Black Men: They Could be Heroes - Part 1

By Elizabeth Wright

[Reprinted from Issues & Views Summer 1993]

Every demonstration of pathology offers the chance to submit "proposals" for yet newer and trendier social programs that will, of course, require the input of the black elites' wise and judicious expertise. Black social problems offer unlimited fodder for workshop topics and themes for the endless string of conferences funded by Philip Morris or Anheuser-Busch, and hosted by the growing numbers of black social scientists and talk circuit riders.

We encounter them almost everywhere. Indigent black men who wander the streets and public places of towns and cities, stationing themselves as unwanted doormen at entrances to stores and cash machines, begging for pittances in train and bus stations, making pests of themselves as they accost the windshields of cars, foraging in trash cans, and begging even from children. A seemingly endless stream of lost souls with time on their hands and no place to go.

Are these men faced with the possibility of night riders bent on destroying whatever they create, as was S.B. Fuller, in 1930s Louisiana, who came close to a face-off with the Klan, yet went on to establish and expand his phenomenally successful Fuller Products, which eventually employed hundreds of blacks across the country?

Are these men living under the burden of oppressive Jim Crow legislation as did Henry Allen Boyd who, nevertheless, in the 1920s, developed one business after another in Nashville, founded a bank to provide capital for other entrepreneurs, all the while working to reform racist laws?

Surely, today's drifters need not be fearful of amassing capital lest it be snatched from them, a possibility that must have worried William Pettiford who, nevertheless, in 1899, as head of the Alabama Penny Loan and Savings Bank, provided loans to his fellow blacks, a task that gave him great pride and satisfaction.

How did the men who are today's vagabonds become so bereft of a sense of mission, if only for themselves? How is it that most of them have no knowledge of the black men who, long before America's official slavery ended, long before anything called an Emancipation Proclamation, had the confidence to make the most of their free status and sustained their families in dignity? What force of circumstance so totally cut off today's derelicts from that tradition of blacks who would have preferred to die rather than be viewed as anything except a "credit to the race?"

The very real restrictions on black economic mobility in the past have been recounted in many sources. Historian John Sibley Butler describes the mass of legislation, especially in the South, that was designed to limit the black man's ability to effectively compete in the marketplace with whites. Such laws forced blacks into what Butler calls an "economic detour," as they attempted, like members of all other groups, to create economic foundations through business enterprise. Biased laws denied them the ability to expand their enterprises beyond the borders of black communities.

Yet, in spite of these legal maneuvers, over the generations, tens of thousands of black men mastered the economic principles that drove American society. Under the guidance and encouragement of leaders like Booker T. Washington, a great many managed to prosper even within a limited economic niche. Butler reports that between 1867 and 1917, the number of black-owned businesses increased from 4,000 to 50,000.

All of this business activity is evidence of the family bonds that were strongly in place as brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, and offspring worked together to maintain the family businesses. In economist Thomas Sowell's studies, he describes the critical importance of trust among members of various immigrant groups, as they re-establish their lives in new countries, pooling resources and putting off immediate pleasures. Sowell claims that a sense of trust among members is the key to any group's future progress. Among blacks, in this early period, the examples of familial cooperation are legion.

The Pretentious Intellectuals

Yet, all the while that blacks were experiencing varying degrees of success as craftsmen, farmers, business proprietors, and even as founders of towns in the South and Southwest, a growing number of "intellectuals" in the North were shaping agendas that eventually would re-direct the attention of the masses. More formally educated than most blacks and eager to enjoy life's comforts, their driving ambitions centered primarily around the trappings of success.

In the 1850s, abolitionist Martin Delany described freed blacks who yearned for prestigious occupations. He exhorted them first to emulate others who understood the necessity of educating their children "to do every-day practical business." Such people were wise, said Delany, because they were willing to take one step at a time. Living in a period prior to the imposition of severe legal restrictions on black enterprise, Delany intoned, "This has been one of our great mistakes—we have gone in advance of ourselves. We have commenced at the superstructure of the building, instead of the foundation—at the top instead of the bottom. We should first be mechanics and common tradesmen, and professions as a matter of course would grow out of the wealth made thereby."

