When I was growing up, in the seventies, I remember hearing Many Successful African Americans say they were moving down south after retirement or moving into the suburbs. As the seventies moved on to the eighties they were leaving before retirement to re-establish themselves in places things moved a little slower. By the end of the twentieth century it became a common theme to hear of African Americans moving to the suburbs, to the south. Some returned to places where they had family but for many their ties to family had long since been severed by the robotic pace of urban life. During that time it was frowned upon for a successful African American to leave their community, notwithstanding, the movement continued and gained momentum. As a teenager I expressed my concerns to my parents that they should not move to the suburbs until I was in college, I was a dyed-in the wool urbanite. During the late nineties when black families were moving to the suburbs in increasing numbers there was, ironically, a renewed interest in the Harlem Renaissance artist Jacob Lawrence who documented so much of the spirit of The Great Migration. Jacob Lawrence perished on June 9, 2000 allowing him to enjoy the celebration of his migration period that so etched his name into the marble of great American Art under the title, "Dynamic Cubism." His new found fame and his death proclaimed a new era which I have coined, "The Reverse Migration."
The Great Migration represented a time of economic growth for African Americans coming from an agrarian background and it introduced them to the growing world of technology on a level far exceeding that of the south. Finding meaningful employment was a difficult task for African Americans then as now. They took the jobs that nobody else wanted... that had been abandoned for better prospects or for ideological constructs. By the turn of the last century African Americans had made great strides as documented in Booker T. Washington's, "A New Negro For A New Century", but we had not created enough industry to sufficiently employ the millions of African Americans that were jobless and struggling to survive in the wake of emancipation.
Therefore, our only choice was to seek employment in the realm traditionally dominated by whites. This realm offered fundamental opposition on virtually all fronts including the military in defense of a country the free slave labor of African Americans fundamentally built. This push for social and economic integration was and is still a critical force in America.
One of the things we are constantly reminded of during these times of fierce economic struggle is the loss of manufacturing and unskilled labor jobs from this American Economy. Between 1915, at the beginning or WWI and 1960s', during the Civil Rights Movement, it is estimated that more than 2 million African Americans migrated northward in search of substantive employment. New jobs had been created because many white males were leaving to fight overseas, American factories were expanding their production to meet the demands of the war and fierce battles were being fought between white factory workers and owners for workers rights and workers unions which had begun to gain momentum since the mid to late 1800's had finally got grounded. In many cases African American migrants, desperate for jobs, filled the positions of striking workers, fulfilling their need for employment but exacerbating racial and ethnic tensions between themselves and striking white factory workers.
In the economy of the early twenty-first century we see a broad spectrum of immigrants filling the voids created by the service industry from Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Caribbean Etc. Although many Americans agree that they are not personally interested in many of the jobs being filled by these recent immigrants some of them nonetheless express resentment toward immigrants who seem to easily find employment performing these jobs in a stagnant job market. It's part of the age old friction between those who consider themselves to be the entitled home-boys or good old boys versus the new kid in town... Although these immigrant populations are filling up an integral void in our economy they are often not given due credit for being the hard working go getter's that they truly are. Like African Americans had done during The Great Migration, these new Americans have left adverse conditions to find opportunity in a new land. 
The Great Experiment began romantically in the 1930's with the opening of Public Housing projects around the country. To be historically accurate the very first experiment was in 1862 with the establishment of Freedman's Village, intended to be a temporary encampment for slaves who had fled slavery during the Civil War. But this early experiment was far from ideal. The concept of a publicly funded community would wait many more years. The second FDR or third historic project was opened in Washington, D.C. in 1937 and called Langston Terrace Dwellings, a picturesque subsidized housing development in Washington D.C. designed by the renown architect Hilyard Robinson who had studied in Germany at the legendary Bauhaus School. Originally, only employed African Americans could be housed in this facility but this was to change. The Great Experiment offered African Americans the opportunity to better themselves by being able to have a stable, safe and healthy home, nearby schools, parks and recreational facilities would allow them to pursue education, sports and enjoy leisure time. But the greatest feature of the social welfare system was that it subsidized all of these things in order to make the transition effortless... So what happened? 
We could debate the vicissitudes of the past 80 years or simply come to a conclusion. The African American community has not effectively utilized the gift of "The Great Experiment" and to the contrary has abused and twisted it creating yet another state of dependency to follow slavery, the cumulative effect has thrust that community into a downward spiral with only two possibilities. The first possibility is that African Americans fill a portion of the thousands of unskilled labor positions and the second is that they will leave the urban centers of the east cost and return to the south, the suburbs or wherever the economy is less demanding for skilled and highly educated labor. But the silent third possibility is that African Americans, having been provided with many opportunities to obtain a free and substantive education will wake up, reclaim their communities, uphold education, create jobs for themselves through entrepreneurial endeavors or utilize their education to enter the competitive world of corporate America and the Global Market.
