Читать книгу Root Shock - Mindy Thompson Fullilove - Страница 13
ОглавлениеIn 1995, Richard Chubb took me for a drive through territory that, before urban renewal, housed Roanoke, Virginia’s black neighborhoods. We passed a series of businesses sitting in such wide swaths of grass, they seemed dwarfed by nature. Pointing in succession at Magic City Ford, the post office, and the civic center, he said with bitter insistence, “There used to be houses here. Those are just buildings.”
As we crossed out of that business area over a bridge, his bitterness dropped away. With pride he told me, “This is Henry Street. This used to be jumping. We had neon.”
I saw a mass of vacant land and a bunch of leftover scraggly buildings typical of a burned-out ghetto. We stopped in front of one of the buildings. “Come in. I want to show you,” he said.
We went up to his second-floor office. “When I was a kid I dreamed of having a business on Henry Street, but my life didn’t turn out that way. I became a school principal instead. But I felt that there was something missing, so in 1986, I left that job and opened my counseling business here on Henry Street.
“Come over to the window,” he beckoned.
We stood shoulder to shoulder and he pointed up the empty street. “Sometimes I just stand here and the tears come down, thinking about what used to be.”
What used to be: houses not buildings, neon not vacant lots, neighborhood not emptiness. I wanted to see what he saw, and to understand how it came into being. In every city, where I was studying the effects of urban renewal, I asked people, “What was it like before urban renewal?”
Before the City Lights . . .
Though black people have been a part of American cities since their importation from Africa began in 1619—the Haitian fur trader Jean Baptiste Point DuSable was the first permanent resident of Chicago, for example—for the vast majority, urbanization was a twentieth-century phenomenon. It followed a long detour from auction blocks in ports serving the slave plantations, where blacks sojourned under the slave regime’s reign of terror. The languages and cultures of many different groups slowly yielded to a common present of oppression and a shared dream of a better future in a faceless place of opportunity they sang of as “New Jerusalem.” It was in New Jerusalem that people torn from their homes and forced into servitude would be able to make a home again.
During Reconstruction—in the immediate aftermath of the emancipation of the slaves and the Civil War—it seemed that the freed people might be able to make this New Jerusalem throughout the South. Between 1865 and 1876, black people were able to own land, establish schools, and elect representatives to every level of government. The violence that followed the federal abandonment of Reconstruction in 1876 inaugurated a frightful new epoch of oppression that greatly resembled slavery in its methods and its intent. As the white power structure solidified its dominance, it was able to introduce a system of segregation popularly known as Jim Crow.1 Between 1890 and 1910, Jim Crow laws created an elaborately divided world, such that the domain of resources and power was inhabited by whites, and the domain of deprivation and powerlessness was inhabited by blacks. The weight of this system fell with greatest force on those in the rural areas, who were tied to the land by debt slavery and peonage.
So much power was concentrated among the white landowners that it must have seemed that the divided world would last forever. But the confluence of worldwide instability and worsening of conditions in the South acted—as did the Black Death in the Middle Ages2—to create an opportunity for those living in feudal conditions to flee to the city for their freedom.
In 1916 the black mass movement to the city began. By 1930, 1.5 million black people had left the privation and oppression of the rural South to make a new life there. In 1941, Jacob Lawrence, then a young painter in Harlem, created sixty panels describing the Great Migration. The stark pictures painted in poster colors on butcher paper cut to the core of the transition between rural oppression and urban opportunity. To help us understand the tension, he adds a refrain about the importance of the train:
• “Families arrived at the station very early in order not to miss their train North . . .”3
• “[White people] made it difficult for migrants leaving the South. They often went to railroad stations and arrested the Negroes wholesale, which in turn made them miss their train.”4
To make the move, you had to get on the train. When you arrived at your destination, the work of building New Jerusalem began. Geographer David Seamon has called this kind of voyage the “Dwelling-Journey Spiral.”5
Seamon traced seven steps in a novel about Swedish immigrants. Forced to leave home because of famine, the Oskar family set out in the 1850s to make a new home in America. They found land, built a home, and created a farm, thus establishing a place. But they were terribly lonely. In time, a group of other Swedish families gathered near, and together with their new neighbors, the Oskars began to create community. It was in the presence of this new community that all of the families found, once again, the opportunity to be at home in the most profound sense of the word, to be dwelling.
A story about Swedish immigrants helps us to see the journey to a new home in its ideal form. African Americans, by contrast, struggled toward their goal against great obstacles. The African American story teaches us that being “at home” requires freedom. Because of racist oppression, the African American journey involved finding a place, building homes, making community, winning the battle for civil rights, and then hoping to dwell.