This was the course that would be followed in the early part of this century by the Tuskegee-inspired southern blacks. Delany warned that those who would have blacks "leap too far" encouraged the young to possess either "no qualification at all, or a collegiate education," leaping from the deepest abyss to the highest summit, "without medium or intermission."

But the black elites were to take their lead from a band of white liberals and other black scholars and pedants, led principally by W.E.B. Du Bois, a man who by 1890 had achieved a doctorate from Harvard University. He was to play a major role in attempts to undermine Tuskegee's outstanding success with the poorest blacks. A highbrow snob, Du Bois dismissed as unworthy the labor of craftsmen, farmers and business owners. In his zeal to drag all blacks through his beloved halls of ivy, he talked of "turning carpenters into men." For, in that peculiar world into which he had assimilated, one who labored or was bereft of a college degree could hardly be considered a man. It is this pretentious spirit that was to become the hallmark of the black elite, whose overriding influence would shape the thinking and behavior of future generations of blacks.

Snobbery alone was not why people like Du Bois set out to convince the masses that they shared the same interests as the elite. It became clear to this cynical crew, who were already actively soliciting whites for greater political and social interaction, that success would be more likely if such demands were made in the name of the entire race, not just an affluent, educated gentry.

Corrupting the Work Ethic

Among blacks, the undiluted pretentiousness of this elite was legendary and had already become the stuff of humor and ridicule, long before it was incisively chronicled in the 1940s and 1950s by the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. From earliest times, it is members of this elite, more concerned with image and immediate gratification than with the task of building, who have sent forth signals that have contributed to undermining the work ethic among the poor. Such signals are still sent forth today.

Zealous in their own desires to avoid the prospect of menial labor, they encourage the poor to disdain "dead end" jobs and to hold out for "meaningful work." On a practical level, the unemployed poor also play important roles as symbols. Held as hostages in the war against the "system," they can be publicly displayed as more victims of "racism," a situation best dealt with by devising more and more social programs. The message of the elite has taken firm root in the culture of the poor.

In an 1989 interview, George Waters, director of EDTEC, an organization in Camden, New Jersey, that teaches entrepreneurial skills to youth, described the greatest obstacle to youngsters' success as "attitude." Waters said, "We're up against bad, unproductive attitudes toward work, which have been instilled into these youngsters, not only by their peers on the streets, but also by parents who actually tell their kids that working for fast food wages is beneath them. . . . There are adults who actually pass such notions on to kids."

In another era, before the corrupt views of the elite achieved dominance, the humblest blacks believed what economist Thomas Sowell teaches, that there is no such thing as a dead end job—that it is up to the individual to turn every work experience into a chance to either learn skills, or improve work habits, or position oneself for achieving still higher goals.

Clifton Taulbert demonstrates this spirit in his memoirs of his southern childhood and youth. He is author of two books that celebrate the character and moral fiber of the citizens of his segregated home town of Glen Allen, Mississippi, where he grew up in the 1950s. In the 1960s, like other young people in the region, he struck out for St. Louis, where social change was just beginning to stir, and where he landed a job as a dishwasher in a major restaurant. Back home, Taulbert had been part of a poor, but close family, for whom work was an imperative and the expected norm. He had grown up with people who instilled within him an ambition to succeed. In his second book, The Last Train North, he describes the dish washing job, and how his days were filled with "grease and soap suds."

What is important is his attitude toward that job. He saw it as a way to pay his share of expenses to the relatives in St. Louis with whom he lived. He spent his spare time diligently searching employment ads and going on interviews arranged by an agency. He says, "I washed those pots and pans with an intensity, because I was determined to wash my way out of that grease room." And indeed he did wash his way out, and went on to become a successful businessman. Today he would be discouraged from ever taking that first lowly "degrading" position.

Taulbert's life had been surrounded not by people who fed him defeatist notions, but by those from whom he drew inspiration. He writes, "My family down South had dreamed of better things for me and I could not let them down. The stack of pots filled that washroom, but memories of southern voices crowded into that little room with us, and enabled me to look beyond."

