Inside the Negro Middle Class (1968)

the following program is from net the national educational television network i'd like to live in in a tree-lined street i'd like to have a summer home on the lake i'd like to have a yacht belong to a north shore yacht club i like to wear suits from brook brothers uh all americans and i am an american we think this way there's no other way to think i can't think african i can't think uh irish i can't make norwegian i have to think with in the structure the society in which i live which is a white society so i uh their values are imposed on me and i think this kind of way i don't think of myself as being a negro never until recently have i really been concerned that i am a negro i thought all the while that i was an [Music] american [Music] in fact it was very interesting commentary on this in life magazine several years ago when they had the sit-ins on route 40 to try to stamp out discrimination and they had asked a lady there who ran a just a hash joint almost uh uh why she discriminated against uh all of these black people when some of them were diplomats from african nations and her comment was simply that they all look like just plain run-of-the-mill [ __ ] to have [Music] marsha king this is robert jones age 38 native born american he holds down an important job on the yacht to sleep eight and vacations each summer on fashionable martha's vineyard he his wife marlene and their two children live on a tree-lined suburban street just across the hudson river from new york city bobby jones as his friends call him is a graduate of new york university with a law degree from new york law school he and his family are among some five million members of a unique and little-known group in the united states the negro middle class [Music] barbie jones and his counterparts are to be found in every state of the union one out of every four negro families can be said to be middle class today which is better than twice the figure of only ten years ago most are still on the lower middle income rungs and the seven to fifteen thousand dollars a year category though others such as bobby jones do much better this is not to say however that the millennium has come according to the united states department of labor statistics negro median income is still little better than half that of whites and whites income is increasing at a faster rate moreover one tenth of all white families now have incomes in excess of fifteen thousand dollars a year only one in forty negro families does as well [Music] but there are increasing numbers of negroes whose incomes are rising as their qualifications multiply and racial barriers to their advancement slowly lessen what i have to do is to get a complete and thorough review of this to make sure that we have everything in there bobby jones whose father was a post office worker in boston supervises a staff of 50 mostly whites in the model cities staffing and budget items we have included rehabilitation specialists we have but does income alone determine what is understood by the term middle class called american sense uh which uh implies the style of life uh dr saint claire drake sociologist from roosevelt university in chicago tended to conceptualize class that way myself one of the ways i like to think about it is this some years ago when horse kate and i were working on black metropolis we were suddenly struck by the fact that you could find two negroes who worked in the stockyards as what we used to like to call cattle eviscerators uh taking out the insides of the cattle as they came along on the assembly line and let us assume that both of them were making about four hundred dollars a month uh one comes home and on the way home stops by the local tavern uh imbibes a good bit of alcohol by the time he gets home he's in a very bad mood he knocks on the door and it isn't open quickly he yells up at his wife and she sticks her head out the window and curses him and then everybody up and down the street begins to throw up the windows and look she comes down he beats her and they finally get on in the house and they both start taking their drinks and the fight goes on now the other man takes his 400 and he passes the bar turning his head the other way and when he arrives at home his wife also doesn't open the door quickly enough but he waits until he gets inside and then the fight starts inside and when he gets ready to beat her he pulls down the shades to make sure that the neighbors don't see that having got that part of it over they sit down at the kitchen table and decide how much of the money they're going to put aside for the educational fund for the kids and how much they're going to put in church next sunday and uh this is the end of the day we call a second a middle-class way of life the first lower-class way of life the point i was trying to make was they both might have the same amount of money but the way in which they behave the aspirations they have for themselves and their children differ and therefore money alone as we would see it doesn't make one middle class now if you want to look at an american society in three levels say an upper middle and a lower class you might peg it this way an upper class puts the emphasis on refinement the middle class on respectability in the lower class on survival [Music] middle-class lifestyle however would be rather difficult to arrive at and to maintain were it not for some economic basis that is more than minimal uh i've never really thought of myself as middle class i said i'm not trying to be facilities but there are any differences and i don't think that that i can overlook these or gloss over these by saying they don't exist well the fact that i have a job to go through every day and a responsibility to discharge and respect that job i think is a basic difference because there are people that are demonstrating for rights that have not a job and for them this is most crucial because they can't feed their families i can't i can feed mine uh they can't draw a paycheck down and i can and this gives a certain pride of uh respect to an individual that i don't think they're gonna have what happens if a middle-class negro loses his job economically he's no longer middle class he's unemployed and that's that's an interesting fact uh this negro middle class that we're talking about is a very very precarious thing uh someone who came out of teaching who can get a job perhaps uh with the job corps or with some other teaching oriented uh kind of occupation can go from seven thousand dollars a year or one year to fifteen or eighteen thousand dollars a year with some of the anti-poverty programs in next year uh of course if he lives up to this fifteen or eighteen thousand dollars a year and his uh project is not refunded he's no longer middle class still for those who customarily think of nearly all negroes as being near the poverty level the present picture in jobs business housing and social activity within the negro middle class is a striking one richard clark owner manager of a new york personnel consultants firm says he's in the business of creating instant middle class negroes by finding them white collar jobs it's called a job opportunity center we've brought together 750 negro college graduates one-third of whom are june 1967 graduates and the other two third experienced people who were disillusioned with the level of jobs that they hold there are 120 interviewers here representing 33 different companies who have in mind employment i think it's a an interesting paradox that at the time that people are concerned about race rioting and looting and burning and things of this kind that over 750 to a thousand negroes will be marching into this place quietly not protesting not driving not burning not looting but looking for an economic chance in the mainstream of american life in a manner of speaking we're involved in a sort of a mass token acceptance kind of a thing equality of job opportunity cannot be taken for granted however nor can promotions current median income for negro college graduates is just under six thousand dollars the white graduate earns overnight but what if negro owned and operated businesses are they as some observers charge threatened with decline i know there are some people who have said that uh there are less fewer negro businesses uh