...Fisk economist Vivian Henderson emphasizes that while relative growth in wage and salary income of Negroes since 1940 has been greater than that of whites . . . the absolute, or dollar, difference has widened considerably...
...Consequently, party affiliation is practically no indication of political program...
...The point to be stressed here is that the Negro's income gains were the result of peculiar employment opportunities that no longer exist...
...For while the levels of Negro education are rising, they are not rising fast enough...
...Equal Opportunity in Housing, National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing, April, 1963.] Because of the population movements of whites into suburbs and Negroes into the central cities, as well as intra-city tendencies toward segregation, more Negro children attend what are in fact segregated schools in the major cities of the North than attend officially segregated schools in urban areas of the South...
...Fair and full employment through a massive federal works program —this is a civil rights demand...
...Vigorous agitation and direct action around it should become central for the movement...
...Journal of Intergroup Relations, Autumn, 1962.] These observations are a salutary reminder of a fact obscured a few years when Herbert Hill's criticism of the unions was at its height: namely, that the labor movement does not control the economic mechanisms that determine employment patterns...
...Whereas the unemployment rate from 1947 to 1953 never exceeded 8.5% for Negroes and 4.6% for whites, now it stands at 12.4% and 5.9% respectively...
...Thus the technological changes in our economy have profoundly affected the composition and layout of our cities...
...Employment of nonwhites in management categories rose by 46.3% .. . and by 37.4% in professional and administrative jobs...
...What portion of long-term unemployed Negroes are victims "purely" of discrimination as against victims of automation is impossible to estimate...
...Toward which portion of the Negro community will they orient their policies and programs...
...Trapped in decaying cities, the Negro becomes, in the eyes of whites, an integral part of the ugly urban scene being left behind...
...Labor economists believe the real Negro unemployment rate is probably close to 20...
...thus, the sending school loses its better students and the local community is deprived of its best prospects for Negro leadership...
...Herman Miller concludes that "In most states, the nonwhite male now has about the same occupational distribution relative to whites that he had in 1940 and 1950...
...If unemployment did not exist, a national face-lifting would still be needed to enable our social services, our very patterns of life, to catch up with Twentieth Century technology...
...They perceive no transformation in the Negro as a "social type...
...Used functionally in negotiations with certain employers, preferential treatment can be advantageous...
...It would assist the states in undertaking their own improvements...
...Whichever approach is taken, the private economy cannot be relied upon...
...Michael, If our understanding of the direction of cybernation is correct the government will probably be faced for the indefinite future with the need to support part of the population through public works...
...Actually, government enforcement of nondiscrimination provisions in its contracts is not likely to increase substantially the job opportunities available to Negroes...
...Nationally one out of every 6 Negro dwelling units is dilapidated, obsolete or otherwise substandard, as compared with one in 32 white dwellings...
...The mass unemployment of the thirties has yielded to a new "under-class" unemployment...
...Nonetheless, so long as the shorter workweek remains the labor movement's key demand, the AFL-CIO will be suspect of protective unionism and indifference to the plight of masses of unemployed workers...
...Times, Aug...
...it would be a pioneering effort in many ways similar to the worker-education programs developed by the early labor movement...
...Public housing benefits but is little more than a handout, and its benefits are miniscule as long as it confines itself to cities and offers only tenancy to minorities while excluding ownership...
...FHA is a boon to the white middle class and the skilled worker but it carries with it the hidden sanction of exclusion as long as it continues to recognize local zoning practices...
...Reports from the 115 companies participating in President Kennedy's "Plans for Progress" program are revealing...
...It is an environment, a culture: your clothes, your home, your manners, your friends...
...Other disadvantages have been cited in proposals for a "massive shifting of Negro and white children out of their own districts": Whatever possibilities might exist for closer parent-teacher contacts are practically eliminated for those who do participate in the open-enrollment program...
...III If Negroes are frustrated by the disparity between image and reality, between the progress they are alleged to have made and the real condition of their daily existence, whites are similarly perplexed...
...In this way, class poverty tends to perpetuate itself...
...But the immediate employment benefits of retraining are limited...
...Urban housing grows more segregated because our major cities are becoming vast racial ghettoes...
...And to suggest that they are not surmountable by the civil rights organizations alone is viewed as an indirect way of asserting their insurmountability—hence as the latest guise of gradualism...
...Consequently, thousands of Negroes left the rural South and poured into the factories...
...Still, "complete equality of opportunity" doesn't seem to be enough...
...That figure represents only 11% of the total MDTA trainees, while Negro unemployment in the South is 30...
...Another million and a half jobs were lost in agriculture over the past decade, as mechanization hit the small family farm and hired hands...
...This, by contrast, is not true of the Negro...
...Rather it came to consciousness in the Eisenhower-McCarthy decade, when relative prosperity and the witch-hunt combined to enthrone mediocrity and discourage nonconformist thought...
...The seniority system is only part of this archaic rules structure of Congress...
...Mississippi has not spent one manpower dollar because the state refuses to offer assurances that the program would be administered on a nonracial basis...
...Crystalization of the Negro's socio-economic needs in a campaign for a massive federal works program admittedly runs the risk of oversimplifying these needs or of overshadowing other concerns...
...Louis...
...The determination of political allegiances on the basis of answers to this question might take us a long way toward the kind of principled politics without which we are not likely to achieve civil rights, or social justice, or economic reform...
...Between 1953 and 1962, mining lost 25% of its jobs...
