Disintegration (6 page)

The same was true of my neighborhood not far from downtown, where a fifty-yard radius would have encompassed the homes of a teacher, a professor, a cobbler, and a clerk. Likewise at Trinity Methodist Church, which we attended every Sunday: Some families were relatively better off and some relatively worse off, some better-educated than others. There were indeed social and economic class divisions in the black America of my childhood, and I recognized them at the time—it was obvious that my life was different from the lives of the kids growing up in Sunnyside, a neighborhood of shotgun shacks where abject poverty and noxious dysfunction were evident for all to see. But it was a given that the factors that might have divided us were far outweighed by a single attribute that both defined and united us: We were all black, and to be black was to live under assault. That was just the way things were. It didn’t matter how well you might have been dressed or how many college degrees you might have had. If a restaurant didn’t offer service to “colored” people, you weren’t going to eat there. If the city built a new whites-only playground, you
kept out. If a redneck in a pickup truck wanted to yell “Nigger!” at the first black person he saw, you were eligible.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression. I think of my childhood as idyllic, and it never would have occurred to either my sister, Ellen, or me to entertain the notion that the South’s system of white hegemony had anything to do with intelligence, ability, or merit. If anything, our environment suggested the opposite: The black Orangeburg we knew was cultured, well-traveled, and urbane, while the white Orangeburg we saw around us—basically a commercial depot and service center for an agricultural belt—seemed unlettered and uncouth. When I left Felton and went to the newly integrated Orangeburg High, which previously had been the whites-only high school in town—I learned that some white people were better than I had thought and some were worse. But the point is that never for a moment was I confused about which “side” I was on, and never would I have imagined that I had the slightest choice in the matter.

In the North, of course, black people did not have to endure all the Jim Crow insults and indignities that we suffered in the South. But those émigré African Americans also were denied acceptance as full participants in the great American experiment. They lived, for the most part, in all-black neighborhoods. They were not welcome at many universities—Princeton, for example, mistakenly admitted its first African American undergraduate in 1935, promptly kicked him out after discovering he was black, and then allowed no more black students until forced to do so by the navy in 1942 as part of the war effort. Blacks in the North were not hired at many worksites, not granted raises or promotions that they deserved, not welcomed into many white neighborhoods, not given access to
the credit they would need to grow small businesses into big ones. They asked for the chance to fight for their country in two world wars and were made to serve in all-black units and perform some of the most unpleasant or dangerous tasks—collecting the bodies from the Normandy beaches after D-day, for example. My father believed his lungs were permanently damaged from working in a chemical munitions facility during the war. My father-in-law, Edward Rhodes Collins, had the ridiculously dangerous assignment of manning an ammunition ship in the South Pacific.

The key thing was that we were
all
in that ammo boat together, metaphorically speaking. Racial apartheid, imposed and enforced by others, ironically had fostered great cohesion among African Americans, binding together social and economic classes that otherwise might have drifted apart. One unintended impact of laws and customs mandating racial segregation was to create, within black America, a remarkable state of
integration
.

What was this separate but integrated black America like? I lived through what Dick Cheney might have called the “last throes” of Jim Crow, and even though my memories are vivid it’s hard to recapture what it really felt like—the constant tension and stomach-churning anxiety that came with the status of being, officially, a second-class citizen. Here’s just one episode: My family was out for a Sunday drive, and my grandmother, who would have been in her late seventies, needed to use the bathroom. My father pulled over at a gas station—it was always risky to stop at a gas station you hadn’t patronized in the past, but sometimes you had no choice—and the good old boy at the cash register directed my grandmother past the restrooms labeled
MEN
and
WOMEN
, all the way around to
the back of the building where there was a dank, smelly toilet labeled
COLORED
. This was after segregation in public accommodations had been made illegal, but civil rights laws and Supreme Court decisions had little weight in the benighted towns and hamlets of rural South Carolina. I remember my grandmother’s look of shame—she had a simple human need and was being treated as if she were less than human, and she didn’t have the option of doing the dignified thing, which would have been to walk away. I remember my father’s anger—he glowered and grumbled and vowed to write a letter of complaint to the chairman of Esso. I don’t know if he eventually wrote the letter, but even if he had managed to deprive one backwoods racist of a livelihood he didn’t deserve, at some level my father must have felt hopelessly impotent. He must have known that although sending a letter was the most effective thing he could do—basically, the only thing he could do—it wasn’t nearly enough. In those days, you had to wonder if anything would ever be enough. He must have felt not just anger but powerlessness, not just rage but inadequacy.