today than there were 20 years ago i think if we think in terms of large numbers of people in business perhaps this may be true but i think negroes are engaged in bigger businesses uh they are doing larger volumes of business i think they are in more diversified businesses uh i think all you have to do is read ebony magazine and and see all the kinds of businesses that negroes are in governor they'd like to know yes i will be there i uh remembered that i was supposed to go so i will be there yeah okay you can call them and tell them that i'll be there dear jeff this is just a little note to tell you how sorry we are that you will be leaving the home office to take up your duties as vice president the johnson publishing company of chicago is one of the country's most successful negro business firms with gross advertising revenues running into the millions it's 250 employees including a few whites engage in a coast-to-coast operation i also want to say that he plays an excellent game of pokemon i just told louie robinson who called me that jeff would be out there and to get the boys ready for it [Applause] negro business in general however remains in the small business category discrimination by lenders suppliers and insurance companies often makes their success a precarious one especially now that many larger white firms have recently discovered the 32 billion dollar negro market under their very noses [Music] aspirations among negroes are often centered on better housing to an extent which frequently out rivals those of their white counterparts atlanta georgia's flourishing negro middle class is widely noted for its extensive and highly status conscious new development areas such as this one in the prestigious collier heights section built and financed by local negro businessmen [Music] in the past white banks traditionally turned down negro loan applications eventually black institutions pooled their resources and moved into the vacuum today atlanta white firms are belatedly trying to outbid black banks and black contractors for a share of one of the fastest growing markets in town [Music] but whether they seek private houses or high-rise apartments such as in these chicago cooperatives most negro home seekers still find themselves barred from all but largely segregated areas even those who could afford better are often trapped in substandard overcrowded units while such better housing as does become available is swamped with frustrated applicants who also seek quality education for their children no matter where they live or with whom they work when it comes to social activities most negro americans frozen out of the white mainstream constitute a veritable society within a society largely paralleling but separate from the various levels of social structure found among whites this world of historia debutant quotidian given semi annually by the new york chapter of a leading negro women's club called the girlfriends is virtually identical to those held here by white groups saved for color [Music] the white catillions they have their junior leagues of course you know there is no color junior league fellow girlfriends is a very friendly group of girls they do charitable work civic work and there's a social group i have a lot of white friends and i think the ones that i have they like me as me and they like to work along with me but i don't think that they want to particularly invite me to their homes to their parties which is perfectly all right with me and you wouldn't want to go oh i mean uh their friends and i uh probably wouldn't have anything in common and we probably would we don't know that we we we meet together on certain bases but i don't expect to be invited to their party and i'm sure they wouldn't enjoy coming to mind [Music] in recent years however there has been some increase in integrated social affairs such as at the annual evening of elegance held last summer at mrs sydney parties westchester estate [Music] invited guests paid 60 per couple for an elaborate evening of cocktails dining and dancing i think that many people in this country who are white they come in contact with nick rose through advisory boards and benefit committees and this in itself brings about a certain amount of communication people can sit down over a cocktail and talk about the world's problems this in itself is a form of dovetailing into society into the mainstream these are the people who are called upon to contribute to every course to every organization to every social agency hundred dollars a ticket for this two hundred dollars for that for a couple to go somewhere for the benefit of someone else the entire involvement of these groups involves participation and giving of themselves of their money of their time to those less fortunate that they in this respect yes there is a negro society man when i take my family on a vacation we want to relax we don't want any problems with prejudiced white folks so we go where we know we won't be bothered that may be down home to visit the family up to canada or cape cod or even abroad to europe or africa one popular vacation spot among negroes is the resort town of oak bluffs massachusetts situated on martha's vineyard an island just off cape cod [Music] for fun and relaxation thousands journey here each summer from all over the country forming a sizable negro colony which gets along with but keeps somewhat a loop from local and vacationing white doctors teachers and other professionals are prominent and many have bought and maintained summer homes for their wives and children [Music] such as sag harbor on new york's long island are a specialty of eastern club and fraternal groups still bob from membership at most country clubs and disgusted attitudes of resort hotels in the catskills miami beach and other holiday spots some club members fly into such private parties from other cities to claim their place in the sun [Music] not all negroes are pleased with the negro middle class however in my mind there is no uh black middle class it's impossible for it to exist in this country we have those who aspire to be uh middle class and and to that group i would say that they have been almost totally 99 negligent in their response uh uh to the struggles of the masses of black people in this country and that they have in many instances in fact hindered that struggle uh by uh moderating the the the genuine and legitimate radicalism of the masses white collar negroes today sometimes find themselves under attack from within their own ranks last summer's evening of elegance was harshly criticized in some quarters particularly since it took place only two nights after the new york riots observers sensed an uneasiness on the part of some guests vassell thomas organizer of the affair gives his own assessment this is completely social even it's not a part of any civil rights organization we don't propose to we don't have speeches politically civil rights or any other type of controversies and yet in your way you do make a contribution completely in sympathy with it completely in sympathy with it but i certainly would not like it to disrupt the beauty of the evening of elegance we have so many charming and responsible ladies and gentlemen here tonight and i thought certainly that i could not expect the public to come to an affair and pay unless it were done for one or another worthy cause and i might say that i'm delighted that the urban league of greater new york has permitted me to use their fabulous name we choose a certain organization or a certain charity each year and after it has been chosen we work like the dickens to try to bring in some sort of support but the evening itself is so lavishly dumb there's so much money put into the promotion of the evening of elegance that there isn't too much going to the particular charity that has been chosen although other ethnic groups also have their class structures sensitive negroes find themselves caught in an awkward dilemma between desires to exercise usual middle class behavior on the one hand and ever-present reminders of their less fortunate brothers on the other the soul-searching goes on i guess it's clear to see now that uh the negro who is truly struggling looks esconce at us they are the upper middle class or the middle class they don't understand our problems we don't need them they're