REVISITING 'AMERICA BEHIND THE COLOR LINE'

Bellow are extracts from a reflection by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on his acclaimed book America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans, where he unveils, through in-depth interviews with a wide range of personalities, the Black America which emerged from the silent and pacific revolution wrought during the past four decades in the US by the Civil Rights movement and some of its offspring such as ‘affirmative action’ and ‘black economic empowerment’.

Written in 2004, it does not account, of course, for the twists and turns the public lives of some of his interviewees went through since then, most notably those of Colin Powell or Vernon Jordan, or for what some have already termed “the hurricane Obama” currently sweeping the American political landscape, or the alliance between ‘black money’ and ‘black political skill’ symbolised by Ophra Winfrey’s open support to Obama’s presidential campaign, thus moving Black America closer to reclaiming Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream – to use the subtitle to Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream”. Yet, it is still worth a ‘revisitation’.

*****

Since 1963, we've had seventy-five black congressmen and congresswomen, two U.S. senators, a whole slew of mayors, and two Supreme Court justices, but only in the last few years have we penetrated the heart of executive political power in Washington. Just a generation ago, the idea of a black president was a joke we'd tell in barbershops. We figured that a black man could be king of England before he'd be elected president of the United States!

When I was growing up in the fifties, I could never have imagined that one of Harvard's most respected departments would be a Department of Afro-American Studies and that twenty professors would be teaching here at the turn of the century. Our experience at Harvard is just one instance of a much larger phenomenon. Since the death of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968, individual African Americans have earned positions higher within white society than any person black or white could have dreamed possible in the segregated 1950s. And this is true in national and local government, in the military and in business, in medicine and education, on TV and in film. Virtually anywhere you look in America today, you'll find black people.
Not enough black people, but who can deny that progress has been made?

In fact, since 1968, the black middle class has tripled, as measured by the percentage of families earning $50,000 or more. At the same time-and this is the kicker-the percentage of black children who live at or below the poverty line is almost 35 percent, just about what it was on the day that Dr. King was killed. Since 1968, then, two distinct classes have emerged within Black America: a black middle class with "white money," as my mother used to say, and what some would argue is a self-perpetuating, static black underclass. Is this what the Civil Rights Movement was all about? Can we ever bridge this black class divide? What does the success of this expanding middle class mean for the progress of our people? Is this economic ascent the ultimate realization of Dr. King's "dream" of integration?.

How do we continue to expand the size of the middle class? And most scary of all, is this class divide permanent, a way of life that will never be altered? Writing in the New York Times on May 31, 2003, Jack Bass, author of Unlikely Heroes: Southern Federal Judges and Civil Rights, quoted from an interview with John Minor Wisdom, "the legendary jurist and scholar," which Bass had conducted just four months before the judge's death at the age of ninety-three in 1999: "He told me he was uncertain which was more important," Bass wrote: "how far blacks have come in overcoming discrimination, or 'how far they still have to go.'" This question arose in another form in an amusing, signifying interplay between the titles of William Julius Wilson's The Declining Significance of Race (1978) and Cornel West's best-selling Race Matters (1993).

There can be no doubt that "race" is far less important as a factor affecting economic success for our generation than it was for any previous generation of African Americans in this country. Still, there can be little doubt that the fact of one's blackness remains the hallmark of our various identities in a country whose wealth, to a large extent, was constructed on race-based slavery, followed by a full century of de jure segregation and discrimination in every major aspect of a black citizen's social, economic, and political existence. I decided to talk with some of the most remarkably successful African Americans of our generation who-because of opportunities created to one degree or another by affirmative action-have been enabled to excel in positions of authority that our antecedents could scarcely have dreamed of occupying, or even aspiring to hold. Had they become the Putney Swopes of our generation?


{Read some of the interviews here}

Bellow are extracts from a reflection by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on his acclaimed book America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans, where he unveils, through in-depth interviews with a wide range of personalities, the Black America which emerged from the silent and pacific revolution wrought during the past four decades in the US by the Civil Rights movement and some of its offspring such as ‘affirmative action’ and ‘black economic empowerment’.

Written in 2004, it does not account, of course, for the twists and turns the public lives of some of his interviewees went through since then, most notably those of Colin Powell or Vernon Jordan, or for what some have already termed “the hurricane Obama” currently sweeping the American political landscape, or the alliance between ‘black money’ and ‘black political skill’ symbolised by Ophra Winfrey’s open support to Obama’s presidential campaign, thus moving Black America closer to reclaiming Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream – to use the subtitle to Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream”. Yet, it is still worth a ‘revisitation’.

*****

Since 1963, we've had seventy-five black congressmen and congresswomen, two U.S. senators, a whole slew of mayors, and two Supreme Court justices, but only in the last few years have we penetrated the heart of executive political power in Washington. Just a generation ago, the idea of a black president was a joke we'd tell in barbershops. We figured that a black man could be king of England before he'd be elected president of the United States!

When I was growing up in the fifties, I could never have imagined that one of Harvard's most respected departments would be a Department of Afro-American Studies and that twenty professors would be teaching here at the turn of the century. Our experience at Harvard is just one instance of a much larger phenomenon. Since the death of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968, individual African Americans have earned positions higher within white society than any person black or white could have dreamed possible in the segregated 1950s. And this is true in national and local government, in the military and in business, in medicine and education, on TV and in film. Virtually anywhere you look in America today, you'll find black people.
Not enough black people, but who can deny that progress has been made?

In fact, since 1968, the black middle class has tripled, as measured by the percentage of families earning $50,000 or more. At the same time-and this is the kicker-the percentage of black children who live at or below the poverty line is almost 35 percent, just about what it was on the day that Dr. King was killed. Since 1968, then, two distinct classes have emerged within Black America: a black middle class with "white money," as my mother used to say, and what some would argue is a self-perpetuating, static black underclass. Is this what the Civil Rights Movement was all about? Can we ever bridge this black class divide? What does the success of this expanding middle class mean for the progress of our people? Is this economic ascent the ultimate realization of Dr. King's "dream" of integration?.

How do we continue to expand the size of the middle class? And most scary of all, is this class divide permanent, a way of life that will never be altered? Writing in the New York Times on May 31, 2003, Jack Bass, author of Unlikely Heroes: Southern Federal Judges and Civil Rights, quoted from an interview with John Minor Wisdom, "the legendary jurist and scholar," which Bass had conducted just four months before the judge's death at the age of ninety-three in 1999: "He told me he was uncertain which was more important," Bass wrote: "how far blacks have come in overcoming discrimination, or 'how far they still have to go.'" This question arose in another form in an amusing, signifying interplay between the titles of William Julius Wilson's The Declining Significance of Race (1978) and Cornel West's best-selling Race Matters (1993).

There can be no doubt that "race" is far less important as a factor affecting economic success for our generation than it was for any previous generation of African Americans in this country. Still, there can be little doubt that the fact of one's blackness remains the hallmark of our various identities in a country whose wealth, to a large extent, was constructed on race-based slavery, followed by a full century of de jure segregation and discrimination in every major aspect of a black citizen's social, economic, and political existence. I decided to talk with some of the most remarkably successful African Americans of our generation who-because of opportunities created to one degree or another by affirmative action-have been enabled to excel in positions of authority that our antecedents could scarcely have dreamed of occupying, or even aspiring to hold. Had they become the Putney Swopes of our generation?


{Read some of the interviews here}