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The flight of middle-class blacks from ghettos has left a disastrously isolated underclass -- one formed less by welfare or a lack of jobs than by its rural-South heritage

by Nicholas Lemann

I. Free Fall "Stand in the center of the black belt -- at Chicago's 47th St. and South Parkway. Around you swirls a continuous eddy of faces -- black, brown, olive, yellow, and white.... In the nearby drugstore colored clerks are bustling about. (They are seldom seen in other neighborhoods.) In most of the other stores, too, there are colored salespeople, although a white proprietor or manager usually looms in the offing. In the offices around you, colored doctors, dentists, and lawyers go about their duties. And a brown-skinned policeman saunters along swinging his club and glaring sternly at the urchins who dodge in and out among the shoppers.... There is continuous and colorful movement here -- shoppers streaming in and out of stores; insurance agents turning in their collections at a funeral parlor; club reporters rushing into a newspaper office with their social notes; irate tenants filing complaints with the Office of Price Administration; job-seekers moving in and out of the United States Employment Office."

So begins a chapter called "Bronzeville" in Black Metropolis, by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, a study of the Chicago ghetto published in 1945. It's impossible to stand at the same corner today without wondering what went wrong. There's hardly ever any bustle at Forty-seventh and King Drive (as South Parkway is now called), especially during the day. The shopping strip still exists, though as a shadow of what it obviously once was, and there are heavy metal grates on virtually every storefront that has not been abandoned. Many of the landmarks of the neighborhood -- the Regal Theater, the Savoy Ballroom, the Hotel Grand, the legendary blues clubs -- are boarded up or gone entirely. The Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments, a large complex that Drake and Cayton called "a symbol of good living on a relatively high income level," is a housing project populated by people on welfare. Prostitutes cruise Forty-seventh Street in the late afternoon. In cold weather middle-aged men stand in knots around fires built in garbage cans. Drake and Cayton's idea of the corner as the heart of a "Little Harlem," where one might glimpse Lena Horne or Joe Louis -- or white people -- sitting in a restaurant, seems ludicrous. I recently spent some time in and around the black sections of Chicago: the South Side, roughly eight miles long and four wide, the single largest black neighborhood in America, of which Forty-seventh and South Parkway used to be the nerve center; and the West Side, a few miles away, a smaller and rougher area. It wasn't just at Forty-seventh and King Drive that the decline of the ghetto over two generations was striking. This is something that black people in Chicago talk about frequently, wondering why the working-poor neighborhoods where they grew up became terrible. Many others wonder the same thing, and they are weary of the standard explanations for the ghettos, which are intellectually neat but don't seem to fit the magnitude of what has gone wrong. It stands to reason that there is another answer to the terrible question of the ghettos. During my time in Chicago I became convinced that there is one. When Drake and Cayton were writing, virtually all black Americans lived in segregated areas, though not necessarily in the urban North. By the sixties, when race relations had become a central national concern, the northern ghettos had received a large influx of migrants from the South, and they were portrayed as overcrowded, desperately poor slums stunted by racism. Today, after years of efforts to end poverty and discrimination, the ghettos are worse, much worse, than they were in the sixties. A few blocks from Forty-seventh and King Drive is a housing project called the Robert Taylor Homes, a two-mile-long row of 28 sixteen-story buildings housing more than 20,000 people. The four-block stretch of the Robert Taylor Homes between Forty-seventh and Fifty-first Streets has the distinction of being the poorest neighborhood in the United States. In the forties the strip of land where the Robert Taylor Homes now stand was the poorest part of the traditional black belt in Chicago, but it had many fewer residents and was just the bad part of the neighborhood. Today the project dominates it physically and demographically. The City of Chicago has defined a "community area" on the South Side that contains both Forty-seventh and King Drive and the Robert Taylor Homes, and its statistics show not just how bad off the neighborhood is but how much worse off it has recently become. In 1970 thirty-seven percent of the population of the area was below the poverty line; in 1980 the figure was 51 percent. In 1970 the unemployment rate was 9.5 percent; in 1980 it was 24.2 percent. In 1970 forty percent of the residents of the neighborhood lived in families with a female head; in 1980 the number had grown to 72 percent. In 1980 of the 54,000 residents 33,000 were on welfare. Experts agree that all of the numbers are even worse today. For a decade after the burst of attention paid to ghettos in the 1960s there was a feeling that blacks were steadily moving up in America. The distance between black and white incomes was continually narrowing. Black education levels were rising sharply. Middle-class blacks were becoming more and more visible on television and in public places. There was a long string of black "firsts," especially and most impressively in elective politics. In the past few years there has been a steady stream of news indicating that at the same time there was another side to the story: a way of life in the ghettos utterly different from that in the American mainstream. One statistic had a tremendous impact on the public perception of black progress: starting in the late seventies, the U.S. National Canter for Health Statistics began to report that more than half of black babies were born out of wedlock, up from 17 percent in 1950. Today the figure is thought to be 60 percent nationwide; in Chicago it is 75 percent. Urban school systems have become increasingly segregated, with a large gap in achievement levels between black and white schools. Black unemployment is nearly triple white unemployment. Black crime rates have soared -- in Chicago, which is less than half black, about four times as many blacks as whites are arrested for violent crimes. The infant mortality rate, which is considered one of the basic indicators of how advanced a society is, is rising in the ghettos. Occasionally a shocking event provides the outside world with a snapshot of ghetto life: Edmund Perry, not a directionless punk but a freshly minted graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, dies in a scuffle with a police officer in Harlem. On the South Side of Chicago, Benjy Wilson, a high school basketball star, is gunned down on the street in broad daylight by two members of a teenage gang, one of whom is the grandson of the great blues impresario Willie Dixon. Perry and Wilson, and Wilson's murderers, were all from absent-father families; Wilson had himself just fathered a child out of wedlock. This is what life is like for the elite of the ghetto, not just the dropouts and semi-professional petty criminals. The way that the two versions of black life since the sixties fit together is through the idea of the bifurcation of black America, in which blacks are splitting into a middle class and an underclass that seems likely never to make it. The clearest line between the two groups is family structure. Black husband-wife families continue to close the gap with whites; their income is now 78 percent as high. But the income of black female-headed families, adjusted for inflation, has been dropping. The black female headed family represents an ever larger share of the population of poor people in America: 7.3 percent in 1959 and 19.3 percent in 1984. Why, during a period of relative prosperity and of national commitment to black progress, has the bifurcation taken place? The question should be urgent for anyone who thinks it wrong that millions of people in the black underclass lead destroyed lives or who, because of the problems of the ghettos, has had to give up the idea of an open, democratic city life built around public education and safe streets. There are two answers prevalent right now, both of which explain the slide in the ghettos using the shifting of economic incentives. The conservative answer is that welfare and the whole Great Society edifice of compensatory programs for blacks do exactly the opposite of what they're supposed to: they make blacks worse off by encouraging them to become dependent on government checks and favors. Poor blacks have children out of wedlock and don't work, so that they can get money from liberal programs. This view is energetically codified in Charles Murray's 1984 book Losing Ground, which presents a series of charts and graphs showing poor blacks becoming poorer -- and crime rising, and efforts to find work declining, and educational achievement dropping -- during precisely the time of the War on Poverty. The liberal answer is built around unemployment. At the time that the ghettos began getting worse, unemployment was very low, but blacks, by then heavily concentrated in the northern industrial cities, were dependent on the one part of the economy that was falling apart -- inner-city unskilled heavy labor. In Chicago the harbinger of the change was the closing in the late fifties of the stockyards, which for half a century were the sine qua non of lower-class grunt work and a heavy employer of blacks. Chicago lost 200,000 jobs in the seventies; small shut-down redbrick factories that used to make products like boxes and ball bearings dot the city, especially the West Side. The lack of jobs, the argument continues, caused young men in the ghetto to adopt a drifting, inconstant life; to turn to crime; to engage in exaggeratedly macho behavior -- acting tough, not studying, bullying women for money -- as a way to get the sense of male strength that their fathers had derived from working and supporting families. As Murray believes that one simple step, ending all welfare programs, would heal the ghettos, the unemployment school believes that another simple step, jobs, would heal them. "When there's a demand for the participation of the black underclass in the labor force, most of the so-called problems people talk about will evaporate in a generation," says John McKnight. an urban-research professor at Northwestern University. Among poverty experts the debate is raging, and though it is quite abstruse (it is based almost entirely on analysis of government statistics), the stakes are large. The country seems to be gearing up for another run at the problems of the ghettos; President Reagan has commissioned a major study of welfare reform, which is a polite way of asking what we should do about the black underclass. A new generation of government solutions will probably follow -- solutions that will be aimed at either dismantling the welfare state or expanding it, depending on who wins the debate, which in turn will depend on who can explain most convincingly why the ghettos have done so badly. With the discussions of the issue so exclusively reliant on statistics, I thought that studying a ghetto at first hand would yield something new. Here, in brief, is what I found: The black underclass did not just spring into being over the past twenty years. Every aspect of the underclass culture in the ghettos is directly traceable to roots in the South -- and not the South of slavery but the South of a generation ago. In fact, there seems to be a strong correlation between underclass status in the North and a family background in the nascent underclass of the sharecropper South. What happened to make the underclass grow so much in the seventies can best be understood by thinking less about welfare or unemployment than about demographics -- specifically, two mass migrations of black Americans. The first was from the rural South to the urban North, and numbered in the millions during the forties, fifties, and sixties, before ending in the early 1970s. This migration brought the black class system to the North virtually intact, though the underclass became more pronounced in the cities. The second migration began in the late sixties -- a migration out of the ghettos by members of the black working and middle classes, who had been freed from housing discrimination by the civil-rights movement. Until then the strong leaders and institutions of the ghettos had promoted an ethic of assimilation (if not into white society, at least into a black middle class) for the underclass, which worked up to a point. Suddenly most of the leaders and institutions (except criminal ones) left, and the preaching of assimilation by both blacks and whites stopped. What followed was a kind of free fall into what sociologists call social disorganization. The result of the exodus from the ghettos is dramatic, both in the statistics and on the streets -- the ghettos have lost considerable population, and they look not just bad today but also empty. As the population of the ghettos has dropped, the indices of disorganization there (crime, illegitimate births) have risen. The underclass flourished when in the seventies it was completely disengaged from the rest of society -- when there were no brakes on it. This argument is anthropological, not economic; it emphasizes the power over people's behavior that culture, as opposed to economic incentives, can have. Ascribing a society's conditions in part to the culture that prevails there seems benign when the society under discussion is England or California. But as a way of thinking about black ghettos it has become unpopular. Twenty years ago ghettos were often said to have a self-generating, destructive culture of poverty (the term has an impeccable source, the anthropologist Oscar Lewis). But then the left equated cultural discussions of the ghetto with accusing poor blacks of being in a bad situation that was of their own making; thus they would deserve no special help or sympathy from society. The left succeeded in limiting the terms of debate to purely economic ones, and today the right also discusses the ghetto in terms of economic "incentives to fail," provided by the welfare system. Both sides call apparently irrational behavior like bearing children out of wedlock and dropping out of school simply a rational response to conditions created by society. In the ghettos, though, it appears that the distinctive culture is now the greatest barrier to progress by the black underclass, rather than either unemployment or welfare. Today the bedrock of the economic arguments of both left and right is eroding: the value of welfare benefits is declining, and the northern industrial cities are not rapidly losing jobs anymore. Still the ghettos get worse, and the power of culture seems to be the reason why. The new immigrants of the eighties (Koreans, Vietnamese, West Indians) have in many cases settled in the ghettos, and so should have experienced all of the reverse incentives, but they have quickly become successful, because they maintain a separate culture. The negative power of the ghetto culture all but guarantees that any attempt to solve the problems of the underclass in the ghettos won't work -- the culture is too strong by now. Any solution that does work, whatever it does about welfare and unemployment, will also have to get people physically away from the ghettos. II. The Old Neighborhood One day last spring Sharon Hicks-Bartlett, a woman in her early thirties who is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Chicago, took me to see the place where she had grown up. The trip was an encapsulation of what has happened in the ghettos since the sixties. We drove from the center of Chicago toward the West Side ghetto -- out West Madison, the riot corridor of the mid-sixties, and then Ogden, a broad boulevard that angles off to the southwest. The neighborhood where