of a dying era the roy wilkins and the whitney youngs and the uh they philip randolph possibly uh we don't understand and they don't understand it uh i don't know where it's going to lead to for instance myself i'm born and reared in new york always having been in a kind of a middle-class structure uh never suffered too terribly went integrated schools got an education in the new york school system college education uh at 17 i i dated uh white girls uh there was some displeasure at it but i did it and i i had no guilt about it for some reason or the other i never uh associated myself with the welfare recipient uh the unemployed person and now i realize that these are my people that i should be able to do something for them or with them but yet i haven't so that i think is where the guilt comes in uh i have empathy for my people but yet in my middle class value i still kind of think of them as those people and i'm aware of it and i think a lot of people in my uh um particular class if you will is aware of it but uh we're reluctant we are um just imbued with this white middle class value where we think might i take the position that these people have been denied and i continue to say these people notice that i continue to say these people and uh like i'm not one of them when in fact i am one of them uh i take the position now that i should help i should do what i can i have begun to protest i will now pick it i will now speak out with my white counterpart about the injustices that have occurred uh to my people when before say 15 years ago i kind of behaved like it didn't exist uh but now when i read when it's brought to the front about housing and about job discrimination uh i realize now that this did exist when i was younger but i was just oblivious to it i uh i didn't think it's a negro but now i'm thinking as a negro and i think more people in my group are thinking as negro while the gap still exists there are those from both groups who realize the necessity of bridging it such as at this candid committee meeting of harlem's anti-poverty agencies agree uh wholeheartedly with the spirit of what uh brother kirby has said i must point out this for you though to it to us let's not make the mistake of confusing all you act staff availability with what cda should provide now the reason we pushed and i want that to really be pushed we'll be in albany tomorrow so somebody'll have to push it here maybe you madam chairman cda to give us the money so he can staff your program so that you'll have staff you can depend on publicist of phil dukes who works in the vice president's office volunteers his spare time to work with underprivileged youths and the washington ghettos so we'll try to uh work out some arrangements to make things very convenient for you if we can get a few uh cadillacs so that would be great [Music] [Applause] well you know i don't like no planes and no trains either i don't like my train you know i was on train one time and just riding along you know and all of a sudden this big boom you know what man a plane fell on it [Applause] i think the one thing that the negro lacks in terms of uh his ability to move from one group to another has been his separation from the total middle class his exclusion from contacts uh with people who are doing things that he could be inspired to do i think i can speak with a little authority since i started from the lowest possible class my day i was born in arkansas and my family came to chicago in the midst of the depression in 1933 our money soon ran out and we were on the relief roads i think that the thing that was most helpful to me and being motivated to move out of one class into another was contact with people in a different class fortunately i worked at an insurance company which had six men negro men who were all graduates of leading colleges like yale and harvard and northwestern and the university of chicago these men had succeeded in business they were black men like myself and so i was able to see from day to day that it was possible to move from one class to another i don't think we ought to be content just to be in the middle class i think just as there are whites in the upper class i think we've got to have negroes in the upper class but the overriding problem faced by negroes particularly middle-class negroes has been the thwarting by the larger white society of negro pursuit of the vaunted american the dream of the united states in 1964 president lyndon johnson stated a new governmental policy it is our task to carry forward nothing less than the full assimilation of more than 20 million negroes into american life this is not to be an assimilation of bland conformity our object is not to make all people alike it is as it has always been to allow ready access to every blessing of liberty while permitting each to keep his sense of identity with a culture and a tradition despite the fact that he promised no more than that which white americans automatically take for granted this still represented the most far-reaching promise to negroes ever made by any american president this climax to time beginning with the march on washington led by dr martin luther king and other civil rights leaders in the mood among most negroes was one of hope of rising expectations of a vision of a new and more just relationship between white and black but a new term was added to the american lexicon white backlash i've read newspaper articles of people second generation immigrants saying well my father came here and he didn't have any civil rights bill to help him but the person forgot one that his father wasn't black the sociologist had this term high visibility to refer to the fact that you can always see the negro he wears his badge of color european could come speaking a european language once he learned english things were different he could change his name and take an anglo-saxon type name and lose himself in the past middle class of this country no matter what the negro attained in terms of his money or his education he could not slough off color and insofar as color was a focal point for prejudice he was a competitive disadvantage yet one of the great ironies of the of life in the united states is that white middle-class neighborhoods without even waiting to see what types of neighbors they are dealing with have had the tendency to meet the incoming negro with the first in the old days was restrictive covenants when they were declared unenforceable and of course with arson and bombs and today with the same wall of lack of acceptance and very often and this has been proved in those neighborhoods where you have block organizations or groups that have welcomed the new people and neighbor very often the new negro neighbor is more solid than middle class than the white neighbors who try to keep him out families who themselves have only become middle class in the last generation very often immigrant families who cannot even speak a variety of english as impeccable as the english which the negro new negro neighbor has have reacted with violence and was fury in order to try to prevent negro neighbors from coming in and this perhaps is one of the greatest tragedies of the negro middle class that it its aspirations are blocked with respect to living in those kinds of neighborhoods where one can live a middle class style of life most effectively the most extreme form of this of course is in the suburban areas and if any of the problems of the inner city are going to be solved as well as the problems of the negro middle class the suburban ring around our major cities is going to have to drastically alter its attitude towards the people who are like them in every respect other than the color of their skins i was quite shocked at many many places uh uh i wanted to see just exactly how the ordinary negro might be treated in these uh in these villages oh i remember at one time i uh parked at uh millionaire chicago scientist dr percy julian co-chairman of a committee of negro businessmen pledged to raise a million dollars a year for civil rights goals tells of a personal experience uh just gently bumped the back of an automobile of a fellow who was uh standing there in parking i bumped his car slightly and then i jumped out and i said oh pardon me uh very much i want to see how he would accept an apology well he called me a