Mad as Hell by Dominic Sandbrook

Author:Dominic Sandbrook [Sandbrook, Dominic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-59545-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

A year after the trial of the Dawson Five, the University of Chicago professor William Julius Wilson published a book called The Declining Significance of Race. It was a landmark in sociological scholarship, but it was also enormously controversial. There was no longer a “single or uniform black experience,” Wilson argued, and the color of black Americans’ skin was no longer the determining factor in their lives. Distracted by their unusual experience, middle-class intellectuals failed to realize that most poor blacks were crippled more by class than by race. “Economic dislocation,” he concluded, “is more central to the plight of the black poor than is the problem of purely racial discrimination.”3

To reviewers who put great store by the idea of a common black experience forged through slavery and discrimination, Wilson’s book came as a shocking affront. The Association of Black Sociologists declared that it “obscures the problem of the persistent oppression of blacks” and that its members were “outraged over the misrepresentation of the black experience.” Yet Wilson’s emphasis on the diversity of the black experience, and on the social distinctions among blacks themselves, made a great deal of sense. For although the events in Dawson, Georgia, testified to the enduring racial prejudice and inequality in many corners of the nation, it was easy to paint a very different picture of black life in the 1970s.

Wilson was right, for example, to point to the emergence of the black middle class, which had gained ground over the previous two decades. This was a tremendously important development (and happened before, not after, the onset of affirmative action). In 1940, most black men had worked as laborers, sharecroppers, or domestic servants, while six out of ten women were servants, working long hours for little pay. By 1970, however, the picture was radically changing. More than one in five black men and one in three black women held white-collar jobs. By the mid-1970s it was perfectly normal, especially in the North, to see black schoolteachers, social workers, doctors, nurses, secretaries, salesmen, and small-business men. And almost every part of the country had what one writer called a “large, churchgoing, home-owning, childrearing, back-yard barbecuing, traffic-jam-cursing black middle class, remarkable only for the very ordinariness with which its members go about their classically American suburban affairs.”4

The growth of this black middle class owed a great deal, of course, to the civil rights laws of the 1960s, but it arguably owed even more to education. Even without affirmative action, there would probably have been an unprecedented surge of black workers into professional and technical positions, simply because of the bigger pool of high-school and college graduates. Between 1960 and 1980, the proportion of black youngsters with four years of high school more than doubled, while the proportion attending college more than trebled. In 1963, George Wallace had made his notorious stand in the schoolhouse door against the admission of black students to the University of Alabama. Ten years later, the university was admitting six hundred black students

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