Over the past twenty or so years while the phenomenon called "Gentrification" has dominated the urban landscapes of cities such as Washington, D.C. Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Chicago there has been a more quiet movement of African Americans away from these urban centers. As rents, mortgages, food, entertainment, transportation and other expenses continually rise more African Americans have had to move out of the city in order to survive. In addition to these factors the rise in violence and the plummeting quality of education in the Public School Systems has compelled many African Americans to flee at all costs. Of course other ethnic groups have been so affected as well if they could not afford to stay in the cities where they were born and they have shared the struggle for affordable housing, sufficient employment and education with African Americans. Reviewing the countless documentaries depicting African Americans who lived through the Harlem Renaissance and The Great Migration we recall the deep sense of community; a structure that enabled Blacks to survive the hardships of being transplanted to places alien and hostile to them. African Americans did build communities during that time... the remnants of which are at the very heart of Gentrification. We have all too many times discussed the many variables that led to the deterioration of these communities and they all seem to boil down to drugs and lack of education. It is not a bad thing for peoples outside of the African American community to purchase homes within their community and once rooted to begin to demand that the community become civilized! Where are our ethics? The question we should be asking ourselves is, "Why Didn't We Do That"? Or even better, why did we ever let it get to that point? I am a proponent of the belief that we learn and are led through example. Gentrification in itself is not evil... I walk through neighborhoods that were once deplorable, dangerous and hopeless and see that they have been given new life by folks who truly wish to have a functional community. Businesses don't get robbed because the community is watching, people don't get killed because the community is watching, children and elders can play outside without fear of being shot or stabbed because the community is watching. Four inch bullet proof Plexiglas windows with turnabouts do not happen where retailers feel comfortable that a neighborhood will protect it. Public Schools with narrow window slits and penitentiary quality bars do not happen where people are comfortable that the community will protect them. Libraries that close at 5pm, public parks that close at dusk, neighborhoods where the corner or front stoop is a base for gambling or contraband sales is not a community that feels comfortable being a community. It is a community in fear of itself! I remember when bee bop groups would harmonize on the corners and kids would play hopscotch, marbles or jacks on the stair and stoop... African Americans must ask themselves the fundamental question: "What do we stand for, what are our ethics"? I cannot say that I applaud the economic effect that gentrification has had upon the real estate value but much of that has been corrected by the recent economic crash. Pricing honest and hard working people out of their homes or potential homes is a vile and evil practice in any event. But look at what has happened to the neighborhood... it's become a neighborhood again! It is important for African Americans to view the process of Gentrification objectively. As a community, they allowed a minority constituency of drug dealers, panderers, hustlers and such to literally take over their neighborhoods. Because of familial or other ties Blacks chose to look the other way rather than to do the right thing. they failed to see the big picture. The lack of ethical fortitude in some African American neighborhoods led to the creation of a crime infested no mans land...scary, dangerous, dilapidated, but one that just happened to be located directly within or near the most valuable and sought after real estate in the city. One of the hallmarks of what was called the "Urban Renewal" era was the construction of housing projects intended to locate African Americans close to business districts. Then, the idea was that Blacks would be closer to potential jobs and that they would adopt the business and work ethic they saw modeled before them. One thing we learned from this Great Experiment was that a work and business ethic appears not to have been gained either through operant conditioning or osmotic demonstration. What happens when a community does not care about itself? Even a poor person can slap a coat of paint on the door or pick garbage up from the ground. African Americans had been poor for many centuries in this country but they had been proud people. Drugs, it appears stripped Blacks of the last remaining thread of dignity offering at once economic and psychological escape. So while the next generations of African American youth was getting high, forgetting the struggle and sacrifice of their parents and ancestors that golden generation died and left them the fruits of their struggle. It wasn't just drugs it was ignorance. African Americans have always had a keen dislike for education thinking it to be uppity or bourgeois. So in order to be true to some manifesto of the street which would have been a revision to some manifesto of the plantation, they vowed for universal ignorance and snubbed education, acculturation and sophistication. It is then the utmost slap in the face that gentrification, precipitated by the epitome of well educated and acculturated classes would ultimately displace African Americans who hold these things as alien and fundamentally "un-cool". In defense of the effect gentrification has had I must add that the movement toward revitalization of the community, such as that initiated by Marian Barry in the seventies involves creating a veritable seed bed. By a seed bed community I mean that a block or two of real estate sufficient to sustain housing and retail must be obtained, revitalized and maintained as a base from which other seed beds will be planted and grow. Eventually all of the seed beds will create a garden and that's when it becomes a successful community. We know how hard old bad habits are to die especially when ones livelihood is at stake. One of the first steps at creating a neighborhood that can be "watched" by the neighbors is owning most of the houses. If there are drug dealers, prostitutes, hustlers or loiterers around they must then contend with the entire neighborhood rather than just one individual. Eventually, through exhaustive police intervention the intruders, who may not even live in the neighborhood will move over a block or two, so it is a piecemeal thing. Now I am not saying that drugs are bad or prostitution or hustling is bad, but I am saying that they are poor choices within the context of a family neighborhood. So goes the expression, "you don't shit where you eat"! The memo, again, did not reach some communities.