three-letter name and uh with black in front of it and uh i asked him please not do that it wasn't necessary but uh then he jumped up and ran into a store i'm going to call the police i'm going to call the police the police came and asked him uh he said he wanted to institute a claim for damage i had damaged this car and police tried to see where the damage was there was no damage uh and yet he was just furious he was uh i began to wonder well just how deep is the hatred of of a person of this sort i went over that over and over that uh experience many many times as i went through these suburbs and i would ask uh children how many of them had a negro friend they would look at me as though they astonished and hardly a child i could find who said he had a negro friend in any of these places one might say oh i know one and uh the innocent children and i realized that uh really the great impact of the ghetto the great impact of the philosophy of of the uh actual existence of the untouchable uh in america which the negro represents that the white child does not know him and the white child grows up in these insulated villages to come in contact with him later on and to pass judgment on him to represent him in congress to represent him on you to try him on a jury uh to send him to the army as a member of a draft board and they never know him and they don't know what all they know is hearsay about him uh rumors about him and this uh this ca this has not been overcome by the uh uh uh large number even though there are larger numbers of people of goodwill who teach their children uh the proper things uh but there are there are so many so many who don't bother uh to teach the children and i'm not sure that we can rest comfortably and think that the majority of white americans have good will toward the people i unfortunately i wish i could keep this dream but i'm afraid that these experiences to which you refer made me doubt that i could have any such dream as that [Applause] oh [Applause] [Music] it's a fallacy you know for people to say that if a negro is prepared if he prepares himself well then the opportunities are there i think the press plays up the appointment of an extremely outstanding negro to a high-level kind of position he's probably an extremely capable person who should have been appointed to that position you know much sooner than he was but and this creates the impression that things are better and they're not things are getting worse and this includes all negroes those with degrees those without as we work in the urban leg one of our major efforts is to establish communication between the races and assess the the communication that takes place and this is pretty much our business and we have noticed particularly uh well i think it comes from congress congress uh has adopted a hard line and there's no reason to believe that they're going to change in any way as a result of the hard line that's being adopted by uh assumed by america's negroes younger negroes particularly i think in terms of my own son who's 17 years old high school senior about ready to graduate and as we discuss philosophies he says in effect that you know you you can have that urban league approach that i'm ready to be a man in america now that i want full equality with no holds barred and if i can't have it no one can have it and uh he's an intelligent boy uh in my opinion a pretty decent boy a nice boy but this is his attitude and uh and this is the attitude of his friends okay come on come on last summer the entire nation was made aware of the violence that erupted in newark new jersey i happened to be attending a national urban league conference in new york and my family still lives in newark and so i decided to visit them on the way back to washington and i visited with my stepfather for about half hour so and we decided to visit with a sister of mine so as we were going from my stepfather's apartment over to a brother's house to get in his car and go visit a sister who lived in another part of noah as we were about to get into the car about three carloads of newark police came around the corner without warning and to my knowledge without any provocation from us opened fire on us and a group of about 40 or 50 people who were standing on the stoop of this apartment building where my brother lived and my stepfather was mortally wounded and i had a brother another brother who was wounded twice who required an operation and extensive hospital care and we were on the fire i would say for approximately 10 minutes by the new york police they said they were looking for a sniper on the roof or the upper floors of the apartment building but they were still flying at ground level range and once we had an opportu i had an opportunity to collect my senses and really evaluate and think this thing through it came through to me in stark reality that regardless of how far up the economic ladder any negro goes that there's still uh this oppressive thing of prejudice that he subjected to on the part of the white man here in america and i realized that i was extremely fortunate not to be killed myself and that even though i possessed two degrees even though i had played football for syracuse even though i was an elementary school principal who had educated white children even though i work with white people in the washington urban way even though there are white people that i consider close friends that in as the boys say when it gets down to the nitty-gritty right down to where it really matters you're still a negro and you're still identified with every other negro in america be here in a ghetto or in a suburban neighborhood you're still a brother and i think we just have to recognize this [Music] right there a failure of communications has often been cited as an important factor in racial difficulties but some negro observers say the failure is actually one way many whites simply refuse to listen to what they do not wish to hear [Applause] oh [Music] [Applause] now [Music] wow [Music] [Music] and that was when john brown of scientific memory struck the blow at hyperspheric in a head-on confrontation 250 000 brave black afro-americans fought in the civil war and brought victory to the union arms and saved this nation from dismemberment and fought for their own liberation and this kind of thing will have to be done again so long as the johnsons and the rest of them fool around play around monkey around however much we may disagree with some impulsive statements of the wraparound we are not going to render them up as sacrificial lambs to these racist oppressors and the masses of the afro-american people are going to stand behind but you can't advocate of uh a violent background and all go burn down a whole state and move on to burnout i am not advocating violence but i am not condemning wrath brown brown has guts i'm not condemning it i'm not condemning the fun for the power i would say than condemn a militant afro-america who however misguided is challenging the best way you can [Music] serious debate concerning tactics goals and strategy is commonplace at middle class negro gatherings today while outright violence is generally deplored there is nevertheless widespread empathy with ghetto rioters as having expressed more openly the same pent-up frustrations and resentments they themselves share i know it isn't just a question of jobs although jobs are important let's say people have to work to learn but the masses of uh of the afro-american people are are simply fed up with uh with the situation of prejudice and oppression they look at themselves and they look at these uh european american communities with their uh with all the things that they enjoy with all their luxuries and whatnot and and and beyond all this uh they resent this european american looking down their noses uh it's it's um it's a it's a revolt for for manhood status people they feel that they can't go on this way anymore yes and they're going to do something about the as a pacifist i deplore violence uh in any form i make no hesitancy about the fact that i feel that all violence uh is inimicable dr nathan wright episcopal clergyman and organizer of the new black power conference articulates a growing trend among black intellectuals but as a historian and as a pragmatist also i recognize that uh there's no group of people who