To Dwell in the City: Build Community
To move from the fictional version of white settlement to the reality, we can turn to the sociologists at the University of Chicago, who were watching the arrival of waves of immigrants from other countries, as well as from rural America. They observed that people arrayed themselves on an urban grid in a particular pattern. Poorer, industrial neighborhoods occupied the center, while wealthier, more residential neighborhoods were located at the edges. As the years passed, the sociologists decoded movements among the neighborhoods, such that white people, when they first arrived, would live in the poor neighborhoods in the center of the city, which we may call “newcomer neighborhoods.” When they got a little money, they moved on to more peripheral neighborhoods.
The newcomer neighborhoods were centrally located, close to mills and factories. They were eccentric places, built at hazard, bisected by alleys and overhung by industrial pollution. Although they were areas of filth, crime, and poverty, those funky neighborhoods provided the doorway into the American dream.
For blacks, the newcomer neighborhoods were the beginning and the end of their options for housing. As the neighborhoods became “black,” segregation created a boundary that was rigidly, and even violently, enforced. The newcomer neighborhoods were transformed into Negro ghettos. A 1946 map, created by the Chicago Council Against Racial and Religious Discrimination, showed vigilante attacks that had occurred on the periphery of the South Side ghetto. This terrorism was directed against the homes of blacks who had dared to move to white neighborhoods.6
Fig. 2.1. Terrorist Attacks Against Negro Homes in Chicago, May 1944–August 1946. Adapted from chart of the same title issued by the Chicago Council Against Racial and Religious Discrimination. ROBERT WEAVER, THE GHETTO, 1948.
The words “ghetto” and “slum” mean quite different things. A ghetto is an area of enforced residence due to membership in a particular ethnic or religious group. The word is usually associated with the ghettos established by the Catholic Church in Italy in the 1500s in order to separate Jews from Catholics.7 Geographer Harold M. Rose offered the following definition in 1971: “To date, the housing allocation mechanism operates under conditions which lead to black residential concentration and spatial segregation. Until blacks have free access to residential locations within their economic means, the ghettoization process can be said to be operative. Then and only then will the ghetto designation have lost its validity.”8
A slum, by contrast, is an area marked by poverty and worn-out housing. A ghetto might be poor, or it might not be: the crucial distinction is that living outside the ghetto is not a choice that members of the oppressed group can make. Even those who have managed to escape the restraints of poverty are confined to the ghetto by virtue of their membership in the subjugated group.
Thousands of ghettos sprang to life as a result of the Great Migration. The attention given a small number of these communities—Harlem and the South Side of Chicago, for example—distracts us from recognizing how very many urban ghettos were growing in the interwar period.
Furthermore, there has been little systematic attention to the ways in which the new geography functioned. African American migrants were leaving the rural, slave-holding areas of the South, known as the Black Belt, to which Harold Rose gave the lovely name “the Hearth of Black Culture.” This was—in 1910, the peak year of black residence in the South before the Great Migration—an area “. . . some two hundred miles wide which spanned the plainsland South from the Black Prairies of Texas to Virginia, and then tapered to a narrow tip in Megalopolis. This belt widened perceptibly where it crossed the Mississippi River bottomlands, sent a finger curling into northern Florida, and had outliers in the middle Tennessee River Valley–Nashville Basin–Pennyroyal Plain area and in the Kentucky Bluegrass.”9
One and a half million black people left the South between 1910 and 1930, settling in major cities in the Northeast and Midwest, while others moved from rural areas in the South to the southern cities. The years 1940–70 marked another great wave of migration, during which millions more moved to the nation’s cities. Though African Americans were 90 percent rural at the beginning of the twentieth century, they were 90 percent urban one hundred years later.
In the usual manner of migration, such a diaspora would have been the beginning of the decline of the culture of the old country, in this case, the culture of the Black Belt. Immigrants themselves hold on to their culture, but their children and especially their children’s children stop speaking the old language and switch to the customs of the American mainstream. However, the virulent racial segregation that was instituted all over America—and which remains at the time of this writing a potent force influencing residential life—has impeded the African American people’s transition from the culture of the Black Belt to the dominant American culture.
Instead, the geography created by dispersal-in-segregation created a group of islands of black life. “Archipelago” is the official geographic term for a group of islands. Black America is an archipelago state, a many-island nation within the American nation. The creation of the archipelago nation had two consequences for African Americans. The first is that the ghettos became centers of black life; the second is that the walls of the ghetto, like other symbols of segregation, became objects of hatred. In this ambivalent, love/hate relationship, it was impossible to choose to dwell. Yet people did choose to make life as vibrant and happy as they possibly could.
Black people worked hard to help one another. They worked especially hard to help the gifted child realize his potential. Paul Robeson, who spent his early childhood in the ghetto in Princeton, New Jersey, described the nurturing that accompanied the community’s conviction that he was a gifted child who would express their culture. “Hard-working people, and poor, most of them, in worldly goods—but how rich in compassion! How filled with the goodness of humanity and the spiritual steel forged by centuries of oppression! . . . Here in this little hemmed-in world where home must be theatre and concert hall and social center, there was a warmth of song. Songs of love and longing, songs of trials and triumphs, deep-flowing rivers and rollicking brooks, hymn-song and ragtime ballad, gospels and blues, and the healing comfort to be found in the illimitable sorrow of the spirituals . . .
