I’m going to put some figures before you in the hope they
will not put you to sleep. Americans – mindful of a dictum attributed to
Disraeli by Mark Twain that there are three kinds of lies: lies, dammed lies,
and statistics – tend to drift off as soon as you drag out the numbers. But, I
assure you, these numbers are reliable and pertinent to this discussion. The
figures immediately below are taken from Pew Research, because that organization is less
prone to “lying” – or, if you prefer, statistical manipulation -- than most
politicians on the make who fluff figure for their own sometimes nefarious
purposes.
For six decades, since the 1963 March on Washington led
by Martin Luther King, black unemployment, relative to white unemployment, has
hardly budged. You may recall the
official title of MLK’s march on Washington: “The March on Washington for Jobs
and Liberty.”
Today, as then, black unemployment is double that of
whites. There will always be discussions concerning the actual unemployment
figure of course. If you are a Democrat in office, the national figure in
November 2013 was about 7.6%. If you are a Republican in office, the “real”
unemployment figure is a few of points higher, because Republicans include in
their figure people who have stopped looking for work.
These statistical differences are altogether unimportant
for blacks because -- unemployment in Hartford for the same period was about
15.8 %, a figure that pretty much confirms Pew’s statistics. Hartford has
vibrant Black and Hispanic communities, and the unemployment figure there is
about twice that of unemployment in the predominantly white suburbs of
Connecticut. This differential has not budged, other Pew measurements show,
since the 1960s. And worse, all the historical studies show a retrogression in
important indicators of prosperity since 1910, a quarter century after President Andrew
Johnson officially ended the Civil War.
Why the lack of progress? How do we account for the
retrogression? And what is the magical significance of 1960s? From the Civil
War up to the 1960s, blacks in the Northeast were, if you will forgive the hackneyed
yuppie phrase, upwardly mobile. But in urban areas the upward trend plummeted
dramatically shortly after MLK turned out in Washington a crowd that marched on
the Capitol demanding jobs and liberty.
It’s crucial to understand what MLK meant by liberty. He
meant that blacks should have the same measure of liberty as whites; that the
Jim Crow barriers blacks were forced to surmount before they could become
self-reliant should be pulled down and thrown on the ash heap of history; that
the unemployment rate among blacks in Hartford should approach that of whites
in New Canaan; that the rate of blacks and whites entering the job market
should be nearly similar, as should the home ownership rate; that there should
not be an ever-widening gap between the college graduation rate among blacks
and whites; that the marriage rate among
blacks and whites should approach parity.
MLK indisputably identified self-reliance as the bridge
that could, if it were in good repair, span the racial divide. Even Malcom X
knew that self-reliance was the equal sign in the equation “black=white.”
So then, what does it means to be self-reliant? It means,
among other things, that you are able to finance your own household without
excessive interference. A person who is self-reliant is one who is able to fend
for himself and those he loves. To this end, he makes sure that he has a steady
job that, hopefully, provides him with access to promotion. If he is married
and has a wife who is his help meet – In Hebrew, the word “help-meet” means “savior”
-- his way in the world will be made smooth. He will be a man of peace,
shunning violence. He will be magnanimous, willing to share his talents and
good fortune with others beyond his wife and children.
I have just described Martin Luther King and, for that
matter, Malcolm X. People who regard Malcolm X as a man who promoted violence
make a grave error. Malcolm X, after he had become a Sunni Muslim, rejected
violence – except when self-defense required a reciprocal response. And even here Malcom X was demanding a rightof self-defense long accepted in American society.
I have just described Fredrick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln’s
gadfly. And I have just described family life as it had been in these sometimes
United
States from the post-Civil War period through the 1950s. Magnanimity, or large
heartedness, which involves the ability to help others by drawing on a store of
emotional and monetary resources, is one of the marks of a free man; a slave
cannot be magnanimous, not because his heart is pinched, but because he lacks
the means to help others – or himself. The slave lacked the means because he
was deprived by force of the means to self-reliance. Other than liberty, the
slave owner deprived “his property” of three things: education, guns and votes.
Fredrick Douglas felt an ocean of freedom coursing through his veins the moment
he was able to read a book.
This is very important to note: Liberty is not a passive
condition conferred upon a man by pre-existing laws. It is a virtue – a power
of acting. A man who is “at liberty” is one who has within himself those public
and private virtues that enable him to act to benefit both himself and others.
That is why the bars of a cell were powerless in suppressing the spirit of a
man who knew what liberty really is. Martin Luther King was never freer than when
he was imprisoned in a Birmingham jail. The same may be said of Malcom X, who
was delivered from bondage when, while in jail, the borders of his life
expanded under the influence of books and his tutors. Bars alone cannot
circumscribe liberty and freedom. It is only moral atrophy that robs a man of
his freedom and liberty. Listen to MLK’s “I Have a Dream Speech.” Read and try
to hear with the ear of your heart Lincoln’s second Inaugural Address:
“The Almighty has His own
purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that
offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall
suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence
of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed
time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this
terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern
therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a
living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that
this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it
continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty
years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn
with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three
thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are
true and righteous altogether.’”
These are not words; they are a fire in the soul, a
clarion call to freedom and liberty.