have been oppressed uh who have won their freedom unless they have either believed in uh actual uh violence of some kind or have utilized effectively the threat of violence i would read into the presence of so many middle class oriented there aren't any middle class black people but middle class oriented black people at the black power conference as a sign that middle class black people want to render to this nation and to our world the most basic service that can be rendered at this particularly urgent and perilous hour and that is of understanding and relating to the desperate needs of the most desperate in our society and all our black people are um militant all of our black people realize that they are oppressed and it's simply the press the public press that has chosen to identify uh the philosophy which says that black people should have a sense of being and a sense of control of their own destiny as being an esoteric movement associated with a certain type of so-called radical few and all black people are radical everyone who loves this country uh is a radical i think that uh these people who denounce the materialist values in our culture serve a fundamentally creative purpose the greatest evil that happened in our city streets this past year was not the destruction of property by people who were driven crazy and when people are driven crazy they do crazy things and in our system of justice if a person is temporarily insane he's a judged uh he's not rendered not uh incapable of judgment and so uh riots which are a form of social psychosis are certainly are immoral they're beyond the realm of moral judgment but the worst thing that happened was the resort to public massacres as uh an antidote to the destruction of physical property now no civilized mind could ever equate the value of one human life with two stolen bottles of whiskey a stolen television set or the destruction of 500 billion dollars worth of property now i've had some religious leaders who have said that we must have order and i tell them but i may not be an expert on christianity but it may be christianly to kill in a savage way but it is certainly not civilized for people to equate uh property values with human life uh it is this kind of thing that i think that our black people uh must uh repeatedly remind our nation until our barbaric nation uh realizes the error of its ways [Music] traditional religious concepts are also under growing scrutiny by black theologians we liberals cannot get very excited over what stokely called at one time the death of four or five hundred babies in the city of birmingham over the year mainly black babies for lack of decent medicine and care but you and i do get terribly excited over in that same city when someone puts a bomb in the church and blows up two three four little children for so long the negro in america has had a consciousness of a white christ today as there's a rise in the consciousness of black identity there are many who are saying that we need a black christ and these are black christians who are saying this because they see that a white christ is irrelevant to the hopes and aspirations of black people and of course if we want to speak classically if uh i would say christ uh and the in in the true divinity of christ knows no color but in our racist society he has to take one concrete form to be relevant for either the whites or the blacks in this culture yes i was at that black power conference as were many uh a number of other uh uh black episcopal priests and uh we were not disturbed by this we expected this that uh there would be a rejection of christianity as a white man's religion as indeed it is and it seems to me if we ever ought to going to solve this question we're going to have to admit that fact but we're going to also have to extricate jesus from this thing because i don't think he's in that bag at all uh it may mean then that christianity will take a different direction than the white nationalist direction which unfortunately is has taken it seems to me that my most understanding assessment of situations is always the situation where i'm standing full black nationalists i just i'm you know i i'm almost afraid of this business because if the danger is that it will usurp my basic faith which is christian it has that kind of uh of excitement and vitality and uh and contagion about it i really do believe that black nationalism serves a creative purpose in a projected multiracial world because it's it seems to me it serves the purpose of confronting white people with what they really are i don't think they've ever really seen themselves as they are until they see themselves reflected in the mirror of black nationalism they are frightened by because they are fighting by themselves and if this will as i believe it will serve the purpose of moving them toward becoming more human in other words if we will move them toward creating an image of themselves that they lack better then we have no need for black nationalism and can ourselves make ourselves over in ways that we like better and which i think would be more human all around but right now i think we need the confrontation and we need all the pressure we can get and we need to keep that pressure on so that hopefully and here's where i think i'm optimistic and christian hopefully human nature can be reshaped into uh more viable forms and and more viable shapes you know we've been watching i feel the the the if you want to call them the the negro in the street go through his type of revolution which is the affirmative the aggressive the active revolution but i think the middle class negro has has developed to the point where he now is going through what i would consider a mental revolution he will not participate actively in the streets in terms of the going out and the riots and what have you but i think these have caused him to do some serious rethinking mentally about the entire thought about the entire process of what's what's happening what needs to be done with uh the negro in this country and what role uh the middle class negro is really going to play and this kind of situation has caused an internal revolution the mental revolution of the middle class negro which i think is frankly it's about time it's happened it's it's too important a mental revolution what are its roots [Music] for the first 250 years in america negroes were concerned with freeing themselves from physical bonds though the horrors of american chattel slavery left their scars upon not only the backs but also the minds of its victims during slavery distinctions arose between those who labored in the fields under the overseer's gun and others often the illegitimate offspring of the slave owner himself who are favored with servant jobs up at the big house these house negroes as they were called were sometimes more mentally chained than the field negroes they were elevated above from the house negroes on the plantations and the small artisan and servant group which established itself in the cities the negro middle class developed once you have freedom coming in 1865 what you had then is an eruption into the cities of the peasant farming group coming out of the cotton fields which builds down beneath the emerging middle class a very large stratum of less sophisticated people with less money and less education and um you now have a mass which really uh in many cities it begins to so outnumber the middle class that it begins to have prejudices itself against these groups of people who act very differently and have different values then i think you begin to get something else happening which has happened with all immigrants who have come to this country that out of that uneducated impecunious mass people begin to get ahead by acquiring some money in education and their children do also and so you'd have what might be called the new middle uh class arising say between 1920 and the second world war i think this process then got speeded up after the second world war partly because of the fact that those who hadn't done army service had a chance to get a college education or various kinds of technical education through their gi bill of rights money which meant a whole new stratum begins to get an education which happened before still as the outward evidences of physical enslavement were overcome they often remain