...Young seems to be assuring the NUL audience, differs from many revolutions inasmuch as it is an attempt by an underprivileged element of society not to change the fabric of that society, but to "revolt" into partnership with it...
...Not only do these Negroes constitute a relatively small portion of the Negro population...
...The Negro male who finishes four years of college will earn less than a white male with only eight years of elementary school...
...As the nonviolent direct-action movement has fanned out of the South, it has been frustrated by the diffused yet deeply built-in character of discrimination and segregation in the big cities...
...Most of all, it is a challenge to white Americans in the liberal, labor, and radical communities to rescue the Negro from isolation—not merely by sympathizing with his struggle, not alone by joining it, but by radically altering the context in which it takes place...
...Also, the child who has a long route home by bus from a distant school has less chance to participate in local after-school activities sponsored by the city and by the settlement houses...
...That is, although the proportion of workers needed for any particular task will be reduced through the use of cybernation, the total number of tasks that need to be done could equal or exceed the absolute number of people available to do them...
...But last summer, unemployment among Negro youth was 24% as against 9% among whites...
...Frustration and Counter-revolution in the North As for the North, it is unnecessary to list defeats...
...And these are precisely the jobs now being destroyed by automation...
...Actually, it poses a challenge...
...cit.] The technological revolution challenges our society at many points...
...The fact remains, however, that in not a single city has the civil rights movement scored a breakthrough victory...
...Of these 21,000, over 4,000 are in the carpenters' program, so the opportunities in all the remaining 160 programs are very limited indeed...
...Still, more intensive social-educational programs could certainly polish some rough diamonds and yield new leaders with deep roots in the community...
...And it is from this social reality that most whites will draw their image of the Negro...
...No...
...How significant that so many sit-inners, seeking intellectual ancestors, turn back to Gandhi and Thoreau...
...The percentage of Negro families in lower income brackets is twice as high as whites, and the differential in earnings of whites and Negroes continues to widen, largely offsetting percentage gains...
...1 Ever since the March on Washington, civil rights activity has been in a relative lull...
...The demand for preferential treatment has been unsuccessful where labor supply exceeds labor demand (as in the New York construction industry...
...Apart from historical equity, a massive compensatory effort may well be the only means of overcoming the present results of past neglect...
...In Detroit, 45% of the Negro students are in public schools that are overwhelmingly (80%) Negro...
...18, 1963] The Negro's relative income gains were actually registered between 1940 and 1954, when Negro family median income jumped from 37% to 56% of the white figure...
...Ibid...
...Preferential treatment has benefited those Negroes who can qualify for the more skilled occupations...
...Vivian Henderson reports that In September, 1958, the average duration of unemployment for Negroes was 17.8 weeks and for white workers 13.3 weeks...
...In sales positions, the increase was 53.1% and in technical jobs, 31.6...
...The test question for Congressional candidates should be: If elected, do you pledge to vote against any candidate for a committee chairmanship who opposes the party's platform in the area of the committee's concern...
...The figures for whites are but 20% and 10%, respectively...
...One of the major disappointments is the toned-down fair employment provision...
...But to win jobs will require a reorientation of national policies beyond the capacities of the Negroes alone...
...He went on to report that MDTA programs in the South in the first 8 months of operation have trained only 234 Negroes, according to the report of the Civil Rights Commission...
...In part, as Michael Harrington observes, these gains were due to "economic geography rather than the workings of the society...
...Testimony before The Committee on Employment and Manpower, July 25, 1963.] Something of Randolph's view is conveyed by Peter Kihss in the New York Times: There are about 140,000 men in the city's construction industry...
...Corporate profits keep soaring, however, because corporations prefer to maintain high profit margins on a smaller volume of production than lower profit margins on a larger volume...
...Titles VI and VII, legislatively outlawing discrimination in all government programs and establishing "complete equality of opportunity within the government and by government contractors," have already been put in operation administratively...
...How does the child relate to its family, to neighborhood friends, to the ghetto itself...
...Package demands—combining integration of public accommodations with jobs and/or school integration and/or biracial commissions—have become increasingly prominent in demonstrations, eclipsing the earlier single-demand approach associated with lunch-counter sit-ins...
...The Question of "Bussing" To reverse the trend toward urban school segregation, various techniques have been tried (permissive bussing, open enrollment, realignment of school districts, strategic location of new schools, etc...
...So is extensive public planning...
...Yet expansion and reform of the elementary and secondary school systems is the sine qua non for raising the educational status of the general Negro community...
...II It takes a lot of running to stand still on the treadmill of this technologically advancing society...
...The unemployment figures for Negro and white youth are a frightening adumbration of the future...
...Even then, large numbers of marginal workers will not be able to make the necessary adjustments...
...In contrast with the Great Depression, when masses of workers were more or less suddenly laid off, increasing numbers of today's unemployed are simply never hired...
...Jobs and Income The median Negro family income is $3,233, or 54% of the white family's $5,835...
...Protected by a federal FEPC, needed by an expanding economy, and absorbed in large numbers into the CIO, they won higher wages than the farms could offer...
...The March on Washington, I believe, points the way with its key demand for a massive federal works program to put all Americans back to work...
...It is perfectly legitimate and consistent for the NUL to have this orientation...
...This "underclass" is composed mainly of Negroes, males 65 and over, young men, farm laborers, those in unskilled occupations and those with less than 12 years of schooling...
...But the percentage gain is great only because the starting figure was so low...
...The young people who take at face value current propaganda about the need for an education and are thus disappointed can hardly be expected to take the education of their own future children very seriously...