For whatever its worth, there is a radical change in the city these days and it is fundamentally a good thing because poor and run down neighborhoods are being revitalized if not by African Americans, by an admixture of African Americans and peoples of other ethnicity's who care... The politics are difficult because they will always be reduced to race... I have digressed judiciously in order to explicate the phenomenon I recognized nearly twenty or thirty years ago as "The Great Reverse Migration" and have attempted to tie it into the failure of what I have coined "The Great Experiment" of the social welfare system. The physical transition of urban communities from poor to a more empowered class has occurred many times in history but is being most thoroughly documented in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century and especially in The United States of America. One of the by products of this transition is the reverse migration of African Americans back to the south and to destinations outside of the Major American Cities especially along the east coast and Chicago in the Midwest. The African American community would do well to revisit the words of W.E.B. Dubois and forge ahead for freedom for all, knowing that as an unfortunate reality of life all may not be able or ready to mobilize for progress... But the task must be done...
There are other reasons why African Americans are reverse-migrating from Americas cities other than economic hardship. One could visualize them cumulatively as individual vessels navigating the very essence of self determination and manifest destiny... because fate is a plastic, malleable and flowing phenomenon... Many have left for the very same reasons that they came... to seek out a more civilized existence. The sobering cocktail of real and disquieting issues poise a blatant contradiction and challenge to the establishment of a cohesive family, a peaceful existence and in some cases, the achievement of lofty objectives. It is not mine or anyone else's role to judge their decisions as the determination of whether one prefers urbanity or "liberalitas ultra" as a destination of desire.
One must be able to look objectively at the plight many city dwelling African Americans imagine themselves to battle. Unless one has ones head under a rock it is all too apparent that the achievement level of many inner city schools is deplorable. The obsequious climate created by the plasticised, "Politically Correct" movement may have tied our tongues but not our minds... we know public schools have been failures and continue to fail at educating African American youth. When African American peoples begin to treat their schools as shrines then they will produce an abundance of truly great men and women. To many African Americans, the city holds them hostage. A violent, ignorant, angry and ethically vacant popular culture drives the destructive forces which continue to grind the very last remnants of the African American community into the pavement. The rise of urban gangs, teen pregnancy and crime, recidivism, drug abuse, chronic welfare dependence, lack of appropriate strong male and female leadership and other factors send our children to school and into life with no clear goals and objectives. For this reason I look fairly upon those who wish to escape the city... The term suburb... Sub-Urb, implies something below or less than urban as if urbanity were the epitome. To many African Americans it is not a suburb at all but rather, "Liberalitas Ultra" (beyond urbanity) or even "Liberatus Liberalitas" (liberated from urbanity). To many... an escape from the city meant a renewed chance to create wholesome communities and schools they would uphold as sacred shrines of learning, cultural and economic advancement. But this leaves African Americans who are strivers in our inner cities to implement the difficult task of taking back their communities from thugs and from those who, though desperately ignorant... are nonetheless content with the status quo.
As is the case with humanity circumstances are always dynamic... nothing is static... always a new spin and never any gauge on how long any particular trend may last. Oddly enough, the the austere buffoonery of the infamous theme song to the popular seventies sit-com, "Good Times" begins to play in my mind as a sort of Voltaireian theme...
Yeah we muve'n own up,
To de east side,
To uh Dee-Lux Apart-munt,
In duh sky,
Ohh Ohh we muve'n own up,
To de east side,
We finally got uh peece uv duh pie...
As a child I was immensely insulted by this theme song... with its heavy antebellum vernacular, suggesting that having a penthouse in New York, ( or an upscale residence