So it’s important not to view the past through a fog of sepia-toned nostalgia. No one who values liberty, quality, opportunity, or justice—no one, really, who values the ideals for which this country is supposed to stand—would actually want to turn back the clock.

That said, however, there must be some reason why black Americans were so much more optimistic forty years ago than they are today, as is demonstrably the case. In 1969, when African American survey respondents were asked “Are blacks better off than five years ago?” around 70 percent said yes, according to the Pew Research Center. When that question was put to African Americans in 2007, only 20 percent said
yes
⁹
—meaning, at the very least, that the confident sense of unimpeded ascent that so many black Americans felt forty years ago had all but disappeared. Since that recent polling was done prior to the election of the first African American president, it’s unclear what effect the dawning of the age of Obama has had on attitudes. It’s likely that black Americans have rediscovered some of their old optimism, but it’s unlikely that they’ve reclaimed all of it. The past forty years have seen so many advances for African Americans—higher incomes, better housing, new opportunities for education and employment, meaningful participation in the civic and political life of the nation, the opening of myriad doors that once seemed hermetically sealed against people of color. So why the sense that while all this was gained, something valuable was slipping away? And what was that “something” that we lost?

* * *

Imagine a typical urban scene from an old black-and-white movie—streetcars, newspaper hawkers, the men in suits and fedoras, the women with their hair done in elaborate swoops, waves, and curls. Now imagine that everyone in the scene is black, and you have an idea of what midcentury black America was like.

The 1906 riot in Atlanta greatly sped up the process of segregation, and soon the lines of racial demarcation were fixed: whites had their neighborhoods on the north side of the city and blacks had theirs on the south side. During working hours, there was plenty of mixing—whites needed blacks as labor; many blacks relied on white employers for their livelihoods. After dark and on weekends, though, everyone understood
who belonged where. If a black man wanted to take a Sunday stroll, he knew enough not to promenade on the white side of town.

What evolved on the south side of town was a community that of necessity was socially, culturally, and economically integrated—a development mirrored in cities throughout the country, though rarely as vividly. There were two factors that made black Atlanta in the pre–civil rights era something of a special case: The city was the “Hub of the South,” centrally located in the region where African Americans were most heavily concentrated; and the complex of historically black educational institutions served as a magnet to draw the best and brightest from around the nation. But the same general pattern of evolution could be seen from coast to coast.

The name “Sweet Auburn” became synonymous with wealth and status
—relative
wealth and status, to be sure, but impressive by any standard. Alonzo Herndon, who in 1906 had had the foresight to close his barbershop before the rampaging white mob arrived, went on to become Atlanta’s first black millionaire. He founded the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, the biggest black-owned insurer in the nation, and put his physical stamp on Sweet Auburn with an opulent headquarters building and other projects. The Herndon family home, with towering white columns that make it look almost like a plantation manor—locals called it “Tara,” Herndon called it “Old Glory”—was one of the most impressive residences in the city and a source of great pride for black Atlantans. The beaux arts mansion, painstakingly restored, is now a museum and research center dedicated to black Atlanta’s rich history.

Herndon chose to build his home not in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood but to the west, near the other pole of black
achievement in Atlanta—the University Center District. In 1950, 90 percent of black students pursuing postsecondary education were doing so at historically black colleges and universities. In other words, if you were young, gifted, and black, it was overwhelmingly likely that you would end up attending an all-black institution of higher learning—and quite likely that your dream would be to go to school in Atlanta.

