African Americans And Poverty Essay

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After being outvoted in the 1973 Bakke v. Board of Regents of the University of California decision, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall challenged the view that African Americans are just one of many minority groups, emphasizing that racism toward blacks has been so strong throughout the nation’s history that the “experience of Negroes in America has been different in kind, not just in degree, from that of other ethnic groups.” According to Marshall and Justice Harry Blackmun, who concurred with Marshall’s dissenting minority opinion, the only way America would be able to advance beyond the confines of racism would be “to take heed of race,” no longer ignoring or condoning prejudice. These justices asserted a need to give blacks temporary preferential treatment (as is the case with Affirmative Action) to make up for past damage.

Though Affirmative Action remained a controversial issue, Marshall and Blackmun had a wealth of historical evidence to support their view; no other racial or ethnic group in America—with the possible exception of Native Americans—had experienced racial hatred comparable in length or fervor to that borne by African Americans. After the end of the Civil War, although slavery was no longer legal, blacks continued to experience social and economic exploitation in both the North and South. Many African Americans in the post-Civil War South remained in rural areas as sharecroppers, performing work little different from their employment before the war. High interest rates on the loans they needed to obtain farm supplies and continuing racism combined to ensure that most Southern blacks remained very poor. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many rural African Americans migrated to Northern cities looking for work. Faced with racism in the North as well, blacks often congregated in run-down areas isolated from the white areas of the city—but close enough to cause confrontations over jobs and racial prejudice. One of the worst race riots occurred in south Chicago in 1919 when the burgeoning black population infringed upon a white neighborhood. The violence erupted near Lake Michigan when a black youth floating on the white side of the segregated beach area drowned after being hit by a thrown rock. Afterward, whites invaded nearby black neighborhoods, leading to a riot in which 15 whites and 23 blacks died and 1,000 houses burned. The black communities bore the brunt of the damage and continued to face exclusion from white areas of the city.

Inequality also existed in the workplace, with blacks employed in the lowest unskilled jobs, and hostile whites and immigrants ensuring their exclusion from unions. White laborers feared loss of status if blacks had skilled jobs; the result was a stereotype that blacks could not do skilled work. Blacks rarely obtained an education, and white artisans rarely accepted black youths as apprentices. In addition, Irish and Chinese immigration led to blacks losing even unskilled jobs, which destined them to live in the worst areas of most northern cities. One short-lived exception was the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, when New York blacks found a nationwide cultural voice that was accepted in white society; however, high rental rates, continuing white prejudice, and internal divisions prevented Harlem from enjoying its elevated status for long.

Civil rights for African Americans began to expand during the New Deal of the 1930s, though with few tangible results. The New Deal, however, helped to instill hope among blacks, many of whom began to believe they had the power to change their situation. Programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the National Youth Administration (NYA) benefited black youths: blacks constituted 11 percent of the CCC and 10 percent of the NYA. Other signs of progress included a decline in the mortality rate of blacks, as their average standard of living and prospects for housing, nutrition, literacy, and education improved. African American intellectuals also participated in the New Deal; for example, Richard Wright, author of Native Son, a black protest novel of the 1930s, worked under the Federal Writers’ Project. New Deal politicians such as New York Senator Robert Wagner supported black rights, urban renewal, and low-cost housing projects. Aubrey Williams, assistant director of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), worked with the NYA to provide blacks with better education; the NYA gave blacks the same wages as whites, and provided them with job training. However, many urban blacks failed to obtain meaningful employment and remained isolated in ghettos.

The landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 provided African Americans with a legal initiative for ending segregation. In the following decade African Americans made significant strides toward integration into mainstream American society, but poverty remained a serious problem for many blacks. In the mid-1960s, angry African Americans vented their frustration in a series of “ghetto” riots across the nation; the most serious took place in Watts (1965), Detroit (1967), and Newark (1967). In the wake of these riots President Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission to determine their cause. In 1967 the Kerner Commission reported that the widespread poverty and segregation of African Americans in impoverished urban ghettos was the cause of the riots and proposed a comprehensive plan to lessen the racial basis for the concentration of poverty in the inner city; Johnson rejected the commission’s plan, however, and the concentration of impoverished blacks in the urban core remains a serious problem in many American cities today.

References:

Atkins, Jacqueline M., ed., Encyclopedia of Social Work, 18th ed., 2 vols. (Silver Spring, MD: NASW, 1987);
Bremner, Robert H., Gary W. Reichard, and Richard Hopkins, eds., American Choices: Social Dilemma and Public Policy since I960 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986);
Goldfield, David R., and Blaine A. Brownell, Urban America: From Downtown to No Town (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979);
Kerner Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, DC: 1968);
Litwack, Leon, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971);
Patterson, James T., America’s Struggle Against Poverty in the Twentieth Century

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