Now we come to Connecticut’s cities in the modern period,
and we ask:
How goes it with the black family? The black family was
resilient in the post-Civil War period. That great wound in the soul, slavery,
could not destroy it.
And now?
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER),headquartered
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a non-partisan think tank that has been around
since the 1920s.
NBER’s 61-page paper, heavy
on charts and regression analyses and co-written by Raj Chetty of Harvard and
Emmanuel Saez of Berkeley, disclosed some interesting correlations. But the one
that immediately leaps out of the report and grabs you by the throat is this:
“The strongest predictors of
upward mobility are measures of family structure, such as the fraction of
single parents in the area. Children of married parents also have higher rates
of upward mobility if they live in communities with fewer single parents.”
Now, the single parent household among African Americans
dates from the post-Civil war period; its historical roots reach back to 1880. Data
from the U,S, Census shows that the most widespread form of family structure
among African Americans from 1880 to 1960 was married households consisting of
a man and wife. Single parent households remained at the same level until 1960,
after which they increased precipitously. A study of family structure in
Philadelphia in 1880 showed that three fourths of black families were nuclear
households, consisting of a wife, a husband and children. In New York City in
1925, 85 percent of kin related black households had two parents, just like the
households of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. In 1965, when U.S. Senator
Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned in a much read report that the black family was
in danger of destruction, the out-of-wedlock birth rate had increased to 25
percent among blacks, a figure that continued to rise swiftly as the years
passed.
In 1991, 68 percent of black children were born outside
of marriage. In 2010, U.S. Census data revealed that more African American
families consisted of single-parent mothers than married homes with both
parents, and in 2011, 72 percent of black babies were born to unwed mothers.
One more glaring statistic: Not all black babies are
born. According to a 2012 report issued by the New York City Department of
Health and Mental Hygiene, more black babies were killed by abortion in the
city (31,328) than were born there (24,758). Of children aborted in New York
City during the period under study, 42.4 percent were black, although the black
population in the city is only 17.5 percent.
What all this means, in practical terms, is that life in
the United States for African American boys has become – as it was NOT for their grandfathers
and great grandfathers from the post-Civil war period to the present – a very
iffy proposition.
Had they survived their assassinations, Martin Luther
King and Malcolm X, both loving fathers, would have been more than justified in
considering this undeclared “war on the black family” as a species of racism,
however well intended the architects of the destruction of the back family might
have been. No one needs doubt that they were well intended. But then we know --
do we not? -- that the road to Hell is often paved with good intentions. It was
through a gap in that road that the black father had disappeared sometime after
both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X made their way into history.
Alveda King, a niece of Martin Luther King, soon will
be in Connecticut, at the invitation of Connecticut Black Republicans, to give
the key note address on a forum called ‘Women on Fire." Ms. King’s take on abortion is
considerably more fiery and contemporary than that of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood,
an abortion provider that is doing a bang up business in the black community.
In fairness to Ms. Sanger, it should be said here that
she was not fond of abortion and considered birth control, by which she meant
contraception, to be an alternative to a practice she called, at various times,
“sordid,” “abhorrent,” “terrible,” “barbaric,” a “horror.” The end result of
abortion the founder of Planned Parenthood considered “an outrageous slaughter,” “infanticide,” “feticide,”
and “the killing of babies.” Ms. Sanger labeled abortionists “blood-sucking men
with MD after their names.”
And if all this reprobation was not clear enough, Ms. Sanger
said that birth control “has nothing to do with abortion, it has nothing to do
with interfering with or disturbing life after conception has taken place.” Subsequent
events showed her to be in error on this last point. Nor is abortion the final frontier.
Euthanasia is being seriously discussed as a compassionate end of life measure in
Connecticut’s General Assembly. And in progressive countries such as China,
sex-selective abortion monitored by the state has been heralded as a population
control device.
Such is our Brave New World, where a treacherous compassion has become the last
refuge of scoundrels.
Comments
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Unfortunately, the "civil rights movement" was not about liberty either in the sense of self-government of a community or in the sense of individual freedom from arbitrary government. The best elements, those affiliated with MLK, took their cue from Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party, and were dedicated to equality (or egalite).
I grew up in the sixties, and one thing that has always been a question is why black alienation increased as the civil rights movement achieved its goals. Why was H.Rap Brown saying, "If America don't come around, we're gonna burn it down" after Brown v. Board, after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and after Lyndon Johnson declared our national pursuit of a Great Society?
But, I think it indisputable that black alienation did increase in the sixites; race riots in every summer. My speculative explanation is that the Civil Rights movement was in part anti-American, or at least anti-(the America blacks view has having victimized them). So, black was beautiful, (European Christian)slave names were ditched in favor of Muslim or African ones, and authentic blackness entailed hostility to America and western civilization as a whole. I recall it being debated whether MLK was sufficiently militant. Was he an Uncle Tom? This definition of themselves as alien, the other, coupled with the wider cultural decline represented by the "sexual revolution" has decimated black society.
Now that the progressives need more money in CT they want to apply property taxes to non-profit hospitals. These are the last job-creators for blacks in the cities. There is no other reason for these hospitals to be in the center city anymore. Another disaster looms.
Sharkey's hungry again. The tax on non-profits will be dumped, if it is ever collected, into the general fund, and municipalities will see little of it. Just more food for the shark.