For African Americans, Atlanta enjoyed the same status as a kind of latter-day Athens that Boston did for the larger society. There were elite black colleges and professional schools in other cities—Howard University in Washington, Fisk University and Meharry Medical College in Nashville. But nowhere else could there be found the critical mass that was assembled in Atlanta, where five abutting institutions offered not only a comprehensive range of undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs but also two unique campuses: Morehouse, an elite all-men’s college, and Spelman, an elite all-women’s college. Within black America, a degree from Morehouse or Spelman was the equivalent of a degree from Princeton or Wellesley. (Howard University reserved for itself the designation “the black Harvard,” though generations of Morehouse men would disagree.)

Surrounding Sweet Auburn and the University Center District was a vibrant black community dedicated to upward mobility. The city’s first black-owned office building, built by Henry Rucker in 1904, sheltered the dreams of generations of black entrepreneurs. The Royal Peacock (called the Top Hat Club when it was founded in 1938) became a regular venue for the country’s top-flight black entertainers—much like the Lincoln Theatre and the Howard Theater in the U Street area, the heart of Washington’s African American community, or
the famed Apollo Theater on 125th Street in Harlem. Reporters from the black-owned
Atlanta Daily World
worked to provide black Atlanta’s citizens with news they could use. Over the years, black visitors from out of town found lodgings at black-owned establishments like the Royal and Savoy hotels and the University Motel. Everyone ate at Paschal’s Restaurant, famous for its fried chicken. Thriving black churches gave the community moral cohesion and performed many of the social services that city officials reserved for whites and their neighborhoods. Such was the milieu (midcentury Atlanta; Ebenezer Baptist Church; Morehouse College; regular customer at Paschal’s) that nurtured the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

There were class divisions, based not just on relative wealth but also on skin color—a phenomenon graphically illustrated by the philosophical struggle between the dark-brown, rough-hewn, up-by-his-bootstraps Booker T. Washington, who spoke for the black masses on the farms and in the slums, and the chestnut-colored, aquiline-featured, Harvard-trained W. E. B. DuBois, who placed his hopes for the advancement of the race in the educated elite that he called the “Talented Tenth.” Atlanta’s black elite was disproportionately light-skinned, and to gain access to the better social circles it helped to be able to pass the “paper-bag test”—a simple relationship of hue and value. A premium was placed on what used to be called “good” hair, meaning hair that could be described as wavy rather than kinky. There was a measure of what has to be called discrimination against those with the most purely “African” coloration and features. There were women who set out to nab “light-skinned” boyfriends, and there were men whose idea of beauty eliminated anyone with darker skin, or a broader nose, than the glorious Lena Horne.

But if the professionals who lived in big houses, belonged to the right social clubs, and went to the right parties were tempted to think they were superior to other black Atlantans, the Jim Crow system was always there to bring them back to the real world. Doctors, lawyers, and professors may have clustered in the “better” black neighborhoods, but those were contiguous to middle-income or lower-income areas—and never very far from the slums. And no string of college degrees, however impressive, gave the bearer a pass to sit anywhere near the front of a municipal bus.

Black Atlanta was peopled by solid citizens like Ruby Blackburn. Born in 1901 in a small Georgia town, she attended Morris Brown College in Atlanta and the Apex Beauty School. She opened Ruby’s Beauty Shop on the west side of Atlanta, and that provided her livelihood.

But Blackburn is remembered for her work on behalf of her fellow black Atlantans. She was the founder of To Improve Conditions, a social club dedicated to black uplift. She organized the Cultural League Training Center, an agency dedicated to bettering the skills, working conditions, and earning potential of domestic workers. And she was the motivating force behind the formation of the Georgia League of Negro Women Voters, which pushed tirelessly for the constitutional rights that white Atlantans were so determined to withhold. I mention Blackburn because she was emblematic of her time—energetic, entrepreneurial, dedicated to progress, and rooted in her community. She was determined not only that she and other successful African Americans would continue their inexorable rise but that the entire race, given a chance, could and would come along.