Hicks-Bartlett grew up is called North Lawndale, and today in Chicago its name carries the same freight that "South Bronx" does nationally. The Chicago Tribune published a long series last year that vividly presented North Lawndale as the embodiment of a black underclass community. The 1980 census showed North Lawndale to be 97 percent black and 20 percent unemployed, with 40 percent of its families living in poverty and 61 percent headed by women. Hicks-Bartlett, who hadn't been there for fifteen years, was shocked by the way Ogden Avenue looked: Douglas Park, in her memory a sylvan playground, was empty, denuded of shrubbery, with stern curfew signs posted; Lawndale Oldsmobile, once the biggest commercial establishment in the neighborhood, was shut down and abandoned; of the three neighborhood movie theaters a few blocks away, two were torn down and one had become a church. Everything that remained, even the churches, was protected by heavy steel mesh, and odd symbols (a six-pointed star, crossed pitchforks) were spray-painted everywhere. North Lawndale is a perfect example of the three-step process that has made the ghettos so bad today: the migration north, which included the underclass; then the migration from the ghettos of everyone but the underclass; and finally the victory of disorganization. In 1950, when it was a white neighborhood, North Lawndale had 100,000 residents. In 1960, when it had become all black and the first migration was at its peak, it had 125,000. In 1980 the population was down to 62,000; more than half its population moved away in the seventies. The Hicks family was almost completely gone. Sharon Hicks-Bartlett now lives in Park Forest, the integrated suburb south of Chicago described in The Organisation Man. As the population has gone down in North Lawndale, the indices of ghetto culture -- poverty, crime, low educational achievement, low work effort, the percentage of female-headed families -- have all increased in almost perfect reverse correlation. In real life the bifurcation is never as neat as in the numbers. As we drove, Hicks Bartlett told me about her own family. Her parents had lived for two years in the now infamous Cabrini-Green housing project (a black island near the affluent white near North Side) before moving to North Lawndale. Her brother Walter had once played neighborhood basketball with Mark Aguirre, the Dallas Mavericks star, but had dropped the sport and his dreams of success. A year before, he had been badly and arbitrarily beaten by a gang that set upon him while he was stopped at a red light. Another relative had married a man freshly arrived in Chicago from the southern underclass, and she ended up on welfare for years. This relative, along with her six children and eight grandchildren (all born out of wedlock), had recently moved out of Cabrini-Green to the South Side, and had become estranged from the rest of the family. She and her family had not come to Sharon's wedding. It had gotten back to Hicks-Bardett that her South Side relatives were making cracks about its being no surprise that she was marrying a white man, because she had been living for years as if she wanted to he white -- studying hard, moving to the suburbs. For her part, Hicks-Bartlett had decided since becoming a mother not to visit her relatives on the South Side anymore, because children there were regularly called, as she primly put it, "M. F. " It was an environment she didn't want her daughter exposed to. We turned onto the street where Hicks-Bartlett had lived, South Drake, and pulled up to the house, number 1643. A small gasp from Hicks-Bartlett: only about two thirds of the block appeared to be occupied. The rest of the houses were either abandoned or demolished. Sixteen forty-three was a classic Chicago two-flat; 1642, across the street, a three-flat, was one-third empty; 1625, 1649, 1652, and 1655 were missing entirely. The little parch of lawn in front of Hicks-Bartlett's old house had gone bare, and the paint had faded. "That house used to shine," she said. Down on the corner the grocery store was barred as if against an armored division. The cross street, Sixteenth, had become the hustling, dealing, and hanging-out part of the neighborhood, with the action centering on a windowless "game room," which was several months later exposed by the Tribune as a drug exchange and then closed down by the city. Hicks-Bartlett's grandparents bought 1643 South Drake in 1950, for $13,600. They were the third black family on their side of the block. The whites who sold them the house stayed on in the other flat as tenants for a year. When Sharon's family took over one of the flats, in 1962, the neighborhood was all black and still respectable-postmen and janitors and their families lived there. Then, as it became more and more crowded with migrants, some kind of critical mass of teenagers was achieved (in 1950 twenty percent of North Lawndale's population was between five and nineteen, and in 1970 forty percent), and the gangs began to take over. One day in the early sixties Hicks-Bartlett's uncle Marvin was standing in front of the house wearing some new clothes that, unbeknownst to him, were the colors of rivals of the gang that ran the neighborhood. A group of young men walked up to him in broad daylight and pulled a knife. His mother, watching from the porch, screamed, and they ran off, having inflicted only a flesh wound. Soon afterward Hicks-Bartlett's parents moved to an all-middle-class neighborhood on the far South Side, and over the next few years, as racial barriers fell in the housing and job markets, and the West Side began to have terrifying summertime rioting, most of their friends and neighbors left too. Today Hicks-Bartlett's grandmother, Bertha Williams, who used to own the house at 1643 South Drake with her husband, lives in Niles, Michigan, a small, pretty town between Chicago and Detroit. Her house is out in the country a little ways, on a lane off the highway. On the day that I went to see her she was sitting in an easy chair in her living room, which was decorated with portraits of her grandchildren dressed in either cap and gown or military uniform. There was a clock with pictures of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy on its face. Mrs. Williams told me that all four of her grandparents had been slaves on plantations in southern Louisiana and had walked to New Orleans after Emancipation. She was born in New Orleans in 1914, and her family moved to Chicago in 1922, during the first great migration of blacks from the South to the North. In those days there was no government poverty line. The family lived in much greater material want than there is in the ghetto today -- it was fourteen years before they were able to afford an apartment with central heating. She married Thomas Williams, a laborer from the South with no formal education. The couple had nine children and was occasionally on relief. But for Mrs. Williams there was no hint of the despair that these experiences are supposed to engender; her values remained staunchly anchored in work, marriage, and economic progress. The story ended, as many immigrant sagas do, with her and her husband both getting safe, low-level jobs on government payrolls and staying in them for decades, until retirement. As we were talking, a sixteen-year-old relative of Mrs. Williams's came home from school. After Mrs. Williams had finished recounting her life, he told me about his, and the sense of how much the culture of the ghetto had changed was dramatic. (This young man doesn't want his real name used, because he fears reprisals from Chicago gangs. I'll call him John.) John had recently moved to Niles from Chicago, because his work in school was suffering under the pressure of the gangs. He had been living in Jeffrey Manor, a borderline middle-class area on the far South Side. Although he was born into an economic position that it had taken Mrs. Williams thirty years in Chicago to achieve, he had had the disadvantage of not having a father, because his parents had split up before he was born. During John's first year at Chicago Vocational High School -- a vast institution that has historically had a burly, can-do reputation (Dick Butkus, the middle linebacker, went there) -- members of the biggest gang in Chicago, the Disciples, befriended him and urged him to join, saying that gang life was a lot of fun. At their request he gave them the key to his locker, but he didn't join, and the urging began to turn nasty. Gang members would chase him on the way home from school and beat him in such a way that the injuries would not be noticeable. (Sports stars and some outstanding students are usually immune from this treatment.) Although the Disciples controlled Jeffrey Manor, a rival gang called the Black Cobra Stones had established a beachhead there and began recruiting John too. During his sophomore year John joined a gang called the Valley Rocks, affiliated with the El Rukns, and began staying out of school a lot, in part because of the heavy demands of gang membership. He sketched out the big picture of Chicago gang life for me. There are two large families of gangs in Chicago: the People, whose symbol is a five-pointed star, and the Folks, whose symbol is a six-pointed star. These were what I had seen spray-painted all over North Lawndale. The head of the People, he said, is a man named Jeff Fort, and the head of the Folks is a man named Larry Hoover -- both in their thirties, having emerged as leaders during the period when the adult leadership was rapidly leaving the ghetto, both now in prison. The gangs under the People include the Vice Lords, the Black Cobra Stones, and the El Rukns, as well as the Valley Rocks; under the Folks are the Disciples, the Spanish Cobras, and the Latin Jivers. The People control most of the West Side (John said it was the Vice Lords who had attacked his uncle Marvin twenty years earlier), while the Folks control most of the South Side. The People wear the bills of their caps pointed left, and cross their arms with the right arm on top, while the Folks point their caps to the right and cross their arms with the left on top. Every now and then in Chicago a teenager will be gunned down on the street for the crime of having his arms crossed right-on-top in an area that is Folks turf. John began as a foot soldier, an entry-level position in which the main duties are stealing, selling marijuana, and fighting with other gangs. He said that he did not rob people or sell drugs, but that "as far as fighting, I used to get into it a lot." In the hierarchy, one is promoted from foot soldier to lieutenant or gunslinger, then to captain, then to chief. A chief commands about fifty foot soldiers. John's best friend, Rocky (not his real name), was a chief in Jeffrey Manor. Another friend, named Cortez, was a Valley Rocks chief at Chicago Vocational; recently the school administration had negotiated a Camp David-style peace treaty between him and the chief of a rival gang. Both Rocky and Cortez were two or three layers of bureaucracy removed from Hoover, the chief of the parent gang. One day, John said, he and Rocky were on a city bus and six or seven Disciples got on and attacked him, because of a quarrel over a girl. Rocky, who takes care to dress neatly, opened his briefcase, took out a gun, and started shooting. "They left," John said. "In fact, so did the driver and everybody else on the bus." Another time, when he was standing outside a little store called the Candy Shop, right across the street from Chicago Vocational, a Disciple shot at him. He ducked into an alley and got away. Finally, when a friend of John's named Tystick was shot in the chest and back, he decided he had to get away. (In the time since we talked, both Tystick and Cortez have been killed.) Even Rocky, he said, was talking about joining the Marines as a way out -- "'Cause once you get in a gang, you can't get out. They want you to do something really horrendous before you get out, like kill somebody." The gangs are the real authorities, the most powerful force, in the worst parts of the Chicago ghetto, and as such they are another example of what happened to the ghettos when they became exclusively lower-class in the late sixties and early seventies. But John's story illustrates another point, too. The underclass culture, after a decade on its own to gather force, was strong enough to begin expanding its sphere of influence outside the bad ghettos to neighborhoods a step or two up the ladder, like Jeffrey Manor. There are several signs of the expansion of the culture, including rising illegitimacy and crime rates, but the gang recruitment is the most obvious; it forces kids, through physical terror, to give up school and work, and become professional criminals. III. Back Home One of the largest international migrations in American history created the urban black ghettos. Almost all black southerners who came north arrived essentially penniless, and almost all settled initially in all-black, all-poor areas. Most of the migrants made it. The prevailing theories about why a substantial minority spectacularly did not make it cannot account for the relative success of most blacks who moved north. Answering the question of how and why some of the migrants got out of the ghettos and some did not, I thought, might be one of the keys to the mystery of the underclass. So I got to know a group of friends in Chicago who had come from one town in Mississippi -- Canton, population 12,000, fifteen miles north of Jackson. Most of the group had graduated from the town's segregated black high school in 1955 (though some hadn't finished) and had moved north shortly thereafter. Their version of the origins of the underclass was new to me. Between 1910 and 1920 the first wave of 572,000 blacks moved from the South to the North, almost always to cities. In the twenties 913,000 left; in the thirties 473,000; in the forties 1.7 million, 18 percent of the black population of the South; in the fifties 1.5 million; in the sixties 1.4 million. The number of blacks who moved north, about 6.5 million, is greater than the number of Italians or Irish or Jews or Poles who moved to this country during their great migrations. Chicago had 44,000 blacks in 1910. The labor shortages created by the First World War and the immigration restrictions of the twenties, along with the depression in southern agriculture due to the boll weevil, brought the first big wave. There were 109,000 blacks in Chicago in 1920 (of whom 50,000 had come just in eighteen months during the world war) and 234,000 in 1930. Big Chicago employers, like the packinghouses, sent agents to the South to recruit black laborers; agents of the southern farmers came north to try, unsuccessfully, to persuade them to come home. (A headline from the Memphis Commercial Appeal read "SOUTH IS BETTER FOR NEGRO, SAY MISSISSIPPIANS/COLORED PEOPLE FOUND PROSPEROUS AND HAPPY.") Chicago's preeminent black newspaper, the Defender, was widely circulated in the South and was a constant cheerleader for migration (which it called "The Flight Out of Egypt"), assuring blacks that Chicago had better jobs and more rights, even if it was colder. As one article put it, in response to a warning made to blacks by southern whites, "To die from the bite of frost is far more glorious than at the hands of a mob." During the Depression, because the word went out that jobs were hard to come by in Chicago, the migration slowed considerably; the black population grew by just 44,000 in the thirties. But the Second World War created a labor boom that set off a quarter century of sustained movement of southern blacks to Chicago. There were 492,000 black Chicagoans in 1950 (a 77 percent increase in one decade), 813,000 in 1960 (a further 65 percent increase), and 1.1 million in 1970. Because the migrants followed the existing train, bus, and highway routes, black Chicago was populated from the states along Highway 51 and the Illinois Central tracks -- Arkansas, Louisiana, and, most important, Mississippi. In the fifties alone Mississippi lost more than a quarter of its black population. It's no wonder that the Delta blues became the Chicago blues in the late forties and early fifties; blacks still sometimes call the