“There was something else, too, that I remember from Princeton. Something strange, perhaps, and not easy to describe. I early became conscious—I don’t quite know how—of a special feeling of the Negro community for me. I was no different from the other kids of the neighborhood—playing our games of Follow the Leader and Run Sheep Run, saying ‘yes ma’am’ and never sassing our elders, fearing to cross the nearby cemetery because of the ‘ghosts,’ coming reluctant and new-scrubbed to Sunday School. And yet, like my father, the people claimed to see something special about me. Whatever it was, and no one really said, they felt I was fated for great things to come. Somehow they were sure of it, and because of that belief they added an extra measure to the affection they lavished on their preacher’s motherless child.”10
Ralph Ellison experienced the same investment in the “special” child while growing up in Oklahoma City. “During summer vacation I blew sustained tones out of the window for hours, usually starting—especially on Sunday mornings—before breakfast. I sputtered whole days through M. Arban’s (he’s the great authority on the instrument) double- and triple-tonguing exercises, with an effect like that of a jackass hiccupping off a big meal of briars . . . Despite those who complained and cried to heaven for Gabriel to blow a chorus so heavenly sweet and so hellishly hot that I’d forever put down my horn, there were more tolerant ones who were willing to pay in present pain for future pleasure. For who knew what skinny kid with his chops wrapped around a trumpet mouthpiece and a faraway look in his eyes might become the next Armstrong? Yes, and send you, at some big dance a few years hence, into an ecstasy of rhythm and memory and brassy affirmation of the goodness of being alive and part of the community? Someone had to, for it was part of the group tradition, though that was not how they said it.”11
And when the special child appeared, was nurtured, and took the stage of some city club, the ecstasy happened, as the people knew it would. In 1944, Billy Eckstine’s legendary big band went to St. Louis to play at a white nightclub called the Plantation Club. The owners insisted that Billy enter through the back door. He walked in the front door and they fired him on the spot. He took his band to the Riviera Club, an all-black club on Delmar and Taylor. The band included Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Standing in for an absent trumpet player was eighteen-year-old Miles Davis.12
“Listen,” Miles wrote in his autobiography. “The greatest feeling I ever had in my life—with my clothes on—was when I first heard Diz and Bird together . . . when I heard Diz and Bird in B’s band, I said, ‘What? What is this!?’ Man, that shit was so terrible it was scary. I mean, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie ‘Yardbird’ Parker, Buddy Anderson, Gene Ammons, Lucky Thompson, and Art Blakey all together in one band and not to mention B: Billy Eckstine himself. It was a motherfucker. Man, that shit was all up in my body. Music all up in my body, and that’s what I wanted to hear. The way that band was playing music—that was all I wanted to hear. It was something. And me up there playing with them.”13
The triumph of the legendary band of Billy Eckstine was in part a result of the nurturing those amazing musicians had received throughout their lives.
There is another piece to the puzzle of “neon” and that is understanding that places can have a special quality that is greater than the sum of their parts. Neighborhoods can have magic.
Among the truly magic places on earth is the Hill District in Pittsburgh. I believe that, pound for pound, the Hill District was the most generative black community in the United States. When I say “pound for pound,” it is like arguing whether the lightweight Sugar Ray Leonard was a greater boxer than the heavyweight Muhammad Ali. The size difference is so great, the two would never have met head-to-head. So the discussion is always framed “pound for pound.” Take, for example, photographs. The Hill was so photogenic that Charles “Teenie” Harris took eighty thousand photographs. Richard Saunders was only in Pittsburgh a few months, but took three thousand pictures, mostly of the Hill. W. Eugene Smith almost succumbed to the photographic equivalent of narcosis of the deep, he struggled so hard to capture the images of the city, and the Hill District. The key is this: it was so lively, so absorbing, so hilly, that every picture was interesting. And that’s just for openers.
Eighty-six-year-old tap dancer Henry Belcher told me, “[The Hill District] was amazing. There was people all up and down the street all the time. It was like, well, I never did go to New Orleans, but I would say it was like in New Orleans or something, where if something was going on, people would be out mingling. The only place that I see now, that reminds me of what it used to be here, is on Carson Street on the South Side. See, on Carson Street after dark, people are mingling all up and down the street and in the joints. Well, that’s the way it used to be here. All up and down Centre Avenue.”
Everyone was in the streets, the fundamental place where the magic was created. The young boys were in the streets a lot, trying to make money to help their families and to take care of their own needs. Lots of men told me stories about their adventures doing little jobs. Ken Nesbitt, who was part of a focus group I led, talked of delivering dinners to the brothels and deciding that a pimp’s life was definitely better than the iceman’s. “The iceman, he had a horse and buggy. And I used to watch those guys, and say, ‘I’m never going to be like that, carrying ice, and shoving that coal down that cellar.’ You know, you getting two tons of coal, you got to shovel it down there in the cellar, you get up every morning, you are going to make their fire, and you are going to fix their stove because the stove is run by coal. And I didn’t want to be none of them guys there. Them guys worked too hard.”
