Voices from Striver's Row

...The year he was born, 1950, only 351 of the county's 22,000 inhabitants were black, and most of them, like Gates, lived in Piedmont, population 2,565...

...they] couldn't use certain bathrooms or try on clothes in stores...

...And Sowell leaves no doubt that to him, the culture of Northern Europe and its offshoots is the most advanced one...

...For the vast majority of American blacks, it is still very rare...

...If one looks only at one time and place, he says, it may seem reasonable to attach great importance to the tendency of those groups to recruit new employees chiefly from their own ethnic ranks, as well as to cultural stereotypes that appear to give them few alternative opportunities...

...A brother of Pop Gates had married a Jewish woman and simply vanished into her world...

...Why, asks Sowell, do certain minorities flourish in certain occupations...

...Martin Luther King Jr...

...Pauline Coleman Gates was the first black secretary of the PTA, and her mother, like her husband, had complicated bloodlines: She was "a Howard and a Clifford, families who had intermarried with white people and a few genuine Indians for a long time...

...THOMAS SOWELL, the author of Race and Culture: A World View (Basic, 331 pp., $25.00), is far to the Right of the liberal Gates...

...As Gates came subsequently to realize...

...As "the age of dating dawned," however, the friendship ended, for at that point—the early 1960s—interracial socializing was still "an impossibility...

...his closest pal was a white girl, something that would have been simply inconceivable earlier...

...In bigger, more sophisticated places, Piedmont's blacks were coming to realize, strong currents were in motion, but in their own hometown they "couldn't eat in restaurants or sleep in hotels...

...The Gateses were "light and bright and damn near white," as Henry Sr...

...But Gates had a very rare opportunity to reap the full benefits of integration...

...He correctly points out, though, that anyone is free to enter the kinds of industries in which "middleman minorities" like the Jews compete, and many fundamentally similar success stories, such as that of Greeks in the greasy spoon business in New York, do not appear to be supported by stereotypes at all...

...their ancestors, and those of the blacks, had been attracted by the building of the Westvaco paper mill in the late 1880s...

...Those whose "skills and disciplines" have promoted "economic progress have [often] been viewed as people whose prosperity has come at the expense of others...

...Even so, their two books have a common moral center of gravity in the values of the striving Colemans: respectability, sobriety, industry, and frugality...

...When critics of these middleman minorities accuse them of "monopolizing" certain activities, insists Sowell, they confuse "exclusion of others with outperforming them...

...The men resorted to an even more painful process using mashed potatoes and lye...

...had a second job as a janitor...

...The author, for instance, is a professor at Harvard, not at the black colleges where his Coleman uncles taught...

...Gates, who later grew the first Afro in Mineral County, says he "would have done anything to have straight hair" as a boy, except that...

...maybe he just felt guilty...

...Sow ell aims "to demonstrate the reality, persistence and consequences of cultural differences" among the world's peoples...

...Even if racial separation had been less complete in those areas than it actually was, relatively few whites were on hand to be integrated...

...Good land, too...

...they not only resent "other groups' success but also fear...

...Maybe Brady loved her...

...When they get wet, she said, they smell like dogs...

...put it, and the money realized by the sale of Brady's bequest gave them a fair amount of security...

...Nonetheless, she ran a business helping black women take the kink out of their hair through an elaborate "process" involving hair grease and a red-hot iron...

...In fact...

...Sowell?without sufficient reason, to my mind—doubts that similar recruitment practices and stereotypes could have prevailed in all of them...

...Gates says his father was "jaundiced about the civil rights movement, and especially about the Reverend Dr...

...It is all quite simple, Sowell argues: "Some ways of doing things—some cultures—are better in some respects than others," much as Arabic numerals are better than, not merely different from, Roman numerals...

...To be a Coleman "was a very big deal in Piedmont...

...They were the county's first mixed-race couple...

...Put most of the colored in the B track, vocational, but treat the A group fairly...

...they were "the first colored to own guns and hunt on white land, the first to become Eagle Scouts, the first to go to college, the first to own property...

...Yet as the case of Henry Louis Gates Jr...

...We were pioneers, people my age, in cross-race relations, able to get to know each other across cultures and classes in a way that was unthinkable in our parents' generation...

...That separate domain began to crumble in 1955, the year before Gates entered first grade, when the school board decided on its own to integrate...