South Side "North Mississippi." Although the migration ended in the early seventies -- again, because jobs had become scarce in Chicago -- there is still considerable movement back and forth, and the South is very much in the minds of black Chicagoans. Most of the very successful local blacks who are held up as role models are southern-born: Jesse Jackson (South Carolina), John H. Johnson, the owner of Ebony (Arkansas), Oprah Winfrey, the TV host who appeared in The Color Purple (Mississippi), Walter Payton, of the Chicago Bears (Mississippi), the Reverend Johnnie Colemon, the pastor of the biggest church in Chicago (Mississippi). It is a custom among many black Chicagoans to go to the South at least twice a year, at Christmas and in July -- over the Fourth of July weekend the hotels in Jackson are booked solid with black family and high school reunions. Black Mississippians go to Chicago too. Recently, at a student assembly of a black Catholic grade school in Canton, I asked the children how many had been to Chicago, and nearly every hand went up. Often they went for long visits with relatives in the summers. (How many want to live in Chicago when they grow up? I asked. No hands. Why not? An immediate chorus: "Too dangerous.") At one of Chicago's worst high schools -- Orr, on the West Side -- I asked a class how many were born in Chicago. Almost everyone was. But almost everyone's mother had been born in Mississippi. Many of the mothers of a class of eighth graders at Beethoven School, an elementary school whose students all live in the Robert Taylor Homes, were from Mississippi. Today there are 1.2 million black Chicagoans (the increase of 100,000 since 1970 is the result not of migration but of births exceeding deaths). A reasonable estimate of the number who are in the underclass would be somewhere between 200,000, roughly the total population of all the low-income housing projects, including men who aren't official residents, and 420,000, the number of black Chicagoans on welfare. Even the highest estimate is only a third of the current black population, which does not include the approximately 230,000 blacks in Chicago suburbs. The experience in Chicago of the majority of blacks who migrated, then, has not been one of defeat and failure. A much more typical story would be like that of Mildred Nichols, one of the group I met from Canton. I met Nichols at a restaurant called Soul Queen, on the far South Side, near a neighborhood called Pill Hill (black doctors live there). We talked in the bar, where the waitress who served our drinks was wearing a gold paper crown. Nichols graduated from Cameron Street High School, in Canton, on May 28, 1955, and arrived in Chicago on June 5. She moved in with an aunt and uncle she had never met and began looking for a job. She took a test to be an order-filler at the big Montgomery Ward catalogue store but was told that she had failed. She was convinced that she had really passed and was being tricked, so she told the woman who had administered the test that she would be back in the afternoon to retake it, and back again every day until she passed. She got the job, stayed there until after the Christmas rush, and then began working as a waitress on the midnight-to-8 A.M. shift at a restaurant in the heart of the ghetto. The themes that Mildred Nichols emphasized to me during our conversation were pride and success. Today she works in the office at a nursing home called Bethune Plaza, also in the heart of the ghetto. She has been with the same company for ten years. Of her five siblings, all younger, a sister has a master's degree and teaches school, one brother is an attorney in Jackson, married to a nurse, the next brother is a businessman in Canton, the next is a graduate of Northwestern Law School, and the youngest sister is a pharmacist. I asked her what their secret was. She said, "It might have been that we had a two-parent family. My father had a fourth-grade education, and my mother had eighth grade -- we were middle-class. We lived in town. My father taught us that you have to be a strong person to survive. Willpower! Nothing, nobody is better than you. Nobody. Welfare? No! Jesus! No! Because I simply could not be bought. Never! Never! Catholic schools for my kids. No truancy. I told them, 'Give me two years of college. You must!' My son has no police record. My daughter didn't have her first child till she was twenty-five. I never did domestic work, darling. Never! I've always had office jobs. " What about the people who had failed in Chicago? What was the difference? "They had low self-esteem. They didn't have the drive you need in Chicago. You see, this city is Jaws -- One, Two, Three, and Four. They didn't want to!" In Mildred Nichols's view, the people on welfare were primarily children of sharecroppers from what southern blacks call "the rural" -- the farming areas outside of town. "The persons who aren't able to deal with this society," she said, "are the ones from the deep-rural part of the South that had to drop out of school to pick cotton. They had no one to teach them. They still live that life-style of the rural South up here. The other day I went in the grocery store across the street from Robert Taylor Homes, and I went completely ape. I went stone bats! They had those Little Debbie gingerbread cookies in two-packs. They had the little packets of Argo starch -- people in the country like to chew it, especially pregnant women, and in the country they stay pregnant." What was striking about this answer was how foreign Nichols found the commonly held idea that a poor black underclass has emerged over the past twenty years, starting with the flowering of the Great Society programs. The main characteristics of the underclass -- poverty crime, poor education, dependency, and teenage out-of-wedlock childbearing -- were nothing new to her. She and her friends, and white people in Canton, too, had seen them all their lives. Canton was established in 1834, as the trading center and seat of government for Madison County, Mississippi. It seems warranted to say that slavery was the town's central and defining institution. From the beginning blacks outnumbered whites by three to one (the ratio did not drop significantly until after the Second World War), and the whites' economic status and comfort and safety depended on keeping the blacks subjugated. To what degree slavery hurt the black family is the subject of a lengthy and complicated debate among historians. In Madison County what evidence there is supports the view that slavery had a destructive effect on family coherence. A small oral-history project carried out in the 1930s includes reminiscences by two former slaves, both of whom, when they were children, saw their parents separated through sale. One of them said that there were no marriage ceremonies for slaves in Madison County, and that pairings were often arranged by the masters. Through the mid-twentieth century Madison County was settled into a system of segregation and sharecropping. I found no real disagreement between blacks and whites about the particulars: All but a handful of blacks, fewer than a hundred, were denied the right to vote, by means of a poll tax and a "literacy test," in which the registrar of voters would pick at random a section of the Mississippi constitution and ask black would-be voters to read it aloud and then deliver an interpretation. There were separate black and white schools in Canton, and in the countryside blacks went to one-room schoolhouses with no new books, heat, electricity, or running water. In April and May, and then again in September and October, many blacks, especially in the country, had to leave school to work in the cotton fields, so even a decent junior high school education was a great rarity among rural blacks. Blacks were expected to address whites as "sir" and "mister," as in "Yassuh, Mister Charlie." Whites addressed blacks by their first names. This was serious business: one black woman in Canton told me that when she was a girl, in the forties, a man who was home visiting from the North was shot dead on a sidewalk by a policeman for acting, the woman said, "uppity." Another told me about a black grocery-store clerk in the fifties who was seen flirting with a white female customer; he was castrated by white vigilantes and put on a train out of town. In the country some blacks owned small farms but most were employees or, more likely, tenants. They would live on big farms in unpainted two- and three-room wooden shacks, with no plumbing or heat. Families were big, in part because the more hands there were to go out in the fields the more money the family would make. The sharecropper kept anywhere from half to four-fifths of the proceeds from his cash crops, which he received from the landowner in a settling-up at the end of the year. The sharecropper could never come out ahead. He had to borrow from the white man he worked for all year long, in order to feed his family and buy his implements, feed, and fertilizer. In bad years he would still be behind after the settling-up, sometimes so far behind that he would have to leave in a hurry; in good years, after all the deductions had been made, he would somehow be only a few dollars ahead. The result, fully intended, was an ethic of dependency. Sharecroppers had no money and practically no education, and they counted on the landowner to provide for them -- which he did, meagerly. On Saturday afternoon the sharecroppers would travel into town on foot or by mule, on Sunday they'd go to church, and on Monday they'd be back in the fields. In town there was a more complicated black society consisting of a light-skinned elite of doctors, lawyers, and educators, a dark-skinned elite of ministers and businessmen, a skilled-artisan class (carpenters, truck drivers, railroad porters), a janitor-and-servant class, and a lower class, in which life was meager and chaotic, and bourgeois proprieties such as the marriage ceremony were little observed. This last group lived on the west side of the Illinois Central railroad tracks, often in tiny shacks. Quite often there would be no father in the home; he might be off working, or looking for work somewhere else, or he might have just drifted away. The black women in Canton could always work in white people's homes, but there was very little reliable, steady, decent-paying work for men. A small subculture developed based on hustling -- prostitution, bootlegging, drugs, petty thievery. This was not regarded with great hostility by other blacks or by whites, who had a casual attitude about crime in the black part of town and sometimes came to the black neighborhoods for illicit pleasures. A white man from an old Canton family showed me a novel he had found in his attic, written by a relative, apparently in the twenties or thirties; one of the characters is a sharp-dressing, sweet-talking young black man who lives off women. The idea that black Cantonians began moving to Chicago in droves during the Second World War in order to escape segregation is appealing but not really true. They moved to escape poverty and in most cases the dignity of making a decent living was far more gratifying at first than the dignity of having equal rights under the law. There is nothing comparable in American life today to the amount of financial gain southern blacks could realize instantly by moving less than a thousand miles away, to another part of the same country, and getting the kind of unskilled jobs -- laborer, sales clerk -- that were unavailable to them in Canton. David Brown, raised in the country outside Canton, left in 1951. He was working in gas station for $25 a week. His first week's paycheck at his job in a laundry in Chicago, working around the clock, was $200 -- at the time a large sum by any standards. His brother Eddie, who moved in 1961, was supporting a pregnant wife and six children on $86 a week take-home pay from a factory job in Canton. His first check in Chicago, at a small factory, was $178. Oresa Brown, no relation but also raised in the country outside Canton, was making cabinets in Memphis for $80 a week. He learned that a white co-worker was making $100 for the same job, drove up to Chicago on Labor Day in 1962, and found a cabinet-making job the next day that paid $300 a week. "The only recruiting from Chicago then was by family members who'd bring back a paycheck and show it around," says Robert Chinn, who stayed in Canton but estimates that 80 percent of his class (1958) at Cameron Street High School left. It is part of white folklore that many blacks moved to Chicago just to get on welfare, which pays more than double in Illinois what it does in Mississippi, but this is impossible to substantiate. Though everybody knows that welfare can be a trap, its tidal pull toward dependency is much stronger on people already on the rolls than on those who are working and considering their options. The extremely active Mississippi-Chicago grapevine concerns itself mostly with jobs. The gross migration figures correspond closely to the availability of jobs for blacks: the first surge during the First World War, the big dip during the Depression, and a halt in the early seventies, when the unskilled blue-collar job market was opening up in the South and closing down in the North. In the severities, when welfare payments in Illinois were more than quadruple those in Mississippi, there was little migration at all. The handful of studies of black migrants portrays them as a typical immigrant group in that they are, on average, more motivated and better educated than the people who stayed home. They also do better, after a few years, than blacks born in the North. Whites born in the North do better than whites who moved there from the South, so it is curious that northern-born blacks should do worse; the difference must be a testament to the destructive effects of the northern ghettos on people raised there. The one group of black migrants who in 1970, at the end of the great migration, had an above-average rate of welfare dependency consisted of those who had been in the North for less than five years and who were in female-headed families. At the time of the migration to the North the sharecroppers in Mississippi were moving off the land, because they were being replaced in the fields by machines. Heavy tractors and cotton-picking machines became common equipment on farms in the fifties; by 1960 what was once the work of fifty field hands could be done by only three or four. Typically, the sharecroppers were simply dismissed; white farmers in Canton who had dozens of people living on their property have no idea where they are today. Deserted sharecropper cabins are a common sight in the country outside Canton, spectral presences falling down at the edges of open fields, some of them in rows, some half a mile from the nearest building or road. A few are still occupied, mostly by old people who sometimes still dress in homespun and use wood fires to warm themselves and cook. The sharecroppers moved to town -- to Canton or Jackson or even Chicago -- since there was no place else for them to go. It is impossible to produce statistics to prove it, but the common opinion among both blacks and whites is that many of them ended up on welfare, living in public housing (Canton has housing projects now). The similarities between sharecropping and welfare are eerie: dependency on "the man"; more money for having more children; little value placed on education; no home ownership; an informal attitude toward marriage and childbearing. I met several Cantonians who had done well and whose parents had been sharecroppers, but in every case they came from a two-parent family and at some time during their childhood their parents had scraped together enough money to buy a farm of their own and stop sharecropping. In contrast, everybody I met in the Robert Taylor Homes who was a migrant from the South had been in a sharecropper family right up to the move to Chicago. Others in the Chicago underclass have their roots in the southern small-town black lower class. For example, one member of the Cameron Street High School class of 1955 who ended up in the underclass (she lives in North Lawndale, right across the street from the house where