KingSango: How the 1964 Civil Rights Act cost Black America Twitter Facebook LinkedIn 8 MAY 201411 COMMENTS Who could have foreseen that the passing of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 – which outlawed racial segregation – would spark an exodus by African-Americans to white suburbs, and cause the decline of black neighbourhoods across America? Leslie Goffe examines the issues.
As a result of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the black middle class were able to live wherever they wanted and could afford. Consequently, they fled inner city areas like Chicago’s South Side and Washington DC’s U Street Corridor neighbourhoods where they had been safe from the hostile white world. They were drawn to the white suburbs.
The black neighbourhoods had established black-owned cinemas, black-run churches and black mutual aid societies, but the black middle class gave up this black independence for the chance to move into America’s lilywhite suburbs. They were eager to live in the integrated America that Dr Martin Luther King Jnr. had spoken so eloquently, and tantalisingly, of in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington.
But not everyone embraced King’s integrationist views. “This is a white man’s country,” Malcolm X said in a 1963 interview. “The Negro is nothing but an ex-slave who is now trying to get himself integrated into the slave master’s house.”
The black writer James Baldwin described integration as a “burning house” that he had no desire to live in. Author of the book The Fire Next Time, Baldwin said he would “rather die than become what most white people in this country (America) have become.”
The chief opponents of integration were, of course the die-hard racist Southern whites like Richard Russell, a Georgia Congressman, who promised, but failed, to block the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “We will resist to the bitter end any measure … to bring about social equality and intermingling… of the races in our (Southern) states,” Russell proclaimed weeks before integration became the law of the land in 1964.
Speaking at an event in April commemorating the Civil Rights Act, President Obama said it opened doors for millions of Americans like him. “They swung open for you and they swung open for me. That’s why I’m standing here today.” Eager for the doors to swing open and hungry for their piece of the proverbial American pie, African-Americans had believed their road to success began in America’s suburbs.
They did not move to these suburbs in order to live next door to whites, they told anyone who asked. They had simply wanted to get away from inner city slums and into squeaky clean new homes in the suburbs. And yes, there were black businesses and wealthy blacks who had fancy houses in the ghetto, but most black people there, they pointed out, lived in rat and roach infested tenements that were too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer.
But this black exodus robbed the black inner cities of some of its best and brightest, and denied these black communities black dollars with the black middle class now spending their disposable income in white business places in the white suburbs.
With their core consumers gone, and unable to cope with competition from white businesses in the city, black businesses began, one after another, shutting up shop. This simply added to the steady decline of former black neighbourhoods. Black-owned real estate firms closed. So did black-owned hotels and insurance companies. Black-run hospitals lost black physicians and nurses, while black law firms lost black lawyers. Black universities and colleges lost out as well.
Set up in the 1860s to educate former slaves, the so-called Historically Black Colleges and Universities, among them Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where Nigeria’s first president, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, were educated, saw their enrollment of black students drop precipitously.
Many African-Americans say all this was a very high price to pay for integration. Asked their views of integration, many African-Americans that New African spoke to said that although they would not wish to return to the apartheid-like segregation in the US, integration had not, they said, delivered much of what it promised.
KingSango: In a recent article on the Your Black World internet site, Boyce Watkins, a Professor of Finance at New York’s Syracuse University, said he had begun to question the wisdom behind integration. “We can shop where we want, eat where we want and get almost any job at the big fancy corporation down the street,” Watkins observed. “The problem for our community is that … integration, for the most part, was simply prolonged assimilation, like moving into someone else’s home and giving up the keys to your own.”
Nowhere was this more apparent to Boyce Watkins than on his recent visit to Atlanta, Georgia, where he visited the Sweet Auburn neighbourhood where Dr Martin Luther King Jnr. grew up. Comparing photographs of a prosperous Sweet Auburn from the 1940s with the picture of urban decline it makes today, Boyce Watkins wondered if African-Americans had not lost more than they had gained.
“I carefully studied the old pictures of Auburn Street,” Watkins said. “I saw images of proud black business owners, in their finest clothes, driving fancy cars. Of course not everyone was doing well, but we were certainly better at making our own money.” And a recent report seems to bear this out. The level of business ownership among African-Americans was highest during the era of legal segregation, between the 1890s and 1960s, the report indicated.