...They reflect the shift of rural Negroes to cities and Southern Negroes to the North...
...Beneath the irrational surface of party politics are coalitions rationally designed to perpetuate minority rule...
...It should be noted, for example, that in the North, where there are greater opportunities for white-collar Negro males, more Negro men than women are finishing college, whereas in the South, where teaching is the greatest employment outlet for Negro college graduates, Negro women college graduates outnumber men...
...In New York City—over 1/3 of whose one million public school pupils are Negro or Puerto Rican—there are 95 public elementary schools with Negro or Puerto Rican enrollments above 90...
...We have generously—and with justification—given special consideration in employment, education, and welfare to Hungarian and Cuban refugees fleeing oppression...
...Corporations may contribute heavily to higher education, from which they reap the most immediate rewards, but they have little sense of responsibility toward elementary and secondary education, as witnessed by their frequent efforts to evade real estate taxes from which schools get their basic revenue...
...While 22% of white college men become proprietors, managers, or officials, only 5% of Negro college men do...
...It is as if racism, having put the Negro in his economic "place," stepped aside to watch technology destroy that place...
...People spend and save dollars...
...Equal opportunity is important, but at the present time it is scarcity of apprenticeships which is being shared...
...American Child, November, 1963.] The moral objections to "preferential treatment" have on the whole been flabby and pious...
...And for what jobs do we retrain service personnel, who will soon feel the impact of cybernation...
...Until now the Negro's struggle has proceeded in relative isolation...
...This is not to say that mechanisms for preferential treatment should not be set in motion by expanding industries...
...It is my contention that by tracing rising black frustration to its roots, we simultaneously bare the roots of the white counter-revolution...
...Fifteen per cent of the Negro labor force is still on the farms, but there is no strong organization of small farmers to cope with galloping agricultural mechanization and its miserable human consequences...
...Between 1945 and 1961, the percentage ratio of whites who escaped from the below $4,000 category (63.3%) is almost double that for Negroes (33.1%), despite the fact that a larger percentage of Negroes were in that category in 1945 (90.1% as against 75.5 1], of white families...
...College and university enrollment, now at 4 million, will triple by 1980...
...Infused with the spirit of the movement, continuous classes, in politics, economics, Negro history, etc., might take on a meaning they never had in the formal classroom...
...Otherwise, there is a danger of sinking into a project-centered provincialism and, in the civil rights movement, a disinclination to discuss structural obstacles to Negro freedom...
...in the South this provision can be interpreted by state authorities to mean that since a white man will not want to hire a Negro for any job but a "Negro job" (cleaning, digging), there is not reasonable expectation of employment...
...N.Y...
...The "bottom" is falling out of society...
...Most of the suburbanites are white-collar workers in the expanding service-producing sector of the economy, the sector in which relatively few Negroes are represented because of discrimination and lack of training...
...Both tendencies—rising unemployment and a widening unemployment gap—come into sharper focus if we replace the official figures with more realistic ones which take into account what Professor Charles C. Killingsworth of Michigan State University has called the "invisible army of unemployed"—"people forced out of the labor market some time ago who are willing and able to work, but have become too discouraged to search for jobs" and are therefore not counted as part of the labor force by the government...
...Preferential treatment does practically nothing to alter this distribution...
...N.Y...
...At the end of 1961, the Urban Renewal Administration reported that 66% of those displaced under its programs—involving Federal grants of nearly $3 billion—have been nonwhites...
...If this seems too stark an introduction to an analysis of the civil rights movement, it may hopefully balance a contrary tendency...
...Which public projects, in which locations, will maximize unemployment...
...The deepening racial and economic crises alone—not to mention international problems—require that we make fundamental decisions about our future and that those decisions be acted upon...
...Once the sit-in movement in a city integrates all the lunch-counters, thus securing a given establishment from segregationist competition, lunchcounters enjoy a potentially larger consumer market...
...The real question is, what are the limitations on private economic action, to reduce the differentials in Negro employment, education, and housing...
...Educational reform, therefore, has to proceed hand-in-hand with a direct assault on poverty per se, even while the elimination of its causes is underway...
...It has manifested itself not only in Southern retaliatory violence but in the shifting attitudes of non-Southern whites as reflected in the Harris polls...
...Despite the preponderance of Democrats in both houses of Congress, a coalition of Dixiecrats and conservative Republicans maintains effective control of Congressional machinery...
...Among these goals must be full employment, without which there cannot even be equality in unemployment...
...It could, in fact, create a job for a machine...
...will be predominantly color society...
...The cost savings resulting from higher productivity have not been passed on to the consumer through lower prices or to employees through higher wages...
...These blue-collar jobs in the goods-producing industries paid better than the unskilled and semiskilled jobs in the service-producing industries...
...This was to be "freedom year"—"Free by '63...
...IBM is perhaps the most vigorous in pursuit of Negro talent, regularly visiting 17 Negro colleges to recruit engineers, mathematicians, scientists, as well as sale and managerial trainees...
...This last reaction springs largely from a vision of American society which, if lacking depth, has a certain validity...
...Immediacy and spontaneity are energizing attributes in both people and movements...
...The demand for labor in the total private economy has remained virtually static in recent years...
...To prevent unnecessary cleavage, to maximize solidarity in the struggle, the civil rights organizations must speak to the real social and economic needs of the total Negro community and develop goals to which it educates the less needy members of the community...
...corporations...
...If the crafts were open to us, that could not, in the present economy, create more than 40,000 jobs...