Ken shared his discovery, made at an early age, of how to get change. “I’m talking five or six years old. My dad used to frequent Centre Avenue, the bars, and with us being on Clarke Street, it wasn’t that far. And I remember some of the bars had brass rails and sawdust on the floor, and I would go up there looking for my dad, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to be up there, but everyone knew my dad and knew I was his son, so they’d give me quarters. And I said, ‘Hey, I can get some money!’ And even if I knew my dad wasn’t up there, I would be up there.”
George Moses, in the same group, remembered, “Every Saturday, it was just an unwritten law; every Saturday [the numbers runners] would come down there, and all the boys, there might be thirty of us, they’d take us out to Forbes Field, they’d buy us baseball tickets, and they got kind of like into that, they would support our little sandlot baseball team in the Lower Hill.”
Henry Belcher said, “Yeah, we was on the streets, selling papers. And we used to have little jam sessions on the corners. And someone would come around and he done got a new step or something. ‘Hey, look, man, here’s a step I got!’ And we would show each other steps, and we were actually teaching each other that way.”
When I asked him who invented that art form, he stressed, “The kids on the street accomplished these things themselves, like.” The exchange of dance steps was nourished by the existence of a performance circuit. Henry Belcher explained, “There were certain steps that every new dancer you’d meet knew. ’Cause, times we’d leave Pittsburgh, maybe we’d go up to Harrisburg and work in the clubs. Well, maybe some of them come from Philly or Washington, New York or something, can come up over there to work too. We’d be working on the same deal together. Well, there were certain things that we all knew, these routines. One was called a ‘sham’ and one was called the ‘be-scorts’ and we used to use them as an opening or a closing, because everybody already knew them. You didn’t have to make up no ending on the show.”
The interconnections—in this case, the young boys developing their individual virtuosity, the group establishing a common core of ideas, nurtured both by the local street scene and the national circuit—were essential to the survival and prosperity of the community. Because of the generative nature of the interconnections, those that showed true talent had many venues in which to nurture their talents—Henry Belcher said there were ten or twenty clubs in the Lower Hill, including the Sonia Club, the Crawford Grill, the Ritz Club, Stanley’s, Lopez, Javel Jungles, and the Washington Club, as well as the big theaters, such as the New Granada and the Roosevelt Theater.
“You had clubs, like, maybe two or three on every block . . . And then they had the after-hour clubs, they used to run all night long. People would be coming out of there and it would be daylight. People would be running to catch the streetcar. They had streetcars then; they didn’t have buses. And the people would be running to catch the streetcars and things. But it was amazing, you know? And you didn’t realize, you were just living with what was going on. But that’s just like the Hill House here.14 This was a Jewish place called the Irene Kaufman Settlement. But the Jews never realized that they would have to give that up to the blacks.”
The clubs were supported by the men and women who were working in the factories and mines of the Pittsburgh area. Henry Belcher said that, though they were uneducated people from the South, they had more money than they’d ever had in their lives. “And when they got their pay at the end of the week, they just had a ball.”
Interactions of all kinds kept the Hill afloat and made sure that everybody ate, had clothes to wear, and behaved properly. The boys on the streets got advice from older men: the dancers and musicians taught them how to refine their arts; the pimps showed them an easy way to make money; the regular guys urged them to go straight—“Even if you see me do it, don’t you do it.”
Thelma Lovette, who is a matriarch of the Hill, spoke with me about what the community was like when she was growing up in the 1920s and ’30s.15 She was the fifth of eleven children. Her mother had been born in the Hill, and her father had migrated there. She recalled how white shopkeepers helped her father get started in business. “In May 1919, [Papa] decided that he would work for himself. I know the date because my mother delivered a set of twins. The Gross brothers, a set of Jewish brothers who owned a confectionery store at the corner of Wiley and Crawford, were the ones who suggested that Papa use the converted stable behind Burke’s [Theater] and set up a shop. Father was a self-taught plumber. His skills and talents were often sought after by many who needed various plumbing jobs done. Outhouses had been outlawed and indoor plumbing was required. They were putting the bathrooms in the homes, so Papa had lots of work to do.”
In another story she related, she put across the same message of mutual aid and comfort. “I remember Papa telling us, ‘Always remember the neighborhood grocer. Because when you need, he will help you.’ The government was rationing sugar and butter. We had a neighborhood grocer—Rosenfield was the name of the family. He would always find a square of butter for Papa. We always had butter.”