Among the celebrated black neighbourhoods where black businesses once prospered was Walnut Street in Louisville, Kentucky, where the boxer Muhammad Ali grew up. Also on the list is “The Deuce”, or 2nd Street, in Richmond, Virginia.
“The Deuce” had five black banks, among them the very first black-owned bank in the US, The Savings Bank of the Grand Fountain United Order of True Reformers, which operated between 1889 and 1910. The bank’s owners also invested in a building and loan company, which issued mortgages, and in a real estate firm enabling African-Americans to buy or rent homes. They also owned a black newspaper and began a retirement home for the black elderly.
“The Deuce” was where the US’s first black-owned insurance company, the Southern Aid and Insurance Company, was founded in 1893, and it remained in business for 90 years, until the 1980s.
Another American city that once had a bustling black business district is Charleston, South Carolina. The city’s Morris Street area was home to a rooming house, a real estate company and a restaurant, all of which belonged to a wealthy black family, the Brooks. The family also operated the Brooks Motel, a boarding house where Dr Martin Luther King Jnr. and other prominent African-Americans stayed when in Charleston.
The Brooks Motel, and other grand properties once owned by African-Americans in the Morris Street area, have long since been demolished, much to the dismay of locals like Barney Blakeney, a journalist on a Charleston newspaper.
Blakeney does not believe integration was a “bad thing”, as such – but he is saddened at the damage done to black neighbourhoods by flawed federal government urban-renewal policies and by the exodus to the suburbs that helped produce a generation of alienated and out of touch young African-Americans. The “Lost Boys of Integration”, some have called them.
“I know times have changed, and black people must change with them,” said Blakeney. “But losing the culture that brought us together during periods of trouble and hardship, is not the way to go.” And much has been lost. In 1965, only 8% of black children were born out of wedlock. By 2010, that figure had skyrocketed to 72%. In 1950, the number of African-American women married and living with their husbands was just over 50%. Today, that figure has dropped to just 25%.
Coupled with this crisis in the black family, is an economic crisis, too. Figures show black poverty has increased in the years since integration, not fallen as would have been expected. Fully one third of African-Americans live in poverty, according to a report by the Manhattan Institute think-tank in New York City. And the news is especially bad for the black middle class. A survey found that African-Americans living in the suburbs most often lived in neighbourhoods with whites who were poorer and less educated than they were.
Another study found that middle-aged black professionals were three times more likely than were white professionals to find themselves unemployed, impoverished, and in grave danger of dropping a rung down the class ladder into the working classes.
KingSango: To his credit, Dr Martin Luther King Jnr. admitted in a 1967 speech, a few months before he was assassinated, that integration and the Civil Rights Act had not delivered all he had hoped for.
Speaking in Chicago on 31 August 1967 at a meeting of the left-wing National Conference for New Politics, King stunned the audience when he did an about-turn and stated that integration had failed African-Americans and they ought to consider embracing segregation instead. “… There are times when we must see segregation as a temporary way-station to a truly integrated society,” Dr King said, abandoning his liberal, integrationist, “We Shall Overcome” politics.
“There are points at which I see the necessity for temporary segregation in order to get to the integrated society … We don’t want to be integrated out of power – we want to be integrated into power,” King argued. And he went further. He praised the ghetto, which he described as a “domestic colony”, and he praised, too, the black people who had stayed in ghetto communities when others had escaped to former white suburbs.
“Black people must develop programmes that will aid in the transfer of power and wealth into the hands of ghetto residents, so that they may in reality control their own destinies,” King stated, sounding more radical than he had ever been before. King was right to question whether it was not dangerous for black people to put all their faith in integration. After all, recent studies show many US suburbs and towns have begun re-segregating, with the support and connivance of conservative judges on the US Supreme Court.
By and large, America’s big metropolitan areas have resisted re-segregation. Cities like New York and Washington DC are actually multi-racial oases of integration, where difference and diversity is welcomed.
In a cruel irony for the black middle classes who left the inner cities in the 1960s and 70s, many of the ghetto neighbourhoods they abandoned are among the most sought-after areas in cities like Washington DC and Chicago. Eager to experience city life, and fed up with the conservative suburbs they grew up in, young black, and white, professionals have begun moving to inner cities in large numbers. Homes there once available for a few thousand dollars now command prices upwards of a million dollars and more.