Sharon Hicks-Bartlett grew up) came from a one-parent family in Canton and dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade. She doesn't keep in touch with her classmates, didn't come to their thirtieth reunion last summer, and, when they call her, either doesn't call back or says she's too busy to talk. (It is typical for migrants to Chicago who have not been successful to become more and more isolated from family, friends, and people with jobs.) Mildred Nichols told me, "Most people on welfare here, they were on welfare there, in a sense, because they were sharecroppers. There they were working hard for nothing, now they're not working for nothing. They have been mentally programmed that Mister Charlie's going to take care of them." A white farmer I spent some time with in Canton agreed. He said, "We all quit the sharecroppers and went to tractors. The government takes care of all these niggers now. They live in the housing project in town. They get stamps and welfare. They're living better than they ever lived in their lives." This man didn't want me to use his name, because he had trouble in the sixties with the federal government over shorting his sharecroppers at settling-up time and doesn't want more trouble now. On that condition he agreed to show me around the countryside just outside of Canton so that I could see what the old system was like. He is in his eighties, has a tenth-grade education, and drives an aged blue pickup truck. I met him outside a place called Jimbo's Cafe and got in the cab, and we took off. After a while we turned off the highway and bumped down a dirt road to some land he owned. He pointed out where the sharecroppers' houses had been -- for example, to a pile of rotted wood. "Here's a house. Just a nigger house. Four rooms, eight, nine people. No running water., A well, an outside toilet, no heat. I had twelve, thirteen, fourteen families out here. They got half the crop, and I charged 'em ten cents on the dollar for their money. See, I'd pay 'em on the basis of -- I'd go and ask him how many kids he had out in the field. Because they had to hoe. I'd let them have about twenty up to sixty dollars a month. But they'd always want more money! They were a different class of people! You'd pay 'em Friday night and it'd be gone Monday morning." He went on: "I had these niggers working on shares. At the end of the year they didn't have much left. They'd never go to school. He'd tell me how many he'd have in the field and that's how many I'd look for. They'd go out in the field when they were ten or twelve, as soon as they were big enough to pull a hoe. If they wouldn't put the kids in the field, why, then we'd whup 'em. Then they wouldn't give us any more trouble. We'd tie 'em up and whup 'em with a plow line." The farmer had one sharecropper left. He was sixty-six years old and suffering from lung disease. We drove out to another pasture to pick him up, because the farmer wanted me to talk to him. On the way out, he spoke of him fondly: "I done worked that nigger! I worked him from goddamn sunup to sunset and then at four in the morning I'd get him up again. See, the white folk controlled everything then. They'd see that they didn't have no money for no school or teachers or nothing." The sharecropper, white-haired, gnarled, and leather-skinned, addressed the farmer and me as "sir." He said he had been born in the country, one of seventeen children. He hadn't had any school at all. He had eight children of his own, two in Canton and six in Champaign, Illinois. His wife had gone to St. Louis. It is not just a way of living that grew in the northern ghettos from seeds planted in the South but also a way of thinking. In the Chicago ghetto poor blacks use the verb stay instead of live, as in "I stay at Robert Taylor Homes." Besides implying an inconstant life, this comes from a perfectly sensible sharecroppers' locution: "I stay at the Smiths' place." Another northern ghetto term that comes from southern town life is "getting over," which is less translatable but means, roughly, doing what is necessary to survive and, if possible, succeed. While it does not cover violence, it would apply to hustling as well as to more legitimate pursuits. It comes from the idea of crossing the Jordan River to get to the Promised Land. Though the ghetto expression equivalent is not as sweet, getting over carries a positive connotation. At the thirtieth reunion of the Cameron Street High School class of 1955, everyone greeted with pure affection a man who had been raised by a widowed mother and dropped out of school before high school. Today he is a pimp in Jackson. At the reunion he was wearing leather cowboy boots, a three-piece silk suit with a shirt open at the neck, and a great deal of jewelry (gold chains with bejeweled pendants, enormous gold rings sprinkled with diamonds), and he provided an expensive sound system and a disc jockey. The Civil Rights movement in Canton got underway in 1963, when three organizers from the New Orleans office of the Congress of Racial Equality came to town and started a voter-registration drive, the highlight of which was a peaceful demonstration of more than a hundred blacks who showed up at the county courthouse on a Saturday to try to register. In 1964 northern college students descended on Canton for Freedom Summer. Blacks began boycotting the businesses that line the courthouse square, which wouldn't hire black clerks. Blacks played in the white park and swam in the white pool. A black woman from Canton, Annie Devine, went to the Democratic Convention, in Atlantic City, as part of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Delegation. In 1966 Martin Luther King, Jr., came to town on his march through Mississippi with James Meredith; he spoke in the gymnasium of the Holy Child Jesus parochial school. White vigilantes burned down two black country churches where civil-rights meetings had been held, and planted a bomb in another black church, in town, which was discovered before it exploded. Twice at the movement's unofficial headquarters, a place in the black neighborhood known as Freedom House, shots were exchanged between people inside and whites in passing cars. Today in Canton, there are black elected officials, black firemen, and black policemen -- but only a few. Blacks hold a majority in the number of registered voters, though not a large one. The school system is officially integrated but almost all black; integration of the high schools was achieved by shutting down the white one and changing the name of the black school to Canton Public High School. Most whites go to a private school called Canton Academy, founded in 1965. All the streets in the black part of Canton are paved now, and just west of town is a new all black neighborhood of suburban-style brick bungalows. But there are still houses in the black part of town particularly in one city block of rental properties, that have two rooms, and outhouses instead of indoor toilets, and cracks you can see through in their clapboard walls. IV. Leaving the Ghetto The migration to the North transferred the black societies of Canton and a hundred towns like it, with all their complexities and problems, to Chicago. After that several factors combined to turn the small underclass that came up from the South into the large and separate culture that it is today. In the city -- away from the family, religious, and social structure of small-town life back home -- all the migrants experienced a loosening of the constraints on their behavior (a process that should be familiar to readers not only of black writers like Richard Wright and Malcolm X but also of Balzac and Dreiser). This was made more pronounced because blacks who moved to Chicago from the South were funneled into a ghetto that was strikingly crowded, walled off from the rest of society, and different from what its residents had known before. The greater prosperity of blacks in the North, however, meant that there was a strong leadership in the ghettos working to counteract the forces of social entropy. But then the working black population made its rapid exodus from the ghettos, leaving the underclass disastrously cut off from the rest of the world. Nearly all the blacks who moved went through some kind of change in their way of life from what they had known in the South -- even among the determinedly ambitious members of the Cameron Street High School class of 1955 who moved north, there were several cases of childbirth out of wedlock. Sometimes these led to marriage and sometimes they didn't; usually there was a complicated shuttling of parents and children back and forth from Canton, which offered more of a support system. But in none of these cases was having children out of wedlock related to either of its supposed prime causes, welfare or unemployment. The people involved never went on welfare, and they were not unemployed. It had to do instead with moving to the big city. Chicago's black elite observed the formalities of marriage, but many new arrivals did not, even if they came from a family back home in which illegitimacy had never occurred. "When my parents put me in the car to Chicago," says one Cantonian, "they were upset because they thought it was Sin City. And it was Sin City. It still is. I didn't get pregnant on purpose. I don't think anybody ever got pregnant on purpose. But now I'm glad, because my kids are grown up and I'm still young." The black illegitimacy rate has risen dramatically over the past twenty years, but the problem did not begin with the Great Society programs. Every first-hand observer of black society in this country has mentioned it in connection with both rural and ghetto life. E. Franklin Frazier, in his classic work The Negro Family in the United States (1939), attributed most black out-of-wedlock childbirths to southern migrants just arrived in the North. Sometimes, he said, migrants became pregnant because of "the absence of family traditions and community controls," and sometimes it was simply "the persistence in the urban environment of folkways" -- namely, the lack of a legal marriage ceremony -- "that were relatively harmless in the rural community." He cited a variety of statistics for urban black illegitimacy at the time, ranging as high as 30 percent of births, and he said that in the years just after Emancipation, when there was a more literal loosening of traditional bonds, the rate was probably higher. W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Philadelphia Negro (1899), mentioned far-above-average rates of illegitimacy in the poor black neighborhoods of Philadelphia in the late 1890s. Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944), using 1936 figures, cited a rate of 16 percent for all nonwhites, rising to 21 percent in the big cities of the South, where presumably the recent migrants from the country would then have been most concentrated and freest of social strictures. The nonwhite illegitimacy rate was eight times the white rate nationally, and more than sixteen times the rate among white first- and second-generation immigrants. Drake and Cayton, in Black Metropolis, said that the black lower class in Chicago in the forties "not only tolerates illegitimacy, but actually seems almost indifferent toward it." Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 report, "The Negro Family," put the 1963 rate at 23.6 percent nationally and as high as 49 percent in some parts of Harlem. I suspect that all these rates are skewed to the low side, because of the practice, common through the mid-sixties, of black women in the rural South and northern ghettos saying they were married when they were really just living with someone. I mention these figures in order to dispute the notion that either welfare or unemployment is the overarching reason for the explosion in the black illegitimacy rate. Drake and Cayton said that in Chicago during the depression almost half the black families were on welfare (admittedly, a less generous system than today's) or were supported by government work programs, but the national black illegitimacy rate hardly rose. During the Reagan years, as the welfare rolls have shrunk, the illegitimacy rate has gone up. Today, in fact, many more black women have children out of wedlock than go on welfare. As for black unemployment, whereas there is some statistical match between it and illegitimacy, the match is far from perfect. The Moynihan report, after factoring out blacks in the South, concluded that black unemployment rates had been double the white rates continuously since the early thirties, but the illegitimacy rate had not taken off until the 1950s. The point is not to deny that either welfare or unemployment is a factor in rising illegitimacy -- both plainly are. But there is a third factor: the rapid urbanization of most blacks, followed by the isolation of the black lower class in the cities. High illegitimacy has always been much more closely identified with blacks than with all poor people or all unemployed people or all immigrants. It is a peculiarity of black culture, and within than of the black lower class, and within that, of isolation; Frazier found the loosest attitude toward marriage in turpentine camps, where lower-class black migrant workers lived in rows of cabins deep in the southern forests. If, from the late sixties through the early eighties, the black urban lower class became significantly more isolated than it ever had been before, wouldn't that help explain what happened? In Chicago and other northern cities there was a direct link between the magnitude of the black migration from the South and the degree of residential segregation imposed by whites. In 1898 only 11 percent of black Chicagoans lived in neighborhoods more than 75 percent black. In 1900 thirty-three of Chicago's thirty five wards were at least 0.5 percent black. As soon as the flow of migrants became significant, though, white hostility toward blacks surged, growing partly from pure prejudice, partly from fear of the importation of the social ills created by Jim Crow, partly from intense competition in the labor market. It is a pattern of long standing, reminiscent even of Canton in the mid-nineteenth century: a primal white antipathy toward the black masses, which always leads to the creation of iron restrictions on where blacks can live and work. In the summer of 1919, just as Chicago was absorbing the first big concentrated wave of southern migrants, white gangs started a riot at a Lake Michigan beach when a black swimmer ventured into a de facto white stretch of water. Violence, by both blacks and whites, spread through much of the South Side, lasted a week, and left thirty-eight people dead and 537 injured. In the late forties, with southern blacks again pouring into the city and racial tensions rising (there were riots when black veterans tried to move into temporary housing in white neighborhoods), Chicago, like many cities, began building many public-housing projects. At the time, integrated public housing was one of the great liberal causes, and it was also a constant, long-standing political demand of blacks. In the liberal dream, housing projects would be filled by a racially integrated, clean living, well-educated working class. Ward politicians with white constituents to keep happy were adamantly opposed to integration, though, and in 1949 the state legislature passed a law that boxed out the liberals by requiring that the Chicago City Council approve all public-housing sites. This virtually ensured that projects would be segregated. In 1950 Robert Taylor, the black chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority, resigned in frustration at his inability to get the sites he wanted past the council. In 1953 there were protracted riots when one black family moved into a white housing project. In 1954 Elizabeth Wood, a Jane Addams-style reformer who was the CHA's director and longtime guiding spirit, and a great believer in integration, was forced out. From 1957 to 1968 the CHA built 15,591 housing units- almost all in high-rise buildings, almost all with black tenants, almost all in existing black ghettos. The private housing market was, by unwritten law, strictly segregated in most places. By 1970 Chicago was the