Such reciprocity depended on connection, both within the Hill and among the Hill and other Pittsburgh communities. Though everyone assured me that it was not necessary to leave the Hill, as everything you needed was there, people did leave for work and shopping. One of the ways to travel was the incline, Pittsburghese for a railroad that runs up the side of a mountain. Agnes Franklin filled me in on the role the incline, which ran from the top of the Hill to the Strip Market, played in the community. “[The incline] is a big thing. And because [my family] didn’t live far from there, we were the first ones that those hucksters were in contact with. I remember my grandmother who would want something from down the Strip, she would watch me out the window: go down the incline, get off the incline, go buy her what she wants, and get back on the incline. And she would watch me the whole time.
“And they started to tear down inclines, right? But they only tore our incline down,” she remembered with bitterness. “The other inclines today are in storage, or monuments, but they tore this incline down. But that incline, you know the sign is still there. But whenever I think about the incline they have over on Mount Washington? We had an incline! It cost five cents, didn’t it? Something like that.”
The comings and goings included treats, as well as chores. Barbara Suber told me, “I feel sorry for the kids today. We didn’t have money, but we didn’t miss a parade, and the circus used to come down on Gray Street, and the trains. And we was always there. The kids haven’t had that experience.”
The active, creative life of the archipelago ghetto nation was the result of its interior processes: artists nurtured by the collective and, in turn, giving expression to the people’s moods, issues, and tribulations. In addition, different neighborhoods developed along particular pathways, each making unique contributions to the strength of the whole. But the wall of oppression that ringed the ghetto remained an obstacle to dwelling that had to be removed. Just as with the creation of art, the fight against oppression was the result of both the contributions of special individuals—in this case, especially brave individuals—and the will of neighborhoods.
Fig. 2.2. Charles “Teenie” Harris. “Mother and Daughter in Front of the YMCA in the Hill District.” 1942. COURTESY OF THE CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART, PITTSBURGH.
Fig. 2.3. Charles “Teenie” Harris. “Iron City Marching Band in front of the Carnegie Library on Wylie Avenue.” 1940s. COURTESY OF THE CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART, PITTSBURGH.
Fig. 2.4. Esther Bubley. “Art Class at Irene Kaufman Settlement House.” June 1950. From the Pittsburgh Photographic Project. COURTESY OF THE PENNSYLVANIA ROOM, CARNEGIE LIBRARY OF PITTSBURGH.
The Extra Step: Fight for Freedom
Lorraine Hansberry wrote of black Chicago, “All travelers to my city should ride the elevated trains that race along the back ways of Chicago. The lives you can look into!
“I think you could find the tempo of my people on their back porches. The honesty of their living is there in the shabbiness. Scrubbed porches that sag and look their danger. Dirty gray wood steps. And always a line of white and pink clothes scrubbed so well, waving in the dirty wind of the city.
“My people are poor. And they are tired. And they are determined to live.
“Our Southside is a place apart: each piece of our living is a protest.”16
Because segregation was the major enemy of the community, the defeat of segregation was a major goal. Just as the music evolved with the changing times, so did the style of activism shift with urbanization.
Angelo Herndon, a young black Communist labor organizer in the South, told of many clashes with the old “accommodationist” leadership. The following story, from his experiences in Birmingham in 1930, reflects both the urgency of his wish to be free, and his rage at the old styles of fighting.
“On my way home one day I got on a trolley. I sat among the Negroes in the Jim Crow section in the rear. Iron bars separated us from the whites. As many of the latter kept coming on we were shoved back into the rear behind the bars, which were movable. I felt like a monkey in the zoo. I knew I was going to lose my temper upon the slightest provocation. I had been sitting on a bench right behind these bars when some white boys in front of me asked me to move back. This made me angry. I said:
“‘What do you mean? I paid my cold cash to ride on this car just as you did and you can bet your sweet life I won’t budge.’
“Meekly other Negroes on the car began moving back, urging me to do the same. I felt so ashamed of them! A Negro preacher sitting across from me came over to me and whispered in my ear:
“‘Please, son, for the Lord’s sake, don’t do that. You’ll only cause trouble for yourself and for all of us. What need is there for it? You know you don’t own this car. White people run things like they want to, and it’s not up to us to tell them what to do.’
“Revulsion seized me, and I said to him:
“‘Dear Reverend, will you please go and take ten steps to hell!’
“The conductor finally came back and rudely asked me to move over. I rose from my seat and said to him:
“‘You white people are so civilized that you seem to think that you can afford to behave worse than savages toward us defenseless Negroes. I know you hate us, but it strikes me awfully funny that you are ready to accept money from a black hand as well as from a white. Now understand me clearly, I’ve paid my fare to ride this car and I won’t give up my seat to any white man until hell freezes over!’
“The conductor said to the white boys:
“‘Leave him alone—he’s crazy.’”17
Angelo Herndon, who was crazy for freedom, was jailed shortly thereafter for “attempting to incite insurrection,” a charge that carried the death penalty. A young black Harvard-educated lawyer, Benjamin J. Davis, stepped forward to represent him. It is possible that Ben Davis recognized in Angelo Herndon the “crazy-for-freedom” characteristics of his Grandfather Davis, who was beaten half to death by his owner, yet refused to give up his defiance. Finally, after protecting his wife from a beating, Grandfather Davis was sold away from the plantation and never seen again.