Unfortunately for the black professionals who set out 50 years ago to integrate white suburbs, they will not be able to benefit from the real estate boom taking place in their old neighbourhoods. They are stuck, thanks to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and integration, in distant, soulless and deadly dull suburbia.
I will blame the well to do black elite, for dumping the black struggle movement, yoh see them on media praising the effort of martin Luther King, malcolm x, heuy and other black liberationist for paving way for them when they get high up the ladder, but either they quickly forget those srruggles or they are self centered. There are lot of hypocrisy in the struggle for the emancipation of black race, not only in America, but all over the world. Even the recent proponents if the black movement are either doing it for personal gains or half heartedly! we tend to forget our brothers down the ladder. There are lot of infighting amongst us, the divison and cracks are what the whites are using to buy the few blacks on top of the food chain, they are what I call "bots" they have been deluded, but sadly and unfortunately they want to be deluded. they are the real impedance to the black movement.
that's why the jewish race cant be compare to the black race, they are more of a a cohesive group and they choose not to indulge in self pity, thats one of the unforseen hand holding blacks back. We indulge in self pity a lot. we need to stand up and act. we should forget about the slavery and inhuman treatments and learn to build a black civilisation!!!
hayoholla: I will blame the well to do black elite, for dumping the black struggle movement, yoh see them on media praising the effort of martin Luther King, malcolm x, heuy and other black liberationist for paving way for them when they get high up the ladder, but either they quickly forget those srruggles or they are self centered. There are lot of hypocrisy in the struggle for the emancipation of black race, not only in America, but all over the world. Even the recent proponents if the black movement are either doing it for personal gains or half heartedly! we tend to forget our brothers down the ladder. There are lot of infighting amongst us, the divison and cracks are what the whites are using to buy the few blacks on top of the food chain, they are what I call "bots" they have been deluded, but sadly and unfortunately they want to be deluded. they are the real impedance to the black movement.
that's why the jewish race cant be compare to the black race, they are more of a a cohesive group and they choose not to indulge in self pity, thats one of the unforseen hand holding blacks back. We indulge in self pity a lot. we need to stand up and act. we should forget about the slavery and inhuman treatments and learn to build a black civilisation!!!
These ones here I'm putting out didn't abandon the struggle they destroyed it! We have to keep Negroes in check because we keep witnessing the repeat of the Moors, those who sold out the African race for Islam. Today we have the same thing, many people of African descent selling us out for Christianity and Islam. We are in a spiritual war and some of our people's souls have been captured and are controlled by the evil ones. Demons are real! And its not that demons seek out humans but they wait until humans, wanting power, riches, and fame, seek them out and bargain their souls in exchange. Demons are in control over the world via world leaders, including many leaders of African descent.
How do you identify demonic activity? Don Juan, who is a priest like me, said this, "Separate what is human being, humans are supposed to be compassionate and live blissful, when we are killing wholesale and enslaving ourselves that is the presence of another entity controlling us.The rise of homosexuality is a pedophile demon. Pedophilia is about attacking human children. Whenever an enemy attacks another group they are enemies with they target their offspring. Crocodiles kill the babies of Hippopotamus, Hyenas kill the cubs of lions. Demons via pedophiles are attacking children all over the world. Pedophilia doesn't just include sexual activity, but actually the sexual activity is done to transfer via biological means the demons to children so that they will grow up with the demon inside them. But pedophiles rule our world and they are sacrificing children, creating child soldiers and enslaving humans to build bigger and more destructive empires. I know what I am teaching is way out there but this is the practical side of our issues. We are in spiritual war and many of our brothers and sisters are of the possessed especially those who are wealthy and in power.
These ones here I'm putting out didn't abandon the struggle they destroyed it! We have to keep Negroes in check because we keep witnessing the repeat of the Moors, those who sold out the African race for Islam. Today we have the same thing, many people of African descent selling us out for Christianity and Islam. We are in a spiritual war and some of our people's souls have been captured and are controlled by the evil ones. Demons are real! And its not that demons seek out humans but they wait until humans, wanting power, riches, and fame, seek them out and bargain their souls in exchange. Demons are in control over the world via world leaders, including many leaders of African descent.