...How does the reduction of the workweek of an automobile worker create a job for a displaced miner...
...Poverty is not just an income figure...
...In fact, it benefits most those Negroes who need it least...
...All this would seem to bode well for the civil rights movement...
...The blue-collar workers who live in the suburbs tend to be skilled workers protected by strong unions...
...Speaking for the National Urban League, Mr...
...Thus, masses of Negroes entered industrial production but were concentrated in unskilled and semiskilled jobs...
...and the called issued by the national March office for a Day of Mourning following the Birmingham atrocity elicited impressive results on short notice...
...12-13...
...It is estimated that there are already 50% more school drop-outs than jobs for unskilled workers...
...Underlying the current high levels of unemployment are the high-profit policies of the corporations...
...5. The unemployment gap between Negroes and whites has been widening...
...In the service category, such jobs as tailoring, typewriter-repairing were available to most of the Negroes...
...Certainly, lack of training cannot explain the acute discrimination suffered by Negro college graduates...
...More shocking are those for Negro females, an increasing percentage of whom are now in blue-collar jobs (15% in 1950, 17.2% in 1960...
...Further, the greater part of this increase was registered in the "laborer" category...
...It is also dividing the Negro community, offering glittering rewards to the cream of the crop...
...This is the result of generations of systematic exclusion of Negroes from skilled trades...
...But as it happens, they were also the jobs most hit by automation...
...It would help if the government would stipulate that every federal contract must have joint labor-management apprenticeship training programs...
...as the NAACP slogan had it...
...They have gone into corporation profits, which reached a record $26.8 billion after taxes in the second quarter of last year...
...Many of these practices persist and must be relentlessly extirpated...
...To argue that all citizens are entitled to certain rights without exception is to pit an abstraction against sensuous, visceral attitudes...
...The Political Aspects I spoke earlier of the relative isolation of the Negro struggle...
...The Economic Status of Negroes pp...
...Nor are these rules merely a matter of parliamentary mechanics...
...And their common soil is economics...
...Moreover, while expanding sections of the private economy may be willing to apply preferential treatment in the acquisition and training of skilled personnel, even they are not concerned with creating new jobs...
...The March did sap up a lot of energy and frustration—enough to prevent predicted race riots...
...allies must be won if the program is to be effectuated...
...Poverty Perpetuates Itself Galbraith's proposal tends to treat education in a vacuum, ignoring external factors that impinge on motivation and aspiration...
...If the segregated lunch-counter is a hollow relic of the ancien regime, one which would inevitably topple at an early stage in the revolution, the more fundamental, institutional forms of discrimination appear quite compatible with modern socio-economic trends...
...What if the next AFL-CIO convention were confronted with a demand by the civil rights organizations that labor really press the fight for full employment—by mobilizing workers behind a political campaign for a public works program...
...Life, November 18, 1963] Thus, if present population trends continue, seven of the country's ten most populous cities will have Negro majorities—ringed by overwhelmingly white suburbs...
...The base of the Negro lower-middle-class was considerably expanded...
...No less important, Negroes will especially benefit from the fruits of public works: slum clearance, school and hospital construction, decongestant highway and road construction, new parks and playgrounds, carefully-planned public housing, etc...
...The remainder go to individuals to stimulate consumption...
...This need not be true...
...Sympathy it has...
...In Birmingham a glorious movement, symbolized by hundreds of fearless children, failed in its objectives...
...Probably the only way to maintain attractive, racially balanced public housing will be to subsidize low-income families in middle-income housing...
...It appears, therefore, that the more urbanized Negroes become, the worse their housing conditions...
...At the same time, it has become obvious that the "equal opportunity" principle is only a principle and not a formula for jobs...
...As one writer points out, Even when law or other pressure has brought racial discrimination under some effective control, the probability has to be faced that technological changes will soon make it impossible for 50% of our high school graduates, white or black, to find employment of any kind...
...Mr...
...The great majority of the Negro population is in the lower education categories and will continue to experience high, probably rising, levels of unemployment...
...with varying degrees of success...
...Roy Wilkins' announcement that the NAACP will actively seek the defeat of Congressmen opposed to civil rights legislation is a potentially significant move in this direction...
...We are far enough into the new decade to sense that it is qualitatively different from its predecessor...
...Within this "under-class," Negro representation is mounting...
...The nation can ill afford such uncertainty...
...It appears that the Southern movement has entered a transitional phase whose outcome depends largely on national developments...
...The PostIndustrial Society.] There are three possible solutions: 1) massive education and training to qualify Negroes for the ex panding occupations...
...It will be the chief means for achieving upward mobility in our increasingly technocratic society...
...If we seem on the verge of a cliche, it's because we are...
...failing a special effort to deal with the Negro education problem, the hard consequences remain: that by age 18 the overwhelming proportion of Negro children have already lost out in their chances for economic advancement in the country...
...NAACP Labor Secretary Herbert Hill estimated in 1960 that Negroes make up only 1.69% of the total number of apprentices in the economy...
...Ibid.] Yes, he must...
...The nation limps into the age of cybernation with 14 of the 20 standing committees of the House dominated by rural representatives, with 1: of 19 important Senate committees chaired by Southerners...
...Federal action, however commendable, is still too little—and may well be too late...
...For not only will the unemployment gap widen because of increasing automation in categories where Negroes are concentrated, but so will the dollar gap...
...Still, in the relatively prosperous post-war years, the unemployment rate among Negroes was only about 60% higher than the white rate...