Disdain for Small Businesses

In interviews, members of today's black elite make clear that even little mom and pop ventures are to be avoided, since they are not "viable" businesses that can produce the high incomes to which they would like to become accustomed. Busy as members of this class are with trying to break through those glass ceilings in white corporations, in their quest for higher level positions, they cannot summon the concern to help those on the lowest rungs find the economic means to create these smaller enterprises.

A recent publication from a black Washington, DC "think tank" offers a brief historical survey of American black business, and then condescendingly dismisses the many small businesses that were formed. The article laments that, "The blacks who were lured into the world of business in the 1920s were typically not the ones who were highly educated," and goes on to imply that since such businesses were not created by the more affluent and did not grow beyond a limited size, they were hardly worth noting. Get it? Those thousands of black-owned businesses that were created by the humblest people, and had sustained families and employed children, were not the "viable" kind that would be acceptable to the needs of the better classes.

Parasites on the Poor

After last year's riots [1992] in Los Angeles, it was no surprise that middle class blacks closed ranks around the vandalizing thugs, and explained away the roots of the rioting with the tired old charges of "societal neglect." This was a sure way to deflect those taboo questions from being asked of them: "What are you people doing about the mess in the black community?" and "Where is the input of the middle class, other than as apologists and makers of excuses for inexcusable acts?" Those are questions you can be certain that members of the friendly liberal media will never ask.

Sociologist Nathan Hare writes, "Members of the black middle class essentially occupy a parasitic relationship to the black underclass." Consumed primarily with a quest for recognition and validation, they derive satisfaction only to the degree that the white world grants them "here a news anchor [job], there a distributorship." Television journalist Tony Brown, in his syndicated column, regularly berates members of this class for neglecting to take up their responsibility to lead with their money instead of with rhetoric and bluster. He views their indifference as the true waste in the black community. Brown claims that the only role played by the middle class is as "managers of resources allocated by government and corporate programs." They are, in effect, overseers of the bounty. He charges them with acknowledging a connection to the race, in order to "pick up their affirmative action paychecks."

A disproportionate number of these elites shamelessly earn their livings directly off the adversities of the poor. Are black men shooting one another down in the streets and filling up the prisons across the land? Are black teens irresponsibly producing babies, in addition to menacing society? Members of the middle class view such tragedy as "opportunities" for personal advancement. For every demonstration of pathology offers the chance to submit "proposals" for yet newer and trendier social programs that will, of course, require the input of the elites' wise and judicious expertise. Black social problems offer unlimited fodder for workshop topics and themes for the endless string of conferences funded by Philip Morris or Anheuser-Busch, and hosted by the growing numbers of black social scientists and talk circuit riders.

The Militants

No group understood the self-interest and hypocrisy of the elite better than the militants, the self-proclaimed black nationalists. More connected to the grassroots, throughout the 1960s the militants publicly confronted and badgered the black middle class for their exploitative role. Loud and belligerent, militants promoted racial solidarity, while threatening to hold the "sell-out bourgeoisie" accountable for their indifference to the real needs of the poor. If any group stood a chance of rallying the poor to take initiatives in their own behalf, the down-home, no-nonsense militants might have pulled it off. Invoking the rhetoric of Marcus Garvey's self-help movement, they talked a powerful line.

And they talked, and talked, and talked. Except for the few who were to make national headlines for varying forms of violence, talking is just about all they did. As media promotion turned many of them into instant celebrities, some became heady in the limelight. It was not long before the world was witness to their hypocrisy. For, when government money began pouring in to pay for Great Society poverty programs, the militants beat the "bourgeoisie" to the head of the line to cash in. They proved to be as imaginative as the rest of the pack in devising worthless but lucrative social programs. Lacking an iota of sincerity, and caught up as they were in the trappings of anti-capitalist Marxist dogma, they proved to be yet another faction who viewed the black poor as personal property, ripe for the picking.

As has been pointed out in several candid works by blacks, an adherence to socialist principles has proven a comfortable cop-out for a great many black men—providing a rationale for the ongoing expression of anger at the white man's "system," and alibis for not becoming active economic competitors. The fear of failure has made many fall prey to the seduction of the political left. Nathan Hare in The Endangered Black Family, discusses the tension that such defenses create, claiming that at the heart of the discord between many black men and women is the woman's suspicion that, "the black man's chant against the white man is but an unconscious evasion, an empty quixotic excuse for his own incompetence and reluctance to contend in the marketplace."