How do you identify demonic activity? Don Juan, who is a priest like me, said this, "Separate what is human being, humans are supposed to be compassionate and live blissful, when we are killing wholesale and enslaving ourselves that is the presence of another entity controlling us.The rise of homosexuality is a pedophile demon. Pedophilia is about attacking human children. Whenever an enemy attacks another group they are enemies with they target their offspring. Crocodiles kill the babies of Hippopotamus, Hyenas kill the cubs of lions. Demons via pedophiles are attacking children all over the world. Pedophilia doesn't just include sexual activity, but actually the sexual activity is done to transfer via biological means the demons to children so that they will grow up with the demon inside them. But pedophiles rule our world and they are sacrificing children, creating child soldiers and enslaving humans to build bigger and more destructive empires. I know what I am teaching is way out there but this is the practical side of our issues. We are in spiritual war and many of our brothers and sisters are of the possessed especially those who are wealthy and in power.
These ones here I'm putting out didn't abandon the struggle they destroyed it! We have to keep Negroes in check because we keep witnessing the repeat of the Moors, those who sold out the African race for Islam. Today we have the same thing, many people of African descent selling us out for Christianity and Islam. We are in a spiritual war and some of our people's souls have been captured and are controlled by the evil ones. Demons are real! And its not that demons seek out humans but they wait until humans, wanting power, riches, and fame, seek them out and bargain their souls in exchange. Demons are in control over the world via world leaders, including many leaders of African descent.
How do you identify demonic activity? Don Juan, who is a priest like me, said this, "Separate what is human being, humans are supposed to be compassionate and live blissful, when we are killing wholesale and enslaving ourselves that is the presence of another entity controlling us.The rise of homosexuality is a pedophile demon. Pedophilia is about attacking human children. Whenever an enemy attacks another group they are enemies with they target their offspring. Crocodiles kill the babies of Hippopotamus, Hyenas kill the cubs of lions. Demons via pedophiles are attacking children all over the world. Pedophilia doesn't just include sexual activity, but actually the sexual activity is done to transfer via biological means the demons to children so that they will grow up with the demon inside them. But pedophiles rule our world and they are sacrificing children, creating child soldiers and enslaving humans to build bigger and more destructive empires. I know what I am teaching is way out there but this is the practical side of our issues. We are in spiritual war and many of our brothers and sisters are of the possessed especially those who are wealthy and in power.
These ones here I'm putting out didn't abandon the struggle they destroyed it! We have to keep Negroes in check because we keep witnessing the repeat of the Moors, those who sold out the African race for Islam. Today we have the same thing, many people of African descent selling us out for Christianity and Islam. We are in a spiritual war and some of our people's souls have been captured and are controlled by the evil ones. Demons are real! And its not that demons seek out humans but they wait until humans, wanting power, riches, and fame, seek them out and bargain their souls in exchange. Demons are in control over the world via world leaders, including many leaders of African descent.
How do you identify demonic activity? Don Juan, who is a priest like me, said this, "Separate what is human being, humans are supposed to be compassionate and live blissful, when we are killing wholesale and enslaving ourselves that is the presence of another entity controlling us.The rise of homosexuality is a pedophile demon. Pedophilia is about attacking human children. Whenever an enemy attacks another group they are enemies with they target their offspring. Crocodiles kill the babies of Hippopotamus, Hyenas kill the cubs of lions. Demons via pedophiles are attacking children all over the world. Pedophilia doesn't just include sexual activity, but actually the sexual activity is done to transfer via biological means the demons to children so that they will grow up with the demon inside them. But pedophiles rule our world and they are sacrificing children, creating child soldiers and enslaving humans to build bigger and more destructive empires. I know what I am teaching is way out there but this is the practical side of our issues. We are in spiritual war and many of our brothers and sisters are of the possessed especially those who are wealthy and in power.
Ase
Love Sango
Africans are their own enemies . By reading the narrative on slavery and integration one is compelled to see that it is possible to put an entire race in a box and seal its destiny forever. African Americans were dealt a raw deal in that country.