the more insidious fact of lingering mental bondage twenty years ago dr e franklin frazier howard university sociologist critically assessed the negro middle class and launched upon it a bitter attack which reverberates within the black community to this day in a controversial book entitled black bourgeoisie dr frasier lacerated white collar negroes for what he called aping the surface values of affluent whites he charged them with living in a dream world of delusions of wealth and power while rejected by the middle and upper class whites they sought to emulate and themselves spurning the black masses with whom they refused to identify wrote dr frasier having abandoned their social heritage and being rejected by the white the black bourgeoisie have an intense feeling of inferiority constantly seek various forms of recognition and place great value upon status symbols in order to compensate for their inferiority complex since the black bourgeoisie live largely in a world of make-believe the mask which they wear to play their sorry roles of concealed and of insecurity and the frustrations that haunt their inner lives the black bourgeoisie suffers from nothingness because when negroes attain middle class status their lives generally lose both content and significance thus frasier saw the negro middle class as still suffering from that crippling legacy of slavery as being in a sense still mentally enslaved by concepts which defined blacks as inferior and whites as superior what was needed fraser implied was a breaking of the old mental bonds and emergence into a new and healthier self-image as well as a more realistic appraisal of whites as merely fellow human beings of no special significance what was needed in short was a mental revolution uh when i was in high school i used to i was the only negro and in the whole high school for two years and it was a boarding school and we would sit in a room and a boy would get a package from home or cake or something and pass it around and someone would be missed and he'd say what's wrong am i a [ __ ] and i was ashamed of being a [ __ ] uh because it meant that i was the one who didn't get the cake or the [ __ ] was the one who didn't get the cake but i think i've overcome that i hope i've overcome that and uh i think my participation in the movement helped me overcome it and i think people who don't have that struggle that participation in struggle uh have more difficulty overcoming that shame and that fear that living in america i think forces on you i suppose every negro sometimes in his life has been ashamed of being a negro the point is how long does that feeling last can he overcome it does it last momentarily such as a shame of ashamed of having exhibited poor manners or a nasty temper or is does it become a morbid thing with which he lives i think that's the thing that makes um the neurotic or the psychotic if he can't overcome the feelings of shame if he can't substitute for these unwelcome feelings of shame feelings of pride or acceptance have you ever stopped to consider the fact that the average negro child in growing up is exposed almost entirely to nordic standards of beauty before he ever enters school as he looks at television as he looks at the movies newspapers he sees nordic standards of beauty elsewhere but when he comes home reflected in the mirror he sees himself now it's true anthropologists told us long ago there's no such thing as a pure race and there are no pure african races but there is more with which the american negro can identify when he sees african standards of beauty than say in nordic standards of beauty or anglo-saxon these signs are a reaction to the detrimental effect which western civilization and what i call the manikin experience has had on black people in america we are taught according to the manikin experience that black is ugly black you get back black is evil black people are evil black women in particular are evil and this has a deleterious effect on adults adolescents and children alike it makes us ashamed of just being black there is a bone deep shame about being black which pervades the entire black community and has no respect for class the black bourgeoisie is just as ashamed of being black as all the masses of negroes this was done due to a concerted effort over many years and generations by the white propagandists we intend to counter propagandize we intend to tell black people that they are valuable that they are important that they have made contributions to the world and will continue to make contributions to the world but first they must look upon themselves in a better light hence black is not ugly black is not evil black is beautiful now i spread it right there okay that's what i want see nothing to it just a little smile and boy we're on our way okay that chin down just a wee bit there we are all right i think this this trend toward natural hair uh development uh indicates a a greater feeling of self-pride in africa and in our african heritage and in blackness in naturalness in presenting ourselves and not being ashamed of the way we are and i think this is a very healthy thing as a result of our meeting with girls in new york and chicago and around the country we found that this trend was developing not only among women but also among men and here again we felt that ebony ought to reflect the changes that are going on in the community and i can say that while uh it has certainly not affected the majority of people there are a growing number of negro men and women who are wearing their hair in a natural form and i think quite attractively [Music] one of the great problems that we have faced here in our country is the fact that a lot of black people have not had respect for themselves we have been i think moved and swayed by standards which were not standards of beauty that related uh to us and i happen to work for a hair care and cosmetics company and one of the things that we're taking a long hard look at in fact even more than that that we have made decisions to do is to try to relate beauty among black people as black beauty and not to try to encourage all women to be blonde blond blonding is for women whose skin tones and natural hair calls for that black people now are proud of being black they are proud of their hair when i was a child i was taught that if a negro was light complexion and had straight hair that he was somebody and i was taught that because i had nappy hair and was black i was nobody young negroes today are proud of their black skin they're proud of their nappy hair and because that's what they are now that is new and to me that is good it's beautiful i think our girls wear it very well for our business it's no good it's no good about all this they say blondes have more fun yes if they requested in my shop and said what they wanted i would give it but now but i would not recommend it because why not because the beautician really can't make any money with the natural yes it is uh this is the purpose of every culture to service the people who create the culture whether they happen to be indians in the amazon basin or oxford ons in london england except for the american negro his is a slave culture which comes to us from slavery and is perpetuated and was perpetuated by legalized segregation the white boy on the other hand is told look sharp and do well you might be president of the most powerful country on earth one day now to the negro boy we have the underlying slave culture since a slave is a dehumanized individual is that a [ __ ] is no damn good this is no wonder why very few negroes black boys and girls survive all of this so it is necessary for us the present living generation to create a culture which says that our people are the most valuable our boys and girls are beautiful so we can overcome the damage done to us as a people and as individuals indigenous negro music and dance are pursued with new pride and vigor these days in contrast to the times not long past when such soul expressions were looked down upon as too common for educated negroes in fact the term soul has been virtually commanded by the black community to describe aspects of black consciousness ranging from the religious to the romantics [Music] traditional lower class negro food favorites such as pigs feet collard greens and chitlin now known as soul food