That ferocious appetite for freedom was passed along to Ben Davis’s father, who published a small black newspaper, the Atlanta Independent. On one occasion a bundle of papers was returned from a small town called Covington, and someone had scribbled the words “Nigger Ben, we don’t allow this paper in this town stirring up trouble among our niggers. Keep it out of here and stay out of here yourself.”
The elder Davis refused to be intimidated by the Ku Klux Klan; a few weeks later he set off for Covington, where he had arranged to give a talk on the Constitution. That subject entitled the black people of the area to secure a room in the Covington courthouse. Young Davis accompanied his father. A group of two hundred black people and fifty whites awaited their arrival. On entering the courthouse, all the black men removed their hats, but the whites did not. Ben Davis remembered the tense atmosphere, and the pockets of men, black and white, bulging with firearms.
“My father rose to speak, and my heart was in my mouth. ‘Fellow citizens,’ he began, ‘white and black. I am glad to see that my people respect this courthouse by removing their hats.’
“That was the challenge and my father had boldly chosen the issue—it was an audacious one. We looked around at the audience. Naturally, our eyes fell on the white men standing around the wall with their hats on. What would they do?
“My father paused a full minute, awaiting the reaction to the blow he had struck. As he later explained, he wanted to see whether the whites hated the Negroes so much that they would not respect their own courthouse.
“The next move was up to the badly outnumbered whites slumped along the walls. After about two minutes, one removed his hat. Then another followed suit. One of them walked out. Slowly and sullenly, as if they realized they were beaten, all who remained removed their hats.
“The tension relaxed.”18
Not only did he win the moment, but the senior Davis won subscriptions as well. His son went on to become a councilman from Harlem, the first member of the Communist Party to hold such a position. He was jailed for his beliefs during the McCarthy period. His activism took a different political course from his father’s Republicanism, but like his forebears—and like his client Angelo Herndon—he remained crazy for freedom.
At about the time Ben Davis was getting out of federal prison, Rosa Parks started the modern civil rights movement by refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. In Montgomery, black bus riders were exposed to a degree of humiliation and danger that is nearly unimaginable, considering—from the perspective of our times—that blacks were consumers paying for a public service. Astounding as it may seem, bus drivers, as enforcers of segregation, were given free reign in abusing the black passengers:
• Blacks couldn’t sit in the first rows of seats reserved for whites, even if there were no whites on the bus—even if there were no whites on the bus route!
• If the white section of the bus became full, black people were expected to give up their seats to the white people—and not simply the seat needed for the person, but to vacate the row of seats so that the white person might sit in a “white row.”
• Blacks were forced to pay at the front of the bus, then dismount and enter via the rear entrance. It was not uncommon for black people to be left behind, even though they had paid their fares.
• Angry bus drivers could—and frequently did—throw blacks off the bus, have them arrested, yell at them in a humiliating manner, and hit them. In some cases this led to the permanent injury and even death of the black bus rider.
The black community of Montgomery, dependent on the buses for transportation, was thoroughly and repeatedly traumatized by these racist practices. They had tried to meet with the city and the bus company to win courteous treatment. One brief interlude of peace was won, but matters quickly reverted to the high levels of abuse and traumatization.
Jo Ann Robinson and other members of the local Women’s Political Council, frustrated by the failure of their efforts to negotiate with the bus company, had agreed years before to boycott the buses when the time was right. They had even worked out some fundamental logistics, such as how to spread the word throughout the black community.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, who was known to all as a “respectable seamstress,” was arrested for refusing to give up her seat in the “colored” section to a white man. Jo Ann Robinson and her colleagues agreed the time had come. Rosa Parks was a beloved woman and dedicated community leader. She was one of the “best people” in the community. This led people to ask themselves, “If they can do that to Rosa Parks, what will they do to me?”
Telephones rang all over the city and children raced from house to house, spreading the word. By the next morning, Jo Ann Robinson and coworkers had run off enough leaflets to reach the fifty thousand people in the community, and the Women’s Political Council’s network was passing them out door-to-door and in stores, beauty parlors, beer halls, factories, and barbershops—as well as at Hilliard Chapel AME Church, where a group of Montgomery’s black ministers were meeting. They, like everyone else, embraced the idea of the one-day boycott, called for December 5, 1955.
Everyone who was in Montgomery on that day has testified that it was nerve-racking waiting for the first buses to pass by. Would the black community stand together? Would this effort fizzle out as others had before it? Could people make the sacrifice?