most residentially segregated city in America. But because the segregation was by race, the ghetto was fairly well integrated by class. It was a community, with leaders and institutions -- poor, with unusual difficulties, but a community nonetheless. From the First World War through the mid-sixties the black leadership regarded the high crime and low marriage rates of the black lower class as problems it had to solve, sometimes with a sigh (the white folks on the Gold Coast weren't held responsible for the rough-and-tumble of poor-white Chicago). It would, in sociologists' language, help the lower class to acculturate. For years the Chicago Defender published what a city commission called "instructions on dress and conduct [that] had great influence in smoothing down improprieties of manner which were likely to provoke criticism and intolerance in the city." The big South Side churches all had memberships across the black economic spectrum, in contrast to the segregation by class that prevailed in white Protestant churches. The Urban League was founded with the purpose of teaching lower-class southern migrants the ways of city life. Drake and Cayton, commenting on a slogan made popular by the Defender, wrote, "When upperclass and middle-class people speak of 'advancing The Race,' what they really mean is creating conditions under which lower-class traits will eventually disappear and something approaching the middle class) way of life will prevail in Bronzeville." The black middle class knew that the black lower class would constantly be held up as the reason that all blacks had to be kept in certain neighborhoods and certain jobs; this was a grievous wrong, which had the side effect of giving the black middle class a strong vested interest in the uplift of the black lower class. Then the grievous wrong was righted. In January of 1966 Martin Luther King, Jr., moved into an apartment in North Lawndale and announced that he and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference would be focusing their energies on Chicago for a while. He called his Chicago project the "End Slums Campaign" and said it would be aimed at improving the conditions in overcrowded, poorly maintained inner-city black neighborhoods. During his time in Chicago his campaign underwent a crucial shift, though it may not have seemed that way then. John A. McDermott, at the time a young Catholic activist working in the civil-rights movement and later the publisher of a distinguished Chicago newsletter on race relations, says, "King would try one issue after another to see what would get a response. 'End Slums' did not generate a tremendous amount of popular support. It was not a simple good-versus evil issue. This was not Montgomery, Alabama. There were no overt racist laws or institutions. The problem of racism was more subtle. It was not clear it was a conspiracy. Some of the slumlords were black. "Then a group tried the issue of open housing. We held demonstrations in white neighborhoods that wouldn't let blacks in. The white reaction was one of panic and outrage. It was on the nightly news, and suddenly people saw that a) the laws were not being enforced, and b) white people were full of hate and anger. People suddenly woke up and literally poured into the movement." With the last great wave of southern migrants just arrived, North Lawndale was frustrated, tense, and swollen -- in 1960 its population was 25 percent higher than it had been ten years earlier, when North Lawndale was a white neighborhood, and nearly half the population was under twenty years old, compared with less than 30 percent in 1950. Gangs were starting to become a severe problem. In July of 1966 there was rioting on the West Side that required 1,500 National Guardsmen to restore order. The working, married, better-established part of the population desperately wanted to get out of the neighborhood. On August 5 King led an open housing demonstration in Marquette Park, then an all-white neighborhood, on the Southwest Side. The protection of more than 1,200 policemen did not stop his being hit in the head by a rock thrown by whites from the neighborhood. A knife thrown at him hit someone else. The demonstrators had to be evacuated in buses. On August 26 Mavor Richard Daley, under intense pressure from his white precinct captains to stop the demonstrations, finally sat down with King at the negotiating table. The result was a "summit agreement" devoted almost exclusively to the fair housing issue rather than to ending slums. What happened in Chicago is an especially dramatic version of what happened all over the country: just as the number of new, poor, migrant blacks in the cities reached its all-time peak, the country decided to mount a real attack on segregation in housing and employment, and otherwise to help those blacks capable of moving closer to the mainstream of American society to do so. The result is evident in the census data, as we have already seen: there has been another major migration of blacks over the past twenty years, out of the ghettos. Even more pronounced than the social and economic deterioration of the ghettos between 1970 and 1980 is their depopulation. North Lawndale was already losing population in the late sixties, and in the seventies more than half its black population moved away. The tenement house where King lived is a vacant lot now. In the same decade the area around Forty-seventh and South Parkway, the old vibrant heart of the South Side ghetto, lost 38 percent of its black population. The Robert Taylor Homes, whose extremely low rents and solid construction for years attracted long waiting lists, are now 20 percent vacant. All the ghetto schools, the overcrowding of which in the sixties was supposed to be a major cause of low achievement levels, have lost enrollment. This isn't happening just in Chicago. The South Bronx lost 37 percent of its population between 1970 and 1980. More than 100,000 black Chicagoans moved to the suburbs in the seventies; 224,000 blacks moved from Washington, D.C., to its suburbs, 124,000 from Atlanta to its suburbs. These are unusually high numbers for neighborhood population loss, and the comparable numbers today would be even higher. There's no mystery to why so many people left the ghettos. They wanted to feel safe on the streets, to send their children to better schools, and to live in more pleasant surroundings; in particular, riots drove many people away. Probably everyone who could leave did. Many businesses and churches (except for tiny "storefront" churches, which often are unaffiliated with any organized religion) left with them. What was unusual about the migration of the black working population out of the ghettos, compared with that of other immigrant groups, is that it was for many years delayed and then suddenly made possible by race-specific government policies. That's why it happened so fast. One reason that the numbers for unemployment and poverty and female-headed families in the ghettos have gone up so much is that nearly everyone who was employed and married moved away (also, the fertility rate of black married women has dropped substantially, which is a sign of assimilation into the middle class). Very quickly, around 1970, the ghettos went from being exclusively black to being exclusively black lower-class, and there was no countervailing force to the venerable, but always carefully contained, disorganized side of the ghetto culture. No wonder it flourished in the seventies. The "losing ground" phenomenon, in which black ghettos paradoxically became worse during the time of the War on Poverty, can be explained partly by the abrupt disappearance of all traces of bourgeois life in the ghettos and the complete social breakdown that resulted. Almost all of the Cantonians, when they arrived in Chicago in the late fifties and early sixties, lived in the traditional South Side ghetto, and then all but the very least fortunate left. Of the many success stories, everybody's favorite is that of the Sims family, who prove that it is possible to move unscarred from a peasant background in rural Mississippi to the upper middle class in one generation. Back home they started out as sharecroppers -- two parents and thirteen children working a fourteen-acre plot that was five miles from the nearest paved road. They did have a leg up: Juanita Sims had an unusually high degree of education, which is to say some high school; her father owned a thirty-one-acre plot of land, to which they eventually moved the family so that they could farm for themselves; and J. B. Sims was able to get a job laying pipeline for the city. Wendell Sims, the third daughter, graduated from Cameron Street High School in 1955 and immediately moved to Chicago, following the path of her sister Theresa, who had come up a few years earlier. On her first day in Chicago, Wendell found a job as an assembler at the Bancroft Clock factory, for less than a dollar an hour. After nine months she was laid off, and found a job in the mailroom at Montgomery Ward. She celebrated her thirtieth anniversary at Ward this spring -- she's now a supervisor in the data-control division. In 1961 she married Jack McIntosh, who had moved to Chicago just after his high school graduation in Rayville, Louisiana. He has been with AT&T in Skokie, Illinois, since 1960. Today they live in a beautiful white brick house in an integrated suburb called Matteson, and attend an integrated Lutheran church. They both have college diplomas from Chicago State, earned through years at night school. J. B. Sims, Jr., the oldest son in the family (the initials don't stand for anything), came to Chicago in 1957, at the age of eighteen, right after the fall harvest was finished. He arrived with $13.50 in his pocket. After a week he got a job in a laundry for ninety cents an hour, and soon after that he got a second job at another laundry. After several years of working two full-time jobs, he got a day job in a grocery store, underwent ministerial training at night, and then started a Baptist church in his basement -- Greater Tabernacle Missionary Baptist. The church flourished and moved to larger quarters. In 1975 he moved to a spacious brick house on the South Side. In 1978 he started a bus company that takes Chicago children to school, under contract from the board of education. In 1980 he felt secure enough to quit his job at the grocery store. Today he has forty-eight buses and owns a service station and a fourteen-unit apartment building. The church is just about to reopen in a new half million-dollar building. He is married, for the second time, and has one daughter and one stepdaughter. As the Sims family, and the rest of the Cantonians who made it, did better over the years, they fanned out steadily in the city, to the new working-class and lower middleclass black areas that were opening up in the seventies, mostly in formerly white areas to the south and west of the South Side ghetto. All of them now see the ghetto culture as unhealthy, something to keep one's kids away from. Mildred Nichols's sister, Doris Smith, teaches at Du Sable High School, most of whose students live in the Robert Taylor Homes, but sends her children to Kenwood, a much better public high school near the University of Chicago. Mildred Nichols's two children are both married and both working, and have two children each. Andre lives in Canton, Jacqueline in Chicago. Over the years, Nichols has helped two of her siblings move to Chicago to go to graduate school at Northwestern. This year, on Valentine's Day, she married William Burton, a security officer, and together they bought a neat brick bungalow on the far South Side. As most of the Cantonians who have moved to Chicago have thrived, so has the ghetto culture that grew in Chicago. Now the ghetto is coming home to Mississippi. In Canton today, at the black playground and down the street from the civil-rights movement's Freedom House, there are walls with spray-painted symbols of the Chicago gangs: the six-pointed star of the Disciples, the crossed pitchforks of the Vice Lords. On the evening of April 25, 1985, a young man named Percy Walker, nicknamed Squinky, got into a fight in a Canton bar with a man named Larry Ross. Later that night Ross stopped his car outside Walker's girlfriend's house, pulled out a shotgun, and fired at Walker point-blank. Walker died a few hours later in a hospital in Jackson. For his funeral a group of friends and relatives came down from Chicago in a phalanx of Cadillacs, which were decorated with Vice Lords symbols. Walker's life is a capsule version of the growth and spread of the underclass. His mother never married his father, who was from a sharecropper family, didn't have much school, and moved from Canton to Chicago shortly after Walker was born. (There the father was a hustler and was killed in a fight in a bar.) Walker was sent to Chicago to live with relatives when he was a teenager; he dropped out of school and was arrested for rape. On visits back to Canton he began dating a girl who lived down the street from his mother, and in 1983 they had a daughter. Before she was three she learned when people said "Vice Lords" to her to answer with the proper hand signal.

# 2 J U L Y  1 9 8 6

The first installment of this two-part article described why black urban ghettos are poorer and more isolated today than they have ever been. The question remaining is how to reverse the effects of what has become a self-sustaining culture

by Nicholas Lemann

I. European Norms Today's black ghettos were created by two migrations: first the migration of rural and small-town black southerners to cities, usually in the North; then, for the past twenty years, the migration of the cities' black middle and working classes to middle-class neighborhoods. The problems that now seem overwhelming in the ghettos -- out-of-wedlock childbearing, unemployment, crime, poor educational achievement -- have existed in the ghettos for more than half a century. When the ghettos were multi-class societies, their leadership tried to keep the problems in check by preaching a classic immigrant ethic of assimilation -- if not into white society, at least into a society with middle-class values. In the late sixties, however, when the leadership left the ghettos, it stopped preaching to those who stayed behind. In fact, far from preaching to the ghettos, the official voices of society, both black and white, began defending the ghetto culture, arguing that it was merely a rational response to social and economic conditions and would change only when those conditions were changed by whites, and that to condemn it was to impose white values on a distinctive, valid, resilient culture

Earlier this year Joyce Ladner, a professor of social work at Howard University, wrote in the National Urban League's annual report on the state of black America that no problem is "more threatening to future generations" of blacks than teen-age pregnancy. In 1971, though, in her book tomorrow's tomorrow, Ladner was writing, "Conceivably, there will be no 'illegitimate' children and 'promiscuous' women in ten years if there are enough middle-class white women who decide that they are going to disavow the societal canons regarding childbirth and premarital sexual behavior." The next year the National Urban League published a book called The Strengths of Black Families; in the foreword Andrew Billingsley, a sociologist who is now at the University of Maryland, wrote, "'The operation of General Motors, the State Department, and the Ford Foundation have more to do with the structure and functioning of Black family life than the attitudes, desires, and personal proclivities of all the young men and young women who have been the subject of sociological analyses." In his 1968 book Black Families in White America Billingsley complained about "the deeply held view that patterns of responses generated, practiced, or sanctioned in the white community are normal. and that any deviations from those norms which might be relevant or common in the black community are abnormal deviant, and to be highly disvalued." As a solution he suggested that "all the major institutions of society should abandon the single standard of excellence based on white European cultural norms."