also enjoy new and open popularity among soul brothers and soul sisters uh this is janet who won the uh first prize in the science fair exactly she was the one who decided she wanted to include dr charles drew and dr daniel hale williams in her research woman and this is one of the things that made me feel quite proud that my daughter came home and said she had to turn in a list of 10 famous persons born born during the month of february she showed me the list there were 10 white persons on it and i said to her i said well why don't you at least include some famous negro and she said to me she said well daddy i don't know anything was negro and i wanted to blow my top what do you mean you don't know any famous negro with all this material i make available to you so i told her to get busy in the books to do some research then meanwhile i went back to my library at jet because we do a section called yesterday in negro history and i just simply said to the librarian a more famous person negroes are born during the month of february than any other month give me some research to back it up so i had my little list to be ready for her when she got her little list and there were names like langston hughes uh todd duncan uh richard allen the founder of the methodist church uh w.e.b dubois frederick douglass you know all during the month of february now when she finally got her list together she gave me two lists famous negroes famous whites and i said she only wants 10. so why don't you do it in chronological order when she did it in chronological order she came up with seven negroes and three whites and george washington didn't make it burgeoning interest in negro history and african heritage is leading to the growth of museums libraries and cultural centers and black neighborhoods across the country this south side chicago center is dedicated to the negro fur trader who founded the city in 1779 it is run and supported by a committee of professionals intellectuals and white-collar workers who take their work seriously as keepers of the flame that we can pledge and then the committee or we can empower the development committee to move on in this direction so lebron will expand on that idea and it seems to me that we have to figure out here and now some other means of getting this 53 000 in fact we should not leave this meeting unless we see that 53 000 you know even if various people have to go their credit unions and bars come up since the term negro is rejected by a growing number of black people today as having a slave system origin the center's name was recently changed to the museum of african american history interesting to note that up until about 1812 that early negro middle class in this country always called itself africa the first societies in this country were the african society the african methodist episcopal church so that they weren't citizens they weren't a part of this country and they called themselves africa they would probably have continued to do that if around 1812 the colonization movement had not started in which uh eminent people like george washington uh thomas frank thomas jefferson benjamin franklin and others were saying negroes should be freed but they should be deported from the united states and sent to africa and so you had liberia established and you had this great drive to get negroes out of the country one finds in the negro leadership beginning to use the term color colored men's associations replace african societies because people will say ah they're african send them away i think uh one of the most interesting things is now having secured a relatively stable status within the frame legally within the framework of the us the middle class now does not need to feel insecure about once more accepting an identification with africa in the same way that jewish americans polish americans japanese americans do it last year i happened to be attending a festival in dakar in west africa the first festival of negro arts and one of the most interesting things to me was a large number of american school teachers businessmen and professional people who had journeyed all the way to senegal in west africa to spend a week participating in this festival i think this is an index to the new sense of security which the american middle class has vis-a-vis africa [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh nowhere is this mental revolution more evident than among middle class black youth past graduates of negro colleges such as howard university in washington dc would hardly recognize the old alma mater now known in the past for its strict pseudo-victorian traditions howard today is a hotbed of student and faculty unrest militants and activism though greek letter groups and practices remain there is less old-fashioned snobbery than before as equalizing black consciousness [Music] straight hair favoritism of some sororities girls of every hue and hair texture are acceptable now for a hundred years or more black colleges have been the main springboard to middle-class status for aspiring negroes who are barred from most white institutions by law prejudice or lack of finance today however many of these students have deliberately chosen black schools over the white often as an expression of racial pride and militants i think in the years past the student body and the faculty at howard weren't particularly passive i just think they were scared to death i believe that in the past the university administration was very oppressive and at the slight slightest movement out of line by any faculty or student that student was kicked out or he was censored in some way yeah you have the uncle toms or rather the doctor thomases who sort of uh bow down young sociology professor dr nathan hare recently fired by howard for his militancy they said that if we don't buy down we won't get tax money whereas they give far more money to the white schools and uh much of it for research on the negro and then we have decided now that they've been studying the wrong man and they gave 40 million dollars to berkeley to study the uh negro we want four million dollars instead of the white man because that's the covert and and so we are going to try to reject some of these uh outlooks we pay taxes just like the the whites do as much as we are allowed to make money so uh what you have then is a sort of colored cracker uh system or administrators who don't want person to breathe they can't do anything until the white schools have done it for example malcolm x was not allowed to speak at howard the first year he was invited by students then yale invited him university of michigan and others harvard then the next year howard invited them but they hastened to put out a public relations uh release saying that now we've joined the ranks of yale and harvard and of course they had somebody to debate him black collegians at predominantly white schools such as columbia university are also caught up in the mental revolution gone is the timid please tolerate me attitude of some negro students of yesteryear today it's i'm here i'm black and i'm beautiful baby afro-american societies have sprung up and afro-american students are openly challenging the educational concepts and practices they encounter a lot of the students at this university particularly the black students have been very concerned about the um the fact that we aren't included in any way in the curriculum it's easy to take a course that covers 50 to 75 years of american history and not learned a thing at all about what black people have done or what role they've played the fact that there were many black troops that fought in the civil war or the role they were involved in in political action during reconstruction or or the exact nature of european imperialism during several centuries a lot of these things just aren't covered and we've recently tried to get the administration here at columbia to just set up a study to concern itself with the problem with university in fact has really refused to discuss it in a reasonable manner the university pretends to be interested in an academic approach to things to sitting down and studying they don't like the fact that people go and burn books in front of ferris booth hall but the university isn't really willing to sit down and solve any of these problems and that this is something