...There are skilled manhours and unskilled manhours...
...This is not a notion to which one either subscribes or doesn't subscribe...
...Moreover, while the typical white school has 669 pupils, the mixed schools averaged 947, the predominantly Negro, 1,275...
...ing white counter-revolution, on the other...
...All seem artificial and desperate, especially bussing children to schools outside their neighborhoods—a practice that has evoked the hostility of many white parents and of some Negroes, too...
...The Negro revolt, Mr...
...A Spring, 1961 survey showed that although 10.6% of Federal employees were Negro—roughly equal to the Negro proportion of the population—these were heavily concentrated in the lowest salary grades...
...Italics added.] Still another trend has important implications for the future of American society...
...is completely illiterate...
...in fact, overcrowding them is profitable...
...But as Rustin himself has recently emphasized, social dislocation is a technique of struggle, not a program...
...Negroes constitute 50% of all unemployed youth between the age of 16 and 21, but only 15% of the total youth population...
...The Negro Revolt...
...vast outlays must be made for new physical plants, rehabilitation, teacher training, and salaries...
...Federally-aided private housing has been of relatively little benefit to Negroes...
...Preferential treatment is the most militant demand raised by the "black bourgeoisie...
...The black bourgeoisie has been an important source of leadership, especially when legalized racism exercised a leveling influence and enforced a racial identification that transcended class...
...Its effects are attritional, not cataclysmic...
...and, in the decade following, in Philadelphia...
...Daniel Bell, op...
...The National Education Improvement Act, while broad in scope, suffers similar disabilities...
...The civil rights movement would also be changed by the appearance of Negro-led interracial groups with programs and activities aimed at both the Negro and dispossessed white worlds...
...In fact the more education a Negro male acquires, the lower his lifetime earnings as a percentage of his white counterpart...
...persons who havecompleted fewer than 4 years of school...
...would be "selective, stimulative and where possible transitional...
...Seniority is determined along party lines, and the parties must take responsibility for those it elevates to power...
...To the best of my knowledge," he commented, "there is no place in the world where well-educated people are really poor...
...Of the 60,000 new workers hired by these companies between September and November of last year, 25% were Negroes, whereas previously the percentage of Negroes hired by these companies in any similar period ran only 3...
...The National Urban League estimates that by 1970 eighteen million Negroes will be living in the big cities...
...This Administration curtsy in the direction of the Southern judiciary and the states-righters must be fought not only for the unfair burden it places on victims of job discrimination, but as symbolic of a cruel willingness to compromise on a bread-and-butter issue...
...The Negro technocrat may emerge as a social type—a new image perched on a narrow reality (but a reality all the same...
...The real deficiencies in "preferential treatment" are on another level, and it is here that the essentially conservative nature of the National Urban League's social philosophy becomes evident...
...Approximately two out of every three Negro families subsist on less than $4,000 annually, as compared with 27.7 1], of the white families...
...Negroes accounted for about 1/4 % of all the long-term unemployed, but for only about 11% of the labor force...
...If we correlate, roughly, the school drop-out rate with the skill requirements of the future labor force, then we can say—admittedly a vast simplification and perhaps overly dramatized in order to highlight the cases—that thirty years hence, class society in the U.S...
...For the long-term unemployed tend also to be the most frequently hit by unemployment, and the longer they are unemployed the less chance they have of ever finding jobs...
...Public housing programs have also tended to encourage economic and racial segregation...
...Indeed, present trends suggest a divergence of institutional patterns and ideology, in which the latter cannot long hold its own...
...In his study on cybernation for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Donald N. Michael writes that the shorter workweek approach is intended to maintain the ability of workers to consume the products of cybernation and, in the case of blue-collar workers, to maintain the strength of unions...
...For the 3.5% of the adult Negro population with college degrees, for the 240,000 Negroes presently enrolled in colleges and professional schools, and for numbers of Negro high-school graduates, preferential treatment could quicken the pace of their absorption into the occupations that are expanding with technological progress...
...Conant, in Slums and Suburbs, reports that in one slum area, of 125,000 people, mostly Negro, a sampling of the youth population showed that roughly 70% of the boys and girls ages 16 to 21 were out of school and unemployed...
...Militant optimism rules out the latter possibility and therefore dictates either a continued picture of an omnipotent civil rights movement or an evasion of the knottier problems it faces...
...Many acquired new skills...
...Speaking before the Washington SNCC Conference, Jack Conway, Executive Director of the Industrial Union Department, AFL-CIO, asserted that wage earners, minority groups, middle- and low-income city people in general, older people—all of us who make up an overwhelming majority of the society—have a broad interest...
...Moreover, while one may scoff at the abstract arguments against preferential treatment used by middle-class liberals, one cannot dismiss the fears it arouses among white workers, especially those whose own economic positions are marginal...
...Prospective public housing tenants must have a say in determining where their new homes will be and what they will look like...
...Accordingly, it is still difficult for Negroes to purchase health, education, and the amenities of life on the same level as other members of the population...
...This is not an accommodation to liberalism-as-usual, but a challenge to it...
...But measured in concrete gains, this "freedom year" was disappointing...
...The chief spokesman for "preferential treatment" has been Whitney Young Jr...
...Cannot Rely on Private Economy Politics aside for the moment...
...To recapitulate, then: 1. There is a widening dollar gap between Negroes and whites...
...But while the percentage of whites in blue-collar jobs declined from 53.27 in 1950 to 50% in 1960, the Negro percentage jumped from 63.7% to 66.5...