I saw this coincidence of the defense of ghetto culture and the migration out of the ghettos most plainly during time I recently spent in the ghetto in Chicago, when I met Al Sims, who was running a small branch office of the Urban League out of a former parochial school in the middle of the Cabrini-Green housing project, Chicago's most notorious. Sims was born in New Orleans and moved north with his family at the age of six. His father was a farm laborer in Louisiana; he came to Chicago in 1956, worked in construction, and after a year sent for his wife and nine children and installed them in an apartment at Cabrini-Green. "I remember very vividly getting off the train at Twelfth and Michigan and being picked up and taken here," Sims said. "It seemed like Shangri-la." Cabrini-Green was then all low-rise, and it housed many Second World War veterans and their families, both black and white. Today it is mostly high-rise and all black. The population of the high-rises is as much as 75 percent poor; 65 percent are under twenty-one and 80 percent are in female-headed families. The project has virtually no church attendance or legitimate business activity. The high school that serves it has a dropout rate of 89 percent. Four major gangs and close to a hundred subfactions are active there. All nine Sims children made it out of Cabrini-Green and into the middle class. "We were poor as dirt," Sims said. "But at a certain hour I had to be home. Mr. Sims wouldn't have it any other way. I credit my father. And the six or seven guys I hung out with, my buddies, they had smaller families, but they turned into zero. Tapped out. And they didn't have fathers." These days, he said, stories like his don't often happen. Why not? He said, "I believe America can make what it wants to work, work. White America would not allow white people to live like this. No way. The concept of genocide is very real, it gains meaning, when you think about black people in this town." He was fatalistic about ghetto culture -- it was not something within the power of the residents of Cabrini-Green to control, because the outside forces that had created it were so powerful. Couldn't teenagers stop having children, and finish school, and get jobs, and get out? "It's just not going to happen that way. We can't turn back the clock and have Ozzie and Harriet." Sims had mentioned that he had a young daughter; I asked him what he would do if, as an unmarried teenager, she got pregnant. He looked at me with utter shock; we were no longer talking abstract social forces. "I would die. That would kill me," he said. Of the millions of black Americans who have risen from poverty to the middle class since the mid-sixties, virtually all have done so by embracing bourgeois values and leaving the ghetto. So it is worth exploring why black and white leaders have fiercely resisted telling these secrets to the people left behind. One reason is pure compassion -- a feeling that anyone who understood where the problems of the ghetto had come from and how deep-seated they were could not expect lower-class blacks simply to set them aside. Another, maybe more important, reason is that for almost two centuries whites, especially in the South, have argued that blacks make up a separate caste, because they are immoral, irresponsible, and of inferior intelligence. In the black view, what whites have done, to justify keeping all blacks down, is to point to problems that the whites themselves have created, through centuries of slavery, segregation, and enforced poverty and ignorance. So a tradition has grown up of not discussing within the hearing of whites issues like out-of-wedlock childbirth, poor educational achievement, and crime. This prohibition was especially strong in the late sixties, when the old racial barriers were finally being broken down, and it is still strong. Over and over I heard from middle class blacks the belief that public discussions of ghetto problems would affect the way they were treated, or at least thought of, by whites. Glenn Loury, a professor at Harvard who is a prominent member of a new generation of conservative black intellectuals, last year in an article in The Public Interest offered a more cynical explanation for the resistance of established blacks to soul-searching about the underclass: "More fortunate blacks benefit, through the political system, from the conditions under which the poorest blacks must live.... The growing black 'underclass' has become a constant reminder to many Americans of a historical debt owed to the black community. Were it not for the continued presence of the worst-off of all Americans, blacks' ability to sustain public support for affirmative action, minority business set-asides, and the like would be vastly reduced.... The evidence suggests that, for many of the most hotly contested public policies advocated by black spokesmen, not much of the benefit "trickles down" to the truly poor." Loury told me recently that after he wrote an earlier article criticizing the black leadership, Benjamin Hooks, the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, called him. "He said, 'Look, I'm a civil-rights leader. Sure, I know these problems exist, but my job is to hold white people's feet to the fire. In these years of Ronald Reagan and turning the clock back, how can I go around criticizing little black kids?' Then I had a private meeting with a group of black leaders: Carl Holman, of the National Urban Coalition; John Jacob, of the National Urban League; Walter Fauntroy [the District of Columbia's representative in Congress]; Joseph Lowery, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Coretta King. I made a one-hour presentation. I said the real problem is the problem of the black poor, and civil-rights activism is largely irrelevant, though not" -- he winked -- "if you want to own a TV station. I said, 'You people have exhausted a lot of moral capital with your whining.' The reaction was quite amazing. I got no real rebuttal. They said, 'We appreciate your contribution. We're proud of you. A young black scholar like you being on the faculty at Harvard is what we were fighting for in the sixties. But you have to be careful of when and how you say these things."' It is not only the black leadership that has a strong interest in avoiding the subject of the underclass. The black equivalent of Middle America does too. The primary link between the black middle class and the underclass has been one of blood kinship. The underclass was not a neatly defined national issue -- it was Aunt Mary, whose husband had left her and who had gone on welfare and moved to the projects. That is changing now, as members of the underclass lose social and family contact with their better-off friends and relatives. But there is still a link during the workday. An unusual proportion of blacks work for government -- 27 percent as against 16 percent of whites. Many of these jobs are in the ghetto: schoolteacher, postal worker, social worker, bus driver, police officer. The middle-class black neighborhoods in Chicago are full of people who commute to the ghetto to work. The daily contact leads many middle-class blacks to see the ghetto as a collection of individual hard-luck stories rather than as a problem that would be solved through some sweeping new government policy. Because the bifurcation of black society is still young, for many middle-class blacks the subject of the underclass strikes close to home. Glenn Loury grew up in a middle-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. He fathered two children out of wedlock, and says that his family made economic progress in large part because his relatives ran speakeasies and sold marijuana. He says that he grew up being encouraged to keep a string of girlfriends and to refer to all women as "bitches." Although he does not bristle at condemnations of illegitimacy, crime, and the pimp ethos among ghetto blacks, many people with his life story would. II. Blaming the Victim The public debate about the underclass has for many years been dominated by two views of poor blacks, one considering them collectively (blacks are the victims of racial, economic, and welfare policies not in their power to change) and the other considering them individually (blacks can make their lives better through personal effort). In black politics and intellectual life the debate was symbolized for most of the twentieth century by a struggle between the followers of W. E. B. Du Bois and those of Booker T. Washington. Du Bois, whose family had been free for generations, belonged to the small group of blacks whose suffering consisted primarily of caste barriers, rather than ignorance, hunger, poverty, or social disorganization. He and the organization with which he was long identified, the NAACP, championed the cause of complete legal equality; although he was well aware of the social problems of the black lower class, they weren't at the center of his political agenda. Washington, born a slave on a plantation, was willing to put civil rights off for another day and concentrate on a program of self-help for the great mass of poor blacks, which was intended to turn them into a segregated but economically self-sufficient working and artisan class. Over the years, the Du Bois position gained ground. The idea of self-help for blacks was all but forgotten in the legal struggle over civil rights; the idea even became unrespectable.

In the late fifties and early sixties, when the migration from the South swelled the urban ghettos until they were impossible to ignore, liberals began to discover the problems of the black lower class. At the time, the conservative and centrist position in the northern cities, articulated by Mayor Richard Daley, of Chicago, among others, was that blacks were just like any other immigrant group and would gradually move into the mainstream of city life. (Daley's own group, the Irish, had a large and troubled underclass in the nineteenth century.) Liberal intellectuals began to focus on how blacks differed from other immigrant groups -- the much greater degree of oppression they had suffered, as this country's only non-voluntary immigrants and only slaves, and the deep psychological scars left by the black experience. The implication was that society had to do something special for blacks, though it hadn't for other immigrants; the ghettos would not heal themselves. Three books that give the tenor of liberal thought at the time are Slavery, by Stanley Elkins (1959), Crisis in Black and White, by Charles Silberman (1964), and Dark Ghetto, by Kenneth B. Clark (1965). Elkins, a white historian, compared slaves to the inmates of Nazi concentration camps, as a way of showing the harshness of the system and the psychological devastation that was its legacy. Silberman, a white journalist, was prophetic about the coming explosion in the ghettos and about the underclass. Clark, a black social scientist, was still more prescient; he predicted in terms that must have seemed extreme that crime, unemployment, and a splintered family life would be characteristics of the ghetto for a long time. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous 1965 report to President Johnson on the Negro family was very much of this school of thought; its characterization of ghetto life as a "tangle of pathology" -- which some black scholars, including Andrew Billingsley, attacked as racist -- came directly from Clark. Its subtitle was, significantly, "The Case for National Action." Moynihan saw it as the intellectual underpinning for new government programs. Blacks did not like being characterized as devastated and pathological, especially by whites; it was insulting. Also, it seemed a short step from the liberal position that the ghettos were horrible and needed help to the conservative position that the ghettos were horrible and should be given up on. And so emerged an odd, hybrid ideology that had the force of absolute consensus: Yes, the ghettos were devastated, but from without; there was nothing wrong with the people in them. The final nail in the coffin of Booker T. Washingtonism was a brilliant three-word phrase: "blaming the victim." Its inventor, William Ryan, a psychology professor at Boston College, wrote an early, influential attack on the Moynihan report, and in 1970 published a book titled Blaming the Victim. Explaining the phrase, he wrote, "This is how the distressed and disinherited are redefined in order to make it possible for us to look at society's problems and to attribute their causation to the individuals affected." In other words, ills that are society's fault are attributed to the people suffering from them, whose fault they manifestly are not. The growth of the idea that the ghetto was a valid "community" came just at the time when it was ceasing to be a community, because its leaders and institutions were moving away. Nonetheless the idea was responsible for the federal Community Action Program, a part of the War on Poverty, in which ghetto residents, instead of intrusive social workers, were supposed to be the agents of their own progress. In Chicago this led to the awarding of federal communication funds to "community leaders" like the Blackstone Rangers (forerunner gang of the El Rukns) and the Vice Lords. Silberman, who caught some of the early community action enthusiasm, ended his book with a glowing chapter on the regeneration of the Woodlawn neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago through the organizing efforts of Saul Alinsky's The Woodlawn Organization. At the time, TWO was widely publicized as a model of effective community development. Today TWO is still respected in Chicago, but it certainly did not revive Woodlawn. The census figures available when Silberman was writing showed that Woodlawn had 81,000 residents. In 1970 it had 54,000, and in 1980 it had 36,000 -- 38 percent of its black residents moved away in ten years. The way up was not through community development. It was through getting out. The view that conditions in the ghetto would change only when white society decided to change them seems contradictory to the creed of community development, but it really isn't. The connection is this: if there is not a self-defeating culture in the ghettos, and if the ghettos nonetheless have problems, then white society must be to blame -- who else could it be? The changes by white society that would heal the ghettos were usually described as "deep," "sweeping," and "structural." Ryan wrote that "the solution lies in action to change the balance of power." The trouble with this argument is that it is defeatism clothed in hope. This country so far has been unideological and uninclined to engage in deep, structural change except by accident and in order to meet pressing needs. To single out poor blacks as the one group in our society that will really suffer unless deep, structural changes are made, or unless an entirely different value system takes hold, is to consign them to suffering for the foreseeable future. I got to know a group of people in Chicago who had grown up in the town of Canton, Mississippi, migrated north in the fifties, and mostly done well there. They regularly talked to me about the importance of making something of oneself, with a fervor that would cause Norman Vincent Peale to blush. But they also felt entirely comfortable with the view of black problems in America as collective ones: they were comfortable with the opinions voiced by the black leadership, and they reflected the collective view in the way they talked about their own lives. The view of blacks as masters of their own fate and the view of blacks as objects of the will of whites exist simultaneously. I often heard conversations salted with references to "Mister Charlie" and "Miss Ann" or just "the Man," symbols of the all-powerful white. That all whites can be consolidated into one symbolic personage suggests a feeling among blacks that whites work in perfect concert while blacks work individually and often quarrelsomely -- exactly the opposite of a view common among whites. The persistence of black anti-Semitism long after the Jewish merchants have left the ghettos -- replaced in Chicago by Arabs, ironically -- further testifies to the enduring appeal of the idea of an all-powerful white villain, in this case not "Mister Charlie" but "Goldberg." The sneaking admiration that some middle-class blacks who would never dream of joining the Nation of Islam feel for Louis Farrakhan is stated in terms of his standing up to whites, being unintimidated by them. He's what St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, in their 1945 book about the Chicago ghetto, Black Metropolis, called a "Race Man": "Negroes tend to admire an aggressive Race Man even when his motives are suspect. They will applaud him, because, in the face of the white world, he remains 'proud of his race and always tries to uphold it whether it is good or bad, right or wrong.'" III. The Ghetto Today Black Americans at every level -- even those in the very bosom of the bourgeoisie, who work for white companies and live in affluent and sometimes integrated neighborhoods -- still feel themselves to be apart from white America. It is impossible to imagine any other ethnic group able to support a slick commercial magazine like Ebony wanting to -- the other groups are too much a part of the mainstream culture. (Ebony, by the way, constantly preaches both self-help and collective action for blacks.) As apart as all of black life is, ghetto life is a thousand times more so, with a different language, economy, educational system, and social ethic. White society, though physically less than a mile away from the Chicago ghetto, is so distant that in the ghetto I rarely heard an, hint of the intense race consciousness that pervades the rest of black society. Everything that has happened to lower-class blacks over the decades, every new twist, from segregation to the migration north to the civil-rights movement, seems to have separated them from society even more -- separated them from whites, from the South, from middle-class black life, and finally even from uplifting preachment. They are immigrants who not only have not assimilated in the new land but may even have become more insular there. The ghetto today has schools and