The answer—and we cannot cease to marvel at this—was that not only could and would people make the sacrifice, but they would do it for thirteen months, against great brutality, enjoying every minute of the assertion of their right to respect. The true, mass nature of the boycott was revealed in many ways, among them, the testimony of Gladys Moore, given during the March 1956 conspiracy trial of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Asked to explain why she had stopped riding the buses on December 5, Gladys Moore replied:
MOORE: I stopped because we had been treated so bad down through the years that we decided we wouldn’t ride the buses no more.
JUDGE: What do you mean “we”?
MOORE: All the fifty thousand Negroes in Montgomery.
JUDGE: When did you all decide?
MOORE: Well, after so many things happened. Wasn’t no man started it. We all started it overnight.19 (emphasis added)
Jo Ann Robinson wrote in her memoir, “Our first day did everybody good, for the angry ones had released pent-up emotions. The maladjusted, frustrated ones ‘walked off’ the feeling during the day’s routine and felt better. Those who suffered from inferiority complexes felt important. So there was definitely no stopping it now . . . The one day of protest against the white man’s traditional policy of white supremacy had created a new person in the Negro. The new spirit, the new feeling did something to the blacks individually and collectively, and each liked the feeling. There was no turning back! There was only one way out—the buses must be changed!”20
The stresses and strains of those thirteen months were managed collectively by the Montgomery Improvement Association, but it was Martin Luther King, Jr., who gave the boycott the character of redemptive love, and planted the first seeds of the idea of the Beloved Community.
That fifty thousand people shared a common torture, that they shared networks via which messages might spread at lightning speed, that they had a vast concern for preserving one another, that they had a common religious history and moral tradition: these are the ingredients of what we might call the “Beloved Neighborhood,” the urban ghetto that was built by migrants from the rural South, hoping to find a better life in the cities. The “better” that they found was not good enough, so they began to work, to organize, to struggle, to make the “better” better, the real New Jerusalem.
What did they want? Dr. King offered, in answer to that question, a vision of total relatedness. Religious scholars Kenneth L. Smith and Ira Zepp have pointed out, “Behind King’s conception of the Beloved Community lay his assertion that human existence is social in nature. ‘The solidarity of the human family’ is a phrase he frequently used to express this idea. ‘We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,’ he said in one of his addresses. This was a way of affirming that reality is made up of structures that form an interrelated whole; in other words, that human beings are dependent upon each other. Whatever a person is or possesses he owed to others who have preceded him. As King wrote, ‘Whether we realize it or not, each of us lives eternally “in the red.”’ Recognition of one’s indebtedness to past generations should inhibit the sense of self-sufficiency and promote awareness that personal growth cannot take place apart from meaningful relationships with other persons, that the ‘I’ cannot attain fulfillment with the ‘Thou.’”21
During the Montgomery bus boycott, the people of that place used the linkages they had forged to create a better place. They gained, and passed on, a vision of an even better place: one in which the color of one’s skin did not matter, in which all people were invested in the well-being of other people, and, one might hope, all living beings on the planet.
Jo Ann Robinson explained, “At the beginning, black bus boycotters had learned to hate, and they had hated ‘with a vengeance.’ But they learned one thing: hate does more harm to the hater than to the hated. The body, the state of mind of the one hating responds to the hate, and, like an illness, the hate begins a deterioration of that body, that mind. Illness, even death, can result.
“All boycotters learned this lesson. Dr. King had taught them that love is redemptive. That is why, though they had continued to boycott, they had dismissed the bus drivers from their thinking. They learned to guide their thoughts to pleasant things. This was why they stopped ‘hating whitey,’ why they laughed so much as they walked, why they could boycott for thirteen months while still working at their jobs and keeping their children in school, their bills paid, and their bodies well. Hate destroys, but love revitalizes!”22
Jo Ann Robinson pointed out that, prior to the boycott, the stress of riding the buses had contributed to violence in Montgomery families. The boycott was so effective in changing people’s state of being that hospitals reported many fewer injuries related to family anger. King’s fundamental thesis was that racism hurt whites as much as it hurt blacks. Though blacks were the ones fighting to make Montgomery a better place, the victory was not for themselves alone, but for all of the city.
This is the nature of neighborhood: the way of life evolves over time, as each effort at problem resolution becomes part of the collective memory and the collective foundation for problem solving. In such a way, living for millennia in a place, the aboriginal people of Australia mastered the subtle signs of the bush country, and the Inuit invented names for many kinds of snow. “Generational knowledge,” Roanoke reporter Mary Bishop called it, and I think that is an excellent name for the information which belongs to a community that has lived together for a long time. This is the essence of the ghetto neighborhoods that evolved over several generations. It is, we learn from the story of the Montgomery bus boycott, the ghetto, rooted in place, that is the material basis for Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community—the slaves’ dream of New Jerusalem, the highest expression of people living together in justice and compassion.