...they are also the least disadvantaged...
...But within each area—Northern city, Southern city, agriculture—their relative position remained the same: at bottom...
...Class and caste have become so interwoven that a degree of economic integration implies corresponding measures of racial integration...
...The illiteracy rate among Negroes is four times that of whites...
...Overcrowding in employment, housing, and schools has vastly different consequences...
...We can at least begin the rational reorganization of our cities...
...The average length of unemployment in September, 1962, for Negroes was 18 weeks while that for whites had dropped to 13 weeks...
...Attracted by the militant direct-action of these organizations, the new recruits become restless when activity ebbs and then they often drift away...
...Equal Opportunity" and "Preferential Treatment" The Civil Rights Bill drafted by the House Judiciary Committee is in several respects inferior to the Subcommittee draft, thanks to the efforts of the Administration...
...Times, October 13, 1963.] From California the note is echoed by William Becker of the Jewish Labor Committee: It is not enough to prohibit discrimination in the apprenticeship programs which receive government assistance...
...It is not conducive to motivation or to academic excellence...
...The problems of bussing are symptomatic of most efforts at school integration based on the residential status quo...
...The "dollar gap" trend...
...An enormous social investment—in the billions—is required...
...If substantially correct, the foregoing analysis would seem to justify either variety of social pessimism earlier described—a single-minded focusing upon a messianic civil rights movement, or an ostrich-like posture in regard to the structural obstacles to Negro freedom...
...There is no dearth of public work to be done, and it is not impossible that so much would continue to be needed that an appropriately organized public works program could stimulate the economy to the point that a substantial portion of the work force could be absorbed into the private sector...
...In Manhattan, Negro and Puerto Rican children are 70% of the total elementary school population, and it is estimated that the figure will rise to 85% by 1980...
...Behind this gain was World War II (not the New Deal, after 8 years of which 25 0 of the Negro work force was still unemployed as against 13% of the white...
...The percentage of Negroes in white collar jobs is also increasing, though in percentage points whites gained more than Negroes in professional and technical jobs...
...For the first time, in the mid-1950's, white-collar jobs outnumbered blue-collar jobs...
...Cybernation: The Silent Conquest, 1962, p. 25.] The shorter workweek will doubtless be a concomitant or result of full employment, not the cause...
...The "sit-in" generation was not affected by a militant labor movement struggling for social transformations...
...The struggle for freedom may be eternal, but specific movements never are: they adapt and prosper, or they falter into the graveyard of history...
...Ibid...
...Tom Kahn was assistant to Bayard Rustin in organizing the March on Washington, and previously helped organize Youth Marches for Integrated Schools in 1958 and 1959...
...12-13.] There is perhaps a still more startling fact...
...Ten per cent of the Negro women who finish college end up as domestic workers...
...they are a matter of politics...
...the reasons for the lull are fundamental to the difficulties now being faced by the movement, and the evidence of these difficulties will remain even if the Spring brings a fresh outburst of demonstrations...
...Dan Schulder, of the Manpower Development and Training Agency, told a Washington Conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in November, 1963 that one thousand seven hundred ninety-four projects, providing approximately 63,000 jobs, were approved last year...
...As indicated above, most of the Negroes' economic gains in recent years were made in the period 1940-1953 and reflect their movement out of agriculture into mining, manufacturing, and construction, where they took up unskilled and semiskilled jobs...
...In Grades GS-12 to GS-18, Negroes held only 0.59% of the positions...
...But there is little chance of such a movement effecting progressive social change without a profound reorganization of American politics...
...One impetus toward political realignment is the reapportionment of legislative districts, increasing the representation of liberal urban areas...
...While the South adjusts itself to the least discommoding forms of tokenism, the metropolitan centers of the North are becoming increasingly segregated with respect to housing and schools...
...Because of the new employment patterns in the economy, a general increase in spending for goods and services by consumers and an increase in investment by business firms—which are the hoped-for effects of the proposed $11 billion tax cut—would soon result in acute shortages of many kinds of highly educated workers without greatly reducing the present surplus of poorly educated workers...
...Granted, the picture is distorted if only defeats or failures are listed...
...our present economic crisis is a measure of the tenacity with which we cling to nineteenth century notions of "free enterprise" in the midst of forces that are only socially controllable...
...To change these attitudes requires changing the social references from which they are derived...
...These unprecedented corporate profits have not been invested in the creation of new jobs...
...Similarly, the integration of schools and housing, especially in the industrial centers, is stymied by a complex of socio-economic problems for whose solution no powerful urban reform movement now exists...
...Many of today's youth will never enter into the productive process at all...
...Young writes: For 18.7 million American Negroes...
...Says Mr...
...The trend toward de facto segregation of Negroes in declining job categories can only reinforce the association between Negro and failure...
...Professor Killingsworth carefully calculates the size of this "invisible army" at 1½ million...
...Nonetheless, the evidence indicates that the movement may have reached a point when it not only needs allies but must to a considerable extent call those allies into existence and help launch their programs...
...Government policies in this area have markedly improved since the Eisenhower Administration...
...A similar impression is conveyed by the stock-taking now proceeding among many civil rights activists...
...While Negroes constituted a larger percentage of farm laborers and foremen in 1960 (23.6%) than in 1940 (22.5%), they make up a decreasing percentage of farmers and farm managers (8.6% as against 13.1...
...The right of Negroes to equal employment opportunities must be established as non-negotiable...