hospitals, heat and running water; those of its residents who use the system of welfare and food stamps have enough to eat. But the institutions that are supposed to ameliorate ghetto life (schools, public housing, the police, welfare agencies) give off a feeling not of hope or progress but of containment -- of not letting things get out of hand to the point where life outside the ghetto would be directly affected. Orr High School, on the west side of Chicago, was designed by Mies Van der Rohe. It is a good example of his institutional style, with exposed steel girders, brick walls, and broad expanses of glass windows. Inside it is divided into several "houses" with their own libraries, cafeterias, and other facilities, in order to foster a feeling of educational intimacy. "The design of this building is not the design needed in a neighborhood like this," says the principal, Kenneth Van Spankeren, and it has been altered. Most of the glass has been replaced with an unbreakable plastic material called Lexan, which has turned cloudy. The parking lot is surrounded by a fifteen-foot wire-mesh fence and kept locked during the school day. An unarmed security guard is posted at the entrance, one of five on duty in the school every day and an armed policeman patrols the corridors. The interior stairwells are kept locked and are monitored by teachers. A few years ago the Chicago Tribune published an article about Van Spankeren, presenting him as an unusually successful inner-city high school principal. What this means is that he has been able to maintain order. The students have to wear plastic ID cards at school, can't wear gang symbols (the Vice Lords control the area), can't leave the building, and can't move freely inside the building. "We have a very close relationship with the Eleventh District police," Van Spankeren told me. "The area outside is under constant surveillance." On the morning when we met, preparations were under way for a school dance, to be held at three in the afternoon and under tight security in order to avoid violence. The next morning, during first period, Van Spankeren's voice came over the loudspeaker, congratulating the students on the fact that the dance was held without incident. "We appreciate that, and we expect it," he said. "Students, make sure you have your ID cards, and they're on. Teachers, check and take attendance. Thank you, and have a nice day." There are 2,000 students at Orr, 800 of them freshmen; as at all the ghetto schools nowadays, the faculty has to worry less about how to handle overcrowded classrooms than about whether there will be enough students to maintain the ratio needed to avoid layoffs. Eighty percent of the students are black, 20 percent are Hispanic, and most are from poor, single-parent homes supported by welfare. The great majority are well below their grade level in achievement. In most recent years about 200 have graduated. The PTA has twenty members. Because it is virtually impossible for a Chicago teacher to be fired or even transferred, Van Spankeren has little leeway in picking his faculty. Most of the teachers I met at Orr were dedicated, but they had almost given up on teaching the students -- instead, their emphasis was on maintaining a cheery atmosphere during class. I dropped in on Cindy Slevko's remedial mathematics class for freshmen. The students were working at their desks. "Right now they're working on homework they didn't do," she told me. "We're supposed to have eighteen in the class, and we have twelve today, which isn't too bad. In the sophomore demote class we'll have eighteen and only six will show up." She had me look at some of the students' answers to problems: 4/8 = 1/4; 15 14/10 = 15 4/10; 21/12 = 19/12. Sleyko said, "Now, look at problem twenty-nine here. They'd all get that wrong." The problem was 7 minus 4 2/3. In Pat Michalski's earth-science class the students were watching the movie Forbidden Planet as a lesson in astronomy and also as a reward for finishing a difficult part of the course; it would take up three full class periods. Michalski, sitting in a small office off the classroom, said, "You have to regulate everything with these kids. Rules all the time. A lot are used to being hit. Their homes are constant noise." A deep voice came out of the room where the students were watching the movie: "Where Miss Michalski at?" She walked in, consulted with one of the boys, and came back to her office. "He wanted to know if that was the monster. That kid's a senior!" She pointed to a hand-lettered sign she'd hung over her desk, which said:

DID YOU Ever Know That Your My HERO! And Everything I'd Like TO Be:

"That's by a junior! I know it looks like third grade," Michalski said. She motioned me into a corner of the classroom and whispered, "You wouldn't believe which of these kids are parents." I counted while she pointed: seven. In Joe Valenziano's American-history class, the students were finishing their homework from the night before, which consisted of answering a series of questions by copying the answers out of textbooks. For handing this in the students would get five bonus points on their next exam. Valenziano said, "This is the old rote method of learning. You read it, you write it down. It seems to be working for me. I've been here sixteen years, and I've tried everything. " A student put a paper on his desk. Some of the answers were copied correctly and others were not: Who was George III? "He was a spy." Explain the role of blacks in the Revolutionary War: "forming of America." Valenziano glanced at the paper and wrote a 5 on it. "If it looks good and they answer the questions, they get five points," he said. "I want them to copy! I call it sharing. See, these kids can't do homework like you and me. I learned this from working in an inner-city school. Sure, when I first came here I had all these pie-in-the-sky ideas. People might say it's cheating, but we all copy as adults. We all plagiarize as adults. There's nothing wrong with it." Du Sable High School, which has 1,900 students, has even worse demographics than Orr -- its parents are 100 percent poor -- but the atmosphere is warmer, perhaps because it has a long history as one of the linchpin institutions in what was once a real community. The assistant principal, Luke Helm, who has been at Du Sable for twenty-five years, told me one morning, "Historically, this has been the stepping stone to the black middle class -- from poverty to the middle class. But we're no longer working with the same population. The people we're getting now, sixty-eight percent come from Robert Taylor Homes [a massive housing project across the street]. We have a fifty-one percent dropout rate. The reasons are legion; pregnancy is the biggest. [Du Sable became famous last year because its clinic began to dispense birth control to students. ] There's one gang here, the Disciples. We do not have gang problems in the building. We've been very lucky. We're pretty much in control of the building. They understand turf. This turf is ours. We know who the gang leaders are, we do talk to them, and we do have an understanding." The overwhelming majority of Du Sable parents live within two blocks of the school, but the PTA, called Parents United to Save Du Sable, has just fifteen members, and it exists only because of the efforts of an energetic mother named Brenda Holmes. In 1982 it didn't have any members. Only 60 percent of the parents come in to sign their children's report cards, which is a three-times-a-year duty. Of the 800 boys at Du Sable, as many as a hundred are former inmates of a home for juvenile criminals. One of the classes I went to at Du Sable was an introductory English class made up of fourteen- and fifteen-year-old students who read at between the third- and the sixth grade level. The teacher, Anthony Eirich, a big, energetic man, was teaching Julius Caesar. "'And he will, after his sour fashion, tell you what great events have taken place today.' See, he's saying, 'What's happening?' Remember when we had a fighter named Cassius?" No response. "Cassius Clay." He went around the class asking the kids to read lines out loud. Some did pretty well, but a couple obviously couldn't read at all. One wouldn't even open his book when Eirich asked him to read. "Why doesn't he like Cassius -- because he's what?" Eirich said. One kid called out, "Fat!" "No, he's lean and hungry. Cassius is smart. What wouldn't the slavemasters let the slaves do?" No response. "Go to school! Can Vrdolyak roll over Mayor Washington?" A chorus of nos. "Why not? Because he's smart! Look at Ebony. Forty years of progress. People speaking their mind. Cassius thinks too much. Julius Caesar was a famous man. See, Doctor King, they'll be writing plays about him one day." In another English class, while the students were busy copying the definitions of words out of the dictionary, the teacher, Gwendolyn Jones, showed me some homework she had graded A. The students were asked to summarize famous short stories. One was Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place": "He old man is a deaf man who is tiring to make a living." "He don't cares about anything but his self.... When the clock hits 3 o'clock he get very mad." "He tries to kill his self by hanging his self by rope." On Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart": "He don't want to kill the old man.... When he do kill him cuts off the head." Jones showed me the TAP (Test of Aptitude and Proficiency) reading scores for the class, which rank them by national percentile. Most were in the 30s; the lowest was 4; but one was 92. I asked to meet that last student, and Jones called her over. Her name was Lorese Lewis. She didn't live in the Robert Taylor Homes: she lived in a two-parent home, and her father worked. It was my strong impression that the gap between her and the other kids was one of sociological conditions much more than of basic intelligence. The usual feeder school for Du Sable is the Beethoven School, which is in the middle of the Robert Taylor Homes. As with other schools in the area, its enrollment is dropping rapidly, down from 1,400 in 1977 to 900 today. Its budget, linked to enrollment, is dropping too, but it is still generous. Sue Fowlkes, the principal. told me, "My total budget in '85 was three-point-two million. In the early eighties additional funds were channeled into the school as a result of a desegregation decree. It was felt that otherwise our low achievement levels would never go up. But they have not gone up with more money. The scores fluctuate up and down. Up through third grade we're running about six to eight months below median. In the middle grades it's a year, a year and a half. In seventh and eighth it's at least a year and a half or maybe more. The discipline problems start in the primary grades. Every now and then a kid will start acting out in the first grade -- hitting the next child. I start to see gang signs with around fourth or fifth graders. In second and third grade you may see them calling out the gang names on the playground. Pregnancy generally starts in the eighth grade. This year" -- and it was only three months into the school year when we talked -- "I'm running five."

Of the students who manage to get as far as high school graduation perhaps half will go on to college, but most of these will attend a nearly all black two-year community college in Chicago. The transfer rates from the community colleges to four-year colleges is very low -- at the one with the lowest rate, Malcolm X College, on the West Side, only 5.8 percent of the students go on to a four-year college. Most of these students attend Chicago State, which is 80 percent black and has a de facto open admissions policy. By far the most common choice of career for its graduates is education (Chicago State began as a teacher's college), and most of those who become teachers go to work in the Chicago public schools. Housing projects in the ghettos, like schools, have such a terrible reputation today that it is easy to forget that as recently as a generation ago there was an aura of hope around them. Even the Robert Taylor Homes, which were meant to contain the tide of black migrants from the South inside the traditional ghetto (an interstate highway runs along their western border and the old ghetto abuts the other three sides), were opened in a spirit of some optimism. For years reformers had believed in Le Corbusier's precept that high-rise housing built in "superblocks" with no through streets would be the ideal form of urban life. More prosaically, the Robert Taylor Homes replaced an old black lower-class strip of shanties and junkyards with clean, modern, well-constructed buildings that had reliable plumbing and heating. Even today the apartments there, though spartan, are pretty nice. Almost from the start, however, the Robert Taylor Homes had problems. The reason is that they were designed and filled according to what now looks like a perfect recipe for sociological disaster: large-family apartments in high-rises, and little or no screening for residents. In its early days public housing was in practice barred to the underclass. When the first black public-housing project in Chicago, the low-rise Ida B. Wells Homes, on the South Side, opened in 1941, single-parent families were excluded as a matter of policy. Beyond that, as Devereux Bowly, Jr., wrote in The Poorhouse, a history of subsidized housing in Chicago, "An elaborate investigation was made of Chicago Housing Authority applicants that included: 1) an office interview by a social worker, 2) employment verification, 3) check for a police record, 4) home visit by an investigator, and 5) scoring on a CHA formula giving preference to applicants in substandard apartments with insufficient income to get good housing on the private market." It is common in Chicago to meet successful blacks in their late thirties and early forties who spent part of their childhood in the projects. In the mid-fifties, after the reformist director of the CHA, Elizabeth Wood, was forced out and replaced by a retired Army general named William B. Kean, the CHA began to de-emphasize screening. At the same time, it was becoming committed to high-rise buildings, to large-family apartments, and to building only in black ghettos. J. S. Fuerst, a professor at Loyola University who worked at the CHA in those days, says, "You can't put four thousand units in a place. And if you do, you can't suck it with the most troubled families. But Elizabeth Wood left, and General Kean said, 'Oh, no, it's got to be first come, first served.' And then they proceeded to accept people twenty years old, with three, four, five kids, and no husband." In the Robert Taylor Homes the buildings that were completed first are still, twenty-five years later, considered the best, because there was more screening. The ones completed last, and filled using virtually no screening, are the worst. As in the ghetto as a whole, so in the projects: where they became all lower class and cut off from the rest of society, everything fell apart. Ron Gate, a freelance writer and former radio reporter who grew up in the Taylor Homes (he credits Luke Helm, at Du Sable, with motivating him to get out), was an example of the unscreened Taylor tenant. He is one of nine children who in the early sixties were living with their grandmother in a house on the West Side. Their mother had severe psychological problems (once she was found wandering aimlessly down the street, wrapped in a bedsheet), and left the family. Later the family was evicted from the house and for a while lived at the Salvation Army. From there they moved to the Robert Taylor Homes. Tate doesn't know where either of his parents or any of his brothers and sisters are today, and he doesn't know anything about his parents' families in Mississippi. One day Date took me back to his old building in the Taylor Homes. Though turnover there is high, a few of his friends were still around. The male contemporaries of his that I met were all unemployed or working odd jobs, and invariably they asked him if he knew where there were any good jobs. His female contemporaries were all single mothers, or single and pregnant. The worst part of daily life in the Taylor Homes is the constant crime and fear of crime. In a typical four-week period last year seventy-nine felonies and one hundred misdemeanors were reported there -- far fewer than the real number of crimes, because in the projects the gangs are more powerful than the police and are known to retaliate against informers. Sergeant Leroy O. Grant, a police-community liaison officer with the Chicago Police Department's public-housing unit, which has its headquarters in the Taylor Homes, told me, "Once, a mother wouldn't prosecute a rape of her fourteen-year-old because of fear of retaliation. I don't know if that happens in any other place in the world. But around here, if somebody knocks on your door at four in the morning to say 'Don't go to court,' there's no man to answer." I got a look at what they were talking about one night when I was with two policemen from the Second District, which includes the Taylor Homes. There was a report of a shooting in a small apartment building. Inside the apartment from which the call to the police had come were four boys in their late teens, two girls, two small children, and an old woman in a wheelchair. A coat lay in the bathtub with hot water running over it, forming reddish pools in the tub. One of the boys was shot in the wrist. His story was that he had been standing on the front steps of the building and was shot by a stranger in a passing car. Everybody had a slightly different version of the incident, always skimpy on the details. "Who do you run with, man?" one of the policemen asked the boys. "The Ds." The policemen took the boy who was shot to the hospital, where, tight-lipped and grimacing in pain, he refused to file a complaint against anyone or to say anything else about what had happened. There have always been high crime rates in black ghettos, and a casualness about them in the rest of society. In the early years of this century the black ghetto in Chicago, like those in many cities, was the prostitution and gambling center, and it is courthouse lore that when a black kills another black it is a "misdemeanor murder." Police foot patrols, which do seem to reduce crime, are intermittent: the corridors of the Tavlor Homes are "visually checked" (a cursory patrol) daily and thoroughly patrolled twice a week. The Second District has four men on foot patrol, but only during the day and only in the commercial strips. There's ample evidence in the ghetto to support the liberal theory that poverty and unemployment cause crime, and also for the conservative theory that lax punishment causes it. In Chicago in 1985 there were 277,000 crimes serious enough to be listed in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Report. Because Illinois doesn't keep "offender-based statistics," which track criminals from arrest through prison, it is impossible to say exactly how many of these crimes were punished, but it was certainly a small fraction. The chance that a criminal will get away with it in Chicago, assuming he is not a murderer or a rapist, is thought to be somewhere between 90 and 95 percent. And these are the odds after an attempt was made to increase punishment: in 1978 the Illinois legislature instituted mandatory minimum six-year sentences, without parole, for major crimes other than murder. The law has had no dramatic effect on the crime rate. The hiring of many new black policemen in the seventies, as the result of a court order, did not affect the crime rate either, though it is rare today to hear the police described as racist. In the vicinity of the Robert Taylor Homes crime has dropped in the past couple of years, but the police attribute this to the depopulation of the area. Nobody in the ghetto has a sense that any kind of reform of legal procedure would significantly reduce crime. IV. Ways Out of the Ghetto Discussions in Washington about how to overcome the problems of ghettos through national policy-making tend to flit almost randomly in and out of relevance to real ghetto life. But they cannot be dismissed. Ghettos are a national problem, and aside from continuing to change on their own, they will change because of what happens next in government. A number of ideas about improving ghettos have been put forward, but two have particular momentum right now: workfare and self-help. Both are conservative causes of long standing that, because of the tenor of the times, are being taken seriously by liberals, too. Workfare means tying government welfare benefits to work by the recipients. It is an old idea, dating back at least to the workhouses built for the "undeserving poor" of early-nineteenth-century England. The philosophical justification for workfare is that it is wrong for anyone to get money from the government without doing something in return; the practical justification is that welfare dependency does exist, as almost anybody who lives in a ghetto will tell you, and something should be done to guard against it. Ten years ago workfare was routinely dismissed as "slavefare." Now thirty-nine states have some form of work program for welfare recipients. These range, to cite the two best-known examples, from Massachusetts's program, which requires signing up but no further participation, to California's brand-new system, which actually penalizes welfare recipients for not working or joining a training program. It is a natural guess that the comprehensive study of the welfare system that President Reagan commissioned earlier this year might end with a recommendation for a national workfare program -- for example, all welfare recipients except mothers with children under school age might be required to work in order to receive benefits. National workfare won't happen, however because it would conflict with a deeply held conservative principle: that welfare policy should be made by the states or, if possible, by local governments. The Administration will probably propose giving welfare grants to the states and letting them make their own policy, with a strong hint that workfare is the path of virtue. "I don't believe it's possible for the federal government to run a workfare program," says Robert B. Carleson, who was the architect of President Reagan's reform of the California welfare system and has been consulted on the welfare-reform study. "The country is too big, with too many variations in the labor market. Detailed federal regulations won't work for New York City and rural Idaho and Puerto Rico at the same time." In 1981 the Administration succeeded in rescinding a federal ban on state workfare programs -- Carleson, then working in the White House, spearheaded the effort. It is possible that the big northeastern states, which have the worst ghettos, will decide against mandatory workfare programs if given the choice, and the system will stay essentially the same as it is now. The new self-help movement is essentially a renascence of the old Booker T. Washington creed, minus the acceptance of legal segregation. Its main proponents are conservative black intellectuals outside the old-line elite black national leadership: Glenn Loury; Robert Woodson, of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, in Washington; Thomas Sowell, of the Hoover Institution, at Stanford University; Walter Williams, of George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia. Self-help proponents believe that poor blacks have been crippled by the habit of looking to government for salvation and that they need to develop a tradition of self-reliance, perhaps through small-scale entrepreneurship. They would have the government and the black leadership promote self-help not by passing legislation and spending money but by pointedly refusing to do these things, and talking about values instead. Among the many other current ideas about policies for the ghettos two deserve mention. One, which in any Democratic Administration would receive more attention than it does now, is the classic liberal solution: trying to achieve full employment and creating special job-training and public-service employment programs in the ghettos. A working ghetto population would mean less crime and less out-of-wedlock childbirth. The other idea is conservative in origin: creating enterprise zones in the ghettos -- small and nearly libertarian states that would have radically lower levels of taxation and regulation than the rest of the country, and would produce many jobs. Enterprise zones, like liberal suggestions for policy, are supposed to help the ghettos by reducing unemployment. None of these solutions takes as a given the idea that the ghettos have a separate, self-sustaining culture. Therefore none has the goal of wresting people in the ghettos from the grip of the culture. Even the self-help movement, one of whose axioms is the importance of culture in shaping behavior, promotes ideas like the privatization of housing projects -- implying that the ghettos can be made to function as real communities. The evidence of black success so far, however, seems to indicate that the best hope for people in the ghettos lies in their establishing some link to the outside world. Both of the most pressing problems -- unemployment and out-of-wedlock childbearing -- illustrate how difficult it will be to heal the ghettos without taking on cultural issues directly. More than twenty years ago Kenneth Clark wrote of Harlem. "If all its residents were employed it would not materially alter the pathology of the community." The statistic that best shows how pathology has outrun unemployment is the rate of labor-force participation -- a statistic that includes not only those working but also the unemployed who have looked for work during the past month. The rate of labor-force participation for black teenage boys fell from 60 percent in 1940 to 36 percent in 1970, a fall too great to be accounted for by just unemployment or by the increasing proportion of black teenagers in school. There was a sharp drop in teenage labor-force participation in the ghettos in the late sixties, when national unemployment was quite low. There is some evidence that participation in the labor force does increase when more jobs become available. In 1980 Houston, which then had a very low unemployment rate and many unskilled blue-collar jobs, had a labor-force participation rate for all blacks that was 13 percentage points higher than Chicago's. And the percentage of households made up of single mothers was lower in Houston, which might indicate a correlation between more jobs for men and less out-of-wedlock childbearing. But today a national boom, and even a labor shortage, is under way in unskilled, low-paying, non-industrial jobs. This is bad news for steelworkers but should be good news for black teenagers, as it has been for the new wave of immigrants from foreign countries. The standard argument about why the labor shortage has not affected labor-force participation in the ghettos is that most of the jobs are in the suburbs, and that kids today watch TV and see a swank way of life that makes working for "chump change" seem pointless to them. But these kids' parents and grandparents saw the sweet life at much closer range, because they often worked inside rich white people's houses in the South, and still many were motivated enough to move hundreds of miles away, for jobs slaughtering cattle. A fundamental reason that so many unmarried teenagers have children in the ghetto today seems to be that having them has become a custom -- a way of life. The story I heard over and over from teenage mothers was that their pregnancies were not accidental. Their friends were all having babies. Their boyfriends had pressured them into it, because being a father -- the fact of it, not the responsibility -- is a status symbol for a boy in the ghetto. Welfare does provide an economic underpinning for out-of-wedlock childbearing, but it is rare to hear about a girl who had a baby just to get on welfare. Out-of-wedlock childbearing in ghettos existed before there was any welfare. It is the aspect of life in the ghettos over which the people there have the most control, and it will be the last and hardest thing to change. It is today by far the greatest contributor to the perpetuation of the misery of ghetto life. Although the problems of the ghettos seem to resist economic solution, they do seem to respond to the imposition of a different, and more disciplined, culture. People who joined the Army or the Marines right after high school credit the decision with getting them out of the ghettos. The Black Muslims, in their heyday, were widely respected in the ghettos for being the only people who could turn around prostitutes and heroin addicts, and they accomplished this through severe dress codes, strictures on drinking, smoking, sex, and diet, and a round-the-clock regimen of work. In Dark Ghetto Kenneth Clark proposed, somewhat apologetically, establishing a paramilitary "cadet corps" in Harlem, which he said would be valuable because of "the relative ease with which uniforms, disciplined organization, and regulations can be used to bolster the self-esteem of young people." In the Chicago ghetto today the only institutions with a record of consistently getting people out of the underclass are the parochial schools. They pay their teachers much less than what public-school teachers are paid, but they can screen their applicants, their principals can hire and fire, and they can and do impose many rules on both the students and their parents. (Ghetto public "magnet" schools that are allowed to screen are also successful.) Father George Clements, the pastor of the Holy Angels Catholic Church, describes the regimen at its elementary school this way: "We have achieved honors as an academic institution above the national norm in all disciplines. We bear down hard on basics. Hard work, sacrifice, dedication. A twelve month school year. An eight-hour day. You can't leave the campus. Total silence in the lunchroom and throughout the building. Expulsion for graffiti. Very heavy emphasis on moral pride. The parents must come every month and pick up the report card and talk to the teacher, or we kick out the kid. They must come to the PTA every month. They must sign every night's homework in every subject. They must come to Mass on Sundays. They must take a required course on the Catholic faith. The kids wear uniforms, which are required to be clean, pressed, no holes. We have a waiting list of over a thousand, and the more we bear down, the longer the list gets." Programs based on the idea of making the ghettos bloom again as communities -- in other words, creating a new, healthy, indigenous culture there -- should be regarded with extreme skepticism. Enterprise zones would certainly do no harm, but it is hard to believe that even with tax relief employers would want to locate where crime rates are so high. Turning housing projects over to their residents might foster pride, but it would also lead to physical deterioration unless there were heavy subsidies -- in the Robert Taylor Homes the tenants' rent doesn't even cover the heating bill. Several black leaders, including at one extreme Louis Farrakhan, favor some form of black economic nationalism, in which people in the ghetto would trade only with black firms, in the supposed manner of other immigrant groups. Even if such a nation came into being, it would be a pathetically poor one, because the black middle class wouldn't join -- it is already too reliant on the national economy. Community development is the most appealing idea of all. Everybody knows a story of a great teacher or organizer who made ghetto kids blossom through pure love and encouragement. The trouble is that such people are one in a million and they cannot be legislated into existence. The programs in the ghetto that work best on a mass scale -- most notably Project Head Start, the one poverty program widely acclaimed as a success, which starts giving special instruction to children at a very early age -- represent not the ghetto's taking care of its own but an intervention by the mainstream culture. The best solution for the ghettos would be one that attacks their cultural as well as their economic problems, and that takes place away from the ghettos. One such idea would be to bring back the Work Projects Administration. The original WPA was a big success in the ghettos. In 1940 in Chicago 19 percent of the black male labor force was working for the WPA, and this seems to have helped prevent an unmanageable underclass from developing at a time of catastrophic unemployment; the WPA did function as a conduit into real jobs. In Black Metropolis Drake and Cayton wrote, "During the Depression years an increasingly large number of Negroes were absorbed into the Federal and State Civil Service.... [M]any of these received their first contact with white-collar work on various WPA projects." The wartime boom seems effortlessly to have absorbed the WPA workers, as well as many people who were on welfare. A new federal program like the WPA would create jobs where workfare programs only require people to find them. It could pay workers less than the minimum wage, so that private employment would always be more appealing. The work it would do would be outside the ghettos, like repairing highways and operating word processors; this would require, however, overcoming the union opposition that has kept most government jobs programs confined to make-work within the ghetto. Some people now on welfare would be required to join the program or get a job -- for instance, single people, and parents whose children are old enough to get home from school and be on their own for a couple of hours. Welfare benefits would have to be adjusted nationally to make the incentives come out right, but that probably should be done anyway. The great advantage of such a program is that it would enter the lives of ghetto kids when they were eighteen or nineteen and would affect them at a time when most still feel more hopeful than resigned, even if some have been overwhelmed by the traumas of growing up in the ghetto. It would not have the explosive potential to rend the fabric of adult life, the way busing and the scatter-siting of housing projects have done, but it would take the people involved out of the ghetto culture, one big step closer to the national mainstream. (Ideally, the program would be combined with a universal national-service requirement for young people that would bring many middle-class kids to the neo-WPA too.) It would be expensive, though not unrealistically so if it became a conduit to private jobs and supplanted welfare payments for many people. And it is not a wacky scheme requiring a departure from the whole American political system; it is something that America as already done once. It worked and, just as important, it is widely remembered as having worked. No matter what the specific policies adopted by this or the next Administration, one issue will substantially determine their success or failure. Once it was the simplest of all issues in race relations, and now it is one of the stickiest: integration. Ethnically homogeneous industrial societies can sustain high unemployment rates and operate extremely generous welfare systems, rich in dependency incentives, without creating an underclass. (And when an immigrant group that is looked down upon comes into such a society -- West Indians in Britain, Turks in West Germany -- the first signs of an underclass appear.) The single overriding factor in the creation of the American ghettos is racial prejudice. The ghettos could not have developed their strongly self-defeating culture in the heart of urban America during the height of the postwar boom if the people who lived in them were of the same color as most of our society. The ghettos are the product of many generations of complete segregation from the neighborhoods, educational institutions, economy, and values of the rest of the country. The most invisible of all the ghetto's ills is the sense of racial inferiority that develops there. The endless references in the black official culture to pride and beauty, which to whites may seem to be obvious points not requiring constant restatement, can be explained only by the hold that their opposites, shame and ugliness, had on the minds of blacks for years. John H. Johnson, the publisher of Ebony, was asked on its fortieth anniversary how he would like to