...Henry Jr.'s quite different mother, Pauline, was born into a much more self-consciously respectable clan of "teetotalers?nonsmoking, nongambling souls who seemed to equate close-cropped, well-oiled hair and well-washed automobiles with the very purpose of life itself...

...She simply hated them, hated them with a passion she seldom disclosed...

...the Jews, for example, have dominated the mass-market clothing industry in almost every nation where they have had a substantial presence...

...superiority and inferiority lack "the permanence that might suggest innate differences in ability...

...These worldly people were descended from Jane Gates, born a slave in 1816, whose children were fathered by her owner, a Mr...

...It had clear expectations: "No dating, of course, no holding hands, no dancing...

...Colored People (Knopf, 216 pp., $22.00), by Henry Louis Gates Jr., is the beautifully written, funny, absorbing memoirof a black boy's coming of age in one of these highland areas: Mineral County, in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia...

...But a lot of these nationalities have excelled in particular activities at a great many times and in far-flung places...

...Brady...

...For them the new order meant that the black elite would now be employed largely by white institutions and no longer provide leadership specifically for its own people...

...It did not remain so for long: At the end of the decade, Gates had his "first real love affair," with a white woman...

...The family, originally from a town 25 miles away in Maryland, "drank beer and Scotch, played cards, read detective novels and traded them with each other, did crossword puzzles, and loved puns...

...Although surrounded by whites, Piedmont's blacks spent their lives in a wholly enclosed world...

...Thus the Indians of East Africa have been said to have acquired a 'stranglehold' on" the region's commerce and industry, "as if that commerce and industry existed independently of the Indians," whom the author unapologetically views as more frugal, industrious and reliable than the indigenes...

...Henry Sr., though, was so fair that he was mistaken for a Jew at the predominantly Jewish school in Newark where he was sent for a time as a child...

...But there was a price to pay...

...Gates says, quite rightly, that black people "shouldn't cling to each other out of habit or fear, or use protective coloration to evade the risks of living like any other human being, or use clannishness as a cop-out for exploring ourselves and possibly making new selves, forged in the crucible of integration...

...Pop Gates himself prospered as the owner of a chimney-cleaning business, but his seven sons all became factory workers...

...In other words, he thinks that cultures are not only unalike but also, in many ways, unequal...

...When the color bar began to fall in the mid-1950s, they could sustain a degree of interracial contact that was impossible both in Mississippi and our Northern cities, where blacks have been isolated in a different though no less radical way...

...The local whites were chiefly of Italian and Irish immigrant stock...

...Pauline Gates was one of the darker offspring, but unlike her brothers and sisters she "did not seem to fear white people...

...This pre-eminence is not, he is fairly sure, biological in origin, because the relative positions of societies change continually...

...The obviously large role of cultural factors in explaining why some groups are more successful than others, notes Sowell, also shows that poor communities can improve their lot...

...Virtually all the black men, including Gates' father, worked at Westvaco loading paper on trucks...

...Gates became "the little prince" of an almost lily-white school...

...His aunts—the sisters of his father, Pop Gates—sent their children to Harvard, Radcliffe and Princeton...

...They dated colored, married colored, divorced and cheated on colored...

...and his accomplished family demonstrates, black Americans clearly can compete in favorable circumstances...

...He'd say all of his names, to drag out his scorn...

...They "went to colored schools, they went to colored churches, they lived in colored neighborhoods, they ate colored food, they listened to colored music, and when all that fat and grease finally closed down their arteries or made their hearts explode, they slept in colored cemeteries, escorted there by colored preachers...

...After 4:30 p.m., Henry Sr...

...By contrast, the South's mountainous interior regions have always been largely white...

...but sometime between the 1860 and 1870 censuses," he "gave Jane a whole lot of land in western Maryland...

...an inability to compete with them...

...But those who demand special treatment do not possess this confidence...

...The spectrum of complexions presented by her 12 children showed "why Africans in the New World soon came to be called colored people...

...Piedmont's older middle-class blacks, like the Colemans, "experienced [integration] as a loss...

...The warmth and nurturance of the womblike colored world was slowly and inevitably disappearing...

...Unfortunately, as his brilliant but depressing book reminds us, culture changes slowly...

...Indeed, "expressed in such mundane things as longer hours devoted to homework," cultural factors underscore "the direction from which improvement can come...