...What kinds of financial control should be devised to assure independence from private banks and insurance companies...
...Our present political alignments render such decisions well-nigh imposible...
...In techniques (though presumably not subject matter), the civil rights organizations might take their cues from some of the radical political sects...
...These are the figures for Negro males...
...The view that Negroes are racially inferior yields to a vaguer, but no less malevolent, conception of most Negroes as socially or morally incompetent to realize their potential...
...in manufacturing, 1.6 million blue-collar jobs were lost (white collar jobs increased 900,000...
...A realignment of the two parties into distinctly liberal and conservative entities is a prerequisite for democratic social change...
...Then irrational relations and ancient prejudices conditioned by the old order must give way, or the society will plunge into crisis...
...Without new tactics and fresh approaches, its future success is by no means assured...
...The flight to the suburbs reflects not only a racial separation but an occupational one as well...
...And before the alleged mystery of economics, most Americans throw up their hands...
...But the image is mostly a galling sign of potential that is overwhelmed by a greater social reality...
...One of the ten points is in fact an appeal to these groups for more financial assistance to the civil rights organizations...
...Professional and technical occupations—the fastest growing part of the labor force—will have expanded 40% in the 60s, as compared with 15% for semiskilled jobs and no growth at all in unskilled jobs...
...Educational Crash Program Recognition of the difficulties inherent in urban school integration has led to proposals to improve the quality of education available in the ghettoes...
...Housing and Schools Just as the technological revolution has adversely affected integration in employment, so has integration of housing and schools been adversely affected by population movements set off by economic changes...
...In Los Angeles, 43 elementary schools have at least 85% Negro attendance...
...Since 1954 it has been 250-350 1], higher...
...In both areas the effect of automation is evident in the failure of production and wages to keep pace with rising productivity...
...hence, a cut to 35-hours would produce five million new jobs...
...What whites are fleeing is city life itself, which has become increasingly intolerable—overcrowded, underserviced, dreary, and filthy...
...But they must harmonize with, not undermine, long-range perspectives...
...they constitute a growing percentage of the total workers in these categories...
...Facing Economic Disaster For the vast majority of Negroes, however, an economic crisis is in the offing...
...This confused view is one of the roots of the white counterrevolution...
...A major reason for this dilemma is the absence of a vital democratic Left in the United States...
...It depends upon the value society assigns to the work being performed...
...While the figures reported by statisticians vary slightly, they point to the conclusion of Herman P. Miller of the Census Bureau: In the last decade...
...Joseph P. Lyford in The Negro as an American, Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.] However much weight is given these arguments, it seems clear that the maze of criss-crossing bus routes required to achieve a racially balanced redistribution of urban school populations would be an elaborate thing indeed...
...Johnson continued: "Within those companies whose reports have been received, the ratio of white salaried employees to nonwhite dropped from 65 to 1 at the beginning of the reporting period to 60 to 1 at the end...
...Bussing presents problems for the Negro community as well...
...Nobody knows how many are Negroes .. Last month, at the height of the construction season, there were 12,313 unemployed construction workers here .. Governor Rockefeller has announced that $400 million in hitherto unscheduled state construction contracts will be awarded in the next 18 months...
...Again, the present lull may be over before these words see print...
...Dr...
...Of all laborers (except farm and mine), Negroes were 27.6% in 1960 as against 21.2 1], in 1940...
...Ibid.] The civil rights movement should have a special interest in a massive federal works program because it can provide jobs and additional purchasing power for the unskilled and semiskilled categories in which Negroes are so heavily concentrated...
...Beginning with elementary and secondary schools, the educational system will have to be overhauled if higher education is to be meaningful...
...A disproportionate number are undoubtedly Negroes, many of whom support themselves in the ghettoes by means they are not likely to report to census takers...
...Even these inadequate figures are misleading...
...frustration...
...There is little reason to believe that a private economy characterized by high profits and high unemployment can generate the sense of social responsibility to undertake a "Marshall Plan" that would substantially improve the living conditions of the majority of Negroes...
...The increasingly obvious confluence of class and caste factors may set the spark and ignite a new movement...
...Running fast to stand still is essentially the position in which the Negro finds himself today...
...To put it differently, there has not been sufficient institutional change to support the changes in racial attitudes demanded by the new civil rights ideology...
...They make up a swelling "underclass" that is daily becoming economically more obsolete...
...As late as 1948, unemployment among white youngsters (age 14-19) was worse than among Negro youngsters...
...Several of the organizations, notably SNCC and CORE, have begun to recruit numbers of working-class and unemployed Negroes, many of them youths...
...3) A shorter workweek has been advocated by the labor movement, on the grounds that rising productivity means that fewer manhours are required to create an ever greater abundance of goods and services...
...Gunnar Myrdal, the eminent Swedish economist, likewise taking into account the number of persons who would re-enter the labor force if jobs opened up, put the figure at 9...
...These dangerous trends tend to be neglected in talk of "progress...
...the problem is immediate and desperate...
...Pronouncements regarding economic progress which are confined to acceleration concepts and percentage change obscure the real predicament—Negroes are losing ground rapidly in gaining dollar parity with whites...
...When you know you're running hard and everyone tells you you're moving at a fast clip, and yet the scenery around you remains the same, the most appropriate word to describe your reactions is...
...Responsible party government is impossible so long as Humphrey and Eastland are in the same party...
...Lunchcounters, hotels, parks, and the like are the easiest targets of direct action and boycotts...
...Negroes and whites...