To Dwell or Not: The Uncertain Future of the Ghetto
A dilemma was embedded in the effort to defeat segregation. It was segregation that had made the ghetto. The ghetto, in turn, had made the archipelago state and its local representative, the neighborhood. The alteration—if not the death—of the neighborhood-based community was planted in the death of segregation. Segregation—and the accompanying violence and maltreatment—was intolerable. But what was to become of the ghetto once segregation was defeated?
Among the leaders who faced this issue was my father, Ernest Thompson, who, in the mid-1950s, was a nationally recognized trade union leader. He had been part of the Great Migration, leaving the oppression of rural Maryland in 1922 to make a better life in New Jersey. He immediately took up the struggle for better working conditions. Against great odds he worked to form unions and threw himself wholeheartedly into the union drives that took off after the 1932 election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The union movement, he often pointed out, was a coalition among the workers of different nationalities who worked together in the same plants. The union movement was neither of the ghetto nor in the ghetto. Under the onslaught of McCarthyism, many unions retreated from progressive positions on rights for black people. My father realized that the leadership for the struggle for Negro freedom would come from the ghetto itself. “The Negro must embrace the ghetto like a mother her child,” my father said, as he turned his efforts toward organizing the political power of the ghetto.23 His was not a position of separatism, for he understood clearly that decisions about the ghetto were made outside its boundaries, in city hall or in Congress. Rather, he hoped to use the ghetto as a base of power from which to work in coalition with other groups in the fight for basic necessities, education and housing chief among them. Desegregation, in his view, was the beginning of a new life for the ghetto, not its end. But how was this to be?
It was the urbanist Jane Jacobs who provided a vision of the possible future of the ghetto postsegregation.24 She argued that, though we call all poor neighborhoods “slums,” we should distinguish between two kinds of poor neighborhoods: perpetual slums and unslumming neighborhoods. They might look the same initially, she noted, but they were on distinctly different trajectories due to the actions of area residents. A slum would endure if residents left as quickly as they could. A neighborhood could transform itself, if people wanted to stay. It was the investment of time, money, and love that would make the difference. Following this line of reasoning, one might imagine some ghettos that would flourish and others that would flounder, depending on whether or not the area received investment from residents and attention from the larger body politic.25
It is significant that much of the Jewish ghetto in Rome is still standing, nearly 450 years later. Laura Supino told Carol Shapiro, “Jews have been living in this neighborhood for 22 centuries, two hundred years before the common era, with no break in their presence. So we are the only Jewish community to be present always in the same place before the Diaspora. Jewish people still live here, but of course all Italian citizens can live here and Jews can live in every other part of the town. But this quarter has always been a meeting place and a place for Jewish memories.”26
Sentiment aside, make no mistake about it, the ghetto of Rome was not just a ghetto: it was also a slum. According to Anya Shetterly, “There was just tiny narrow streets, all the garbage went out on the street. You can just imagine the smell.” But, in 2002, Let’s Go Rome tells tourists, “Although Dickens declared the area ‘a miserable place, densely populated and reeking with bad odours,’ today’s Jewish ghetto is one of Rome’s most charming and eclectic neighborhoods, with family businesses dating back centuries and restaurants serving up some of the tastiest food in the city.”27
Segregation in a city inhibits the free interaction among citizens and invariably leads to brutality and inequality, which themselves are antithetical to urbanity. When segregation disappears, freedom of movement becomes possible. That does not necessarily mean that people will want to leave the place where they have lived. The ghetto ceases to be a ghetto, it is true, but it does not stop being a neighborhood of history. Postsegregation, the African American ghetto would have been a site for imaginative re-creation, much like the ghetto in Rome.
The Second Great Migration, which began in 1940 and ended in 1970, posed another extraordinary set of challenges to the ghetto and to the city. The ghettos, largely built by the hopeful and resourceful migrants who arrived during the course of the Great Migration, were now the destination of millions of refugees, forced off the land by the mechanization of the cotton harvest. The new arrivals swelled the populations of the ghettos, bringing with them a welter of needs that far exceeded the kind most neighbors might have to offer. Whereas the earlier generation was urbanized by the factories that stood on every corner, the era of unskilled labor was drawing to a close as this second group of country people showed up looking for work. Who was to meet their needs? Where were they to be housed? Who would help them make the transition from the rural to urban life?
For if the city had been unhappy with the ghetto before 1940, the numbers and the rawness of the new arrivals were an even more severe aggravation to white sensibilities. The city would have to help meet the needs of its new citizens, and somebody had to find some room for them.
The third challenge facing the urban ghettos was the loss of unskilled jobs, some due to “runaway” plants that had left the older industrial areas for the South and other places with nonunion labor, and some due to automation of factory work and the transition to an information economy. The handwriting was on the wall: if people were not ready to compete for jobs requiring mastery of a high level of reading and writing skills, they were going to be shut out of the reconfigured urban job market.
Given the vitality of the civil rights movement, and the strength of the ghetto communities, it is possible they could have solved all these problems and more. But what happened next was an enormous setback, one that threw the homeward journey completely off course. What happened next was urban renewal.