that in the long run is going to contribute to more problems are going to be more incidents of people burning books if they don't start burning buildings in the near future unless the university is willing to really study the discontent that leads the students to the fact that white students and black students don't have a real appreciation of this culture that we talk about history courses whether they deal with american history or history of the world don't include what the accomplishments of non-white people and it's about time some changes were made what kind of the town roger you cleared across the sea between the runways and lagging taxiway lima john 153 is clear to take off runway one three left thus the central theme of middle-class afro-americans today is that despite surface gains they are hurt embittered even furious at the continuing exclusions and discriminations they meet and jobs promotions housing and other opportunities which they know their qualifications or incomes would automatically admit them to were it not for prejudice by whites however subtly applied they are insistent upon recognition and respect as human beings of pride and dignity equal to any others and they are fed up with white paternalism they want to run their own affairs but what of the future where does the black middle class go from here what roles will it play within the general american society i think that the basic function of the middle class oriented black american is to be the interpreter of not only the diseases of which mark and mar our nation's life and the life of our culture and our world but to be the re-creative agents for the reconstruction of our society actually the uh greatest pool of unused talent in this nation is the unused talent of black men of the greatest candor as well as confidence now the great tragedy lies here in the fact that uh the people who are are the controllers of the system need this candor and competence combined in order to preserve the best in their system and what they will do is to get carbon copies of white men and not uh the most competent candid black people who are the really the most creative ones in our society these people are the ones that should be the consultants for the building up of our society this is a unique role of the black middle class there are other roles all along the line creative roles for all elements in the black community but certainly uh these are the people who are presently the most valuable uh people uh potentially in our society today it's there we've got to start playing back and the negro male is beginning to get this feeling especially the younger negros i think this is so beautiful to watch these young kids who you know if you listen to what they're saying and they are saying something what do you uh plan to do or what would you like to do i guess this is an experimental program lasting about six months what would you like to do after uh six months we like jobs damn good job we don't want that cotton washing you know we want damn good job i mean it doesn't got to be a white collar job or nothing like that but we just want damn good job something will grow some type of job that has a future some type of job that means something to you you know how important a job is if it means something to you you know you can grow on it once you get a job then what then i can you know i can sub it see myself if it's a good job and i feel that i can grow on this job and be motivated by the system that they have on this job whatever it is i can see the next 10 years maybe you know i can see ray in a decent family you know i can see being somebody you know and i can get used to the idea of being called mr smith instead of hand boy all them other names you know what they call up you know yeah you know whether they live in the crowded ghetto or commute to work along with whites from the suburbs afro-americans particularly the youth are hardening in their assessment of white attitudes on all levels they are skeptical even the goal of integration itself now comes increasingly under question and the tragic assassination of dr martin luther king has inevitably added to the distrust the disillusion we're in a period in which some degree of acceptance in some situations is given to negros by the white middle class as friends neighbors equal associates but this is something that is just beginning i think the large bulk of the middle class will have its sense of racial identity increased as the years go on that it will tend to ally itself with the negro masses to an even greater extent than it has in the past i think the whole concept of black power and black nationalism generally is not just going to involve the youth who shout stridently are the youngsters who go into militant action uh you see i take a position that ghetto is not going to disappear it's going to be here for a long long time the segregated negro community because america has not made up its mind to desegregated cities a large proportion of people who live in the ghetto they will be giving services in the form of owning stores of being doctors dentists lawyers school teachers social workers and i think that increasingly rather than that group splitting off it will work in common cause with the so-called masses within the community thus the challenge is posed as black people on all levels continue to cast off previously crippling attitude toward themselves and others they i the affluent mainstream of america with both critical and determined scrutiny however irritating or inconvenient it may seem to others black people living in the midst of the wealthiest nation the world has ever known no longer measure progress in terms of how much better things may be today than yesterday their vision is focused on how much further there is yet to go before they too share unhindered in the great american dream for sure they will for the dream itself may well be jeopardized for role hanging in the air therefore is the ominous question how much longer can america evade honoring its most basic and pressing commitment will the younger and the more militant be forced to continue losing faith in the promise of a truly equalitarian multi-racial america if so then the troubles we've recently seen could be but a prelude to national disaster i think we have to be very realistic about it but i don't think that uh we can i'm not an alarmist by any means but i don't think we can uh minimize the situation in any way it's uh it's something that uh all of america needs to look at and think about very seriously because you can bet that the rest of the world is looking at america and trying to evaluate and assess our real sincerity you know when we talk about brotherhood inequality [Music] so [Music] this is n-e-t the national educational television network you

Channel: Blacker The Berry

Views: 426,968

Keywords: John N. Johnson, Johnson Publishing Co., Robert Johnson, Jet magazine, Julian Bond, Bayard Rustin, Dr. Percy Julian, Dr. Dennis Jackson, Dr. Nathan Wright, Mrs. Willie Jackson, Black Bourgeoisie, William Greaves, William Branch, Black Metropolis, Newark Black Power Conference, Mrs. Sidney Poitier, E. Franklin Frazie, Ralph Featherstone

Id: nHcusYwUofg

Length: 90min 7sec (5407 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MGEH1988]

I think there needs to be more awareness around this. I have some friends who were telling me that it was annoying that black people are always depicted as poor, ghetto, and gangbangers, and they felt without someone to look up to (as they are of the average middle class). I told that to a woman I worked with and she basically thought I was saying that we should ignore black people because she could not fathom middle class, privileged black people. I do not blame her for that, I blame universities that teach everyone that black people have nothing, no privilege, no hope, no money, etc. I also think that they want to hide this fact of black middle and upper class because it takes away from the struggle (that some people are making a lot of money off of).

The part where the woman was talking about having white friends but is not invited to their parties...that part is really sad because like she said they don’t even know that they could be missing out in a great connection or relationship...all because of the colour of the skin SMH