...But when the task itself is eliminated or new tasks are developed that need different talents, shorter shifts clearly will not solve the problem...
...As Vivian Henderson summarizes, Whites are acquiring the highest paying jobs in the higher occupational classifications...
...Their incomes are higher and their unemployment rates are lower...
...Only 23% of Southern Negro farm workers own their own farms as contrasted with 60°%o of white farm workers...
...on the other, an orientation toward the corporate structure...
...Nor can they do so on the basis of abstract economic analysis...
...These figures become meaningful when compared to the 1945 figures...
...After FEPC —What...
...Yet 1/3 of all students who enter high school drop out before graduating—and this in a society one half of whose members will be under 25 by 1966...
...In short, the Federal retraining program is not only inadequate to begin with, but it is forced to accommodate to the dominant political and economic patterns within the states...
...Finally, the Act states that people cannot be accepted for training without "reasonable expectation of employment...
...It's an implacable economic reality which would not obtain if Negroes had the same occupational distribution as whites...
...Within the cities themselves, segregation of the Negro community proceeds as part of what Michael Harrington describes as the segregation of poverty, one of the less happy consequences of urban renewal...
...Without such reform, can there be full employment—and can there be fair employment without full employment...
...Such a program would do what the others can not—attack class unemployment by providing job opportunities even for unskilled and semi-skilled workers...
...High-rise low-income public housing has increased population density and racial homogeneity in the ghettoes...
...1) The Administration's proposed II1 billion tax-cut is the centerpiece of the Administration's program to reduce unemployment to . . 4...
...Not only have there been rising levels of unemployment since 1954, but—and this is of strategic importance— the Negro-white unemployment gap has tended to widen in times of high unemployment and to narrow in times of low unemployment...
...It is this dollar difference that counts...
...Such knowledge, in the age of cybernation, is the fruit of planning...
...Iv The sad fact is that nothing even vaguely resembling a "master plan" has been set in motion to eliminate the twin problems of racial inequality and technological unemployment...
...The Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962 was aimed at retraining 400,000 workers within three years...
...Other terms have been coined—"compensatory hiring," "positive discrimination," "the doctrine of the debt," etc.—all meaning essentially the same thing...
...In the words of a leadingsociologist...
...in justice, in full employment, in social security, in a world at peace, in a community where there is no exploitation of one group by another...
...To talk about more than token housing integration in these areas is chimerical...
...Today, less than 15% choose public housing, and the experts see the percentage continuing to decline...
...Nineteen sixty-three was a traumatic year for the civil rights movement, as the words March, Birmingham children, Medgar Evers, construction sites, rent strike, and Dallas suggest...
...With regard to the South, this is due at least in part to the higher stakes for which the movement is playing...
...The integration of lunchcounters was largely won by Negroes alone, using "social dislocation...
...White parents are justified in their relu6tance to bus their children to Harlem schools...
...Preferential treatment, yes—but as A. Philip Randolph declares, preferential treatment for all the unemployed, the poor, the sick, the aged, disadvantaged youth—for the other America...
...Further, training has been offered to Negroes in only a few of the occupations provided by the Commission...
...Another comment I have heard from white parents and school staffs is that the children who are bussed to another school under this program tend to be the better students and their parents the more sophisticated in their community...
...2) planned creation of unskilled and semiskilled jobs for which Negroes are already qualified...
...Others are: Radio Corporation of America, American Telephone and Telegraph, Thompson Ramo Woolridge, Lockheed, Western Electric, Goodyear, Pitney Bowles, Texas Instruments (electronics), Hughes Tool, etc...
...2. The relative income gap between Negroes and whites has remained virtually constant over the past decade...
...Studies have shown a correlation between drop-out rates and economic status: there is a higher drop-out rate among youngsters whose parents have low incomes...
...Meanwhile, eleven freedom fighters gave their lives, while thousands were jailed and brutalized...
...What it lacks is corresponding organization and movement...
...Not only are Negroes trapped in declining and stagnant job categories...
...Times, December 6, 1963.] We have an even longer way to go before the bulk of Negroes can benefit from these forms of preferential treatment...
...In the whole country there are only 6,000 Negro families that can boast of incomes of $25,000 or more...
...Galbraith is certainly right in emphasizing the importance of education...
...Historically it has been true that the Negro fares absolutely and relatively better the closer we come to full employment...
...Only four years ago, over one-third of all low-income families displaced by government action accepted the opportunity to move into public housing...
...Marches of unemployed youth are reported under consideration by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, at whose Washington Conference last Thanksgiving Bayard Rustin urged white students to concentrate more of their energies on the organization of unemployed whites...
...On the other hand, the percentage increase of Negro families entering the $4,000-$5,999 category seems very impressive when compared with the figure for whites...
...among operatives and kindred workers, Negroes constituted 11.6% as against 6.1...
...This raises a fundamental question: for which jobs should today's youth be trained...
...They need to be revived and popularized...
...This is the inescapable conclusion that emerges from an examination of the Negro's situation in employment, housing, and schools...
...Moreover, the seeming quiet on the Southern front cannot be attributed to March exhaustion, since Southern participation was not that great...
...The twenty-five percent job quota demanded by Negro pickets at construction sites in New York is known to have irritated the Puerto Rican community...
...N.Y...
...It produces crises where traditional philosophies and social relations are most in conflict with the imperatives of technological progress...
...The technological revolution, it has been said, is creating two Americas—the "affluent society" and the "other America...
Vol. 11 • January 1964 • No. 1