Hare laments the fact that the vitality of this angry man is spent on what he calls the "dream-scheme complex," a mental fantasyland that prevents him from dedicating his energies to the "necessary day-to-day endeavors in the mundane world." Eventually scorned by others for the escapist route he has chosen, his defensive posturing only increases, "in such a way as to externalize every portion of the responsibility for his fate away from himself."

Today's militant has transformed himself from Marxist ideologue to "Afrocentrist," an idealized groupness which, like its Marxist soulmate, denigrates individual initiative. And since nothing could be more incorrect these days than to openly follow the teachings of a very Dead White European Male, the collectivist message must be garbed in the sanctity of African "communalism." Although our current militant has hitched his socialist wagon to an Afrocentric star, the message he spouts makes it clear that his Chieftain is still none other than old Uncle Karl decked out in kente cloth.

One could call it blasphemous that, almost to a man, these militants pay homage to Marcus Garvey, making claim to his strong nationalist teachings. Every year, they come together on his birthday and other occasions to celebrate their patron saint. Yet, there was no greater advocate of capitalism than Garvey. Not only did he show blacks, by example, how to access the economic system, he taught that capitalism was the best route to prosperity for the "little man." He abhorred all forms of collectivist schemes, claiming that communism "robs the individual of his personal initiative and ambition or the result thereof." Not for Garvey the depiction of poverty as a morally superior state or condition. On the contrary, he indicated that a man who remained poor was evidence of someone who had failed to make the most of his abilities and the world's opportunities. The nationalism of yesterday's militant or today's Afrocentrist is without focus or base. Garvey's brand of nationalism had an economic mooring, a purpose and rationale, and it gave his followers constructive goals toward which to work. Garveyites were to be "up and doing," they were to be achievers.

Men of Authority

Those black men of that earlier period of our history, who took the lead in entrepreneurial activities, were looked upon as the natural authority figures in their communities, held in regard by their peers and respected by the young. They were driven by the same natural urges so well described in George Gilder's book, Men and Marriage—an innate understanding of their, dare we say it?, masculine responsibility.

After citing the all too well-known statistics that show single men of all groups as more prone to mental and chronic diseases and the perpetrators of most crime, Gilder describes the manner in which American social policy, most of which no longer reinforces the family, consequently induces men to disrupt rather than support society.

As historical fact and as common sense, it once was accepted wisdom that the major reason for the institution of marriage, which assures a man's union to a woman, was to help put brakes on men's aggressiveness—to turn their focus away from intemperate self-indulgence toward more responsible behavior. Gilder claims that when normal socializing restraints are no longer in place and the social institutions deny the basic terms of male nature, "masculinity makes men enemies of family and society." And where a welfare bureaucracy has entirely replaced their economic function, men are even less likely to play positive roles in the ongoing sustenance of communities.

As is clear from the study of all groups, as well as those earlier "segregated" black communities, where married men function as husbands and fathers, it is they who set the tone and influence the nature of the community. Among blacks, where almost 60% of men are single rolling stones, it is they who set the tone in ghetto neighborhoods.

The Moynihan Report

Sociologist Nathan Hare considers irreparable the damage done by black intellectuals and later by white feminists, who undermined and eventually destroyed the credibility of the 1965 Moynihan Report—a document of research and analysis that gravely warned of the oncoming collapse of the black family.

The report's urgent message emphasized the need for policies designed to strengthen the economic role of black men. Embarrassed by the frankness of the report and its bleak picture of abandoned women and children, defensive throngs of black academics and other notables, along with pandering whites, worked to suppress the report's further distribution, and attacked its conclusions as "racist."

Hare says of this period, "While black intellectuals with their condominiums and two-car garages, continued to ferret out and assert the 'strengths' of the black family, everywhere we went, black people were crying the blues, as male-female conflict mounted and things continued to fall apart." Once again, interfering and opportunistic black elites, buttressed by whites, set the agendas and, in effect, decided the fate of the black masses. By denying the severity of deep-seated patterns, they stood by as the black family continued to crumble.

Read the Moynihan Report online.

[Go to Part 2]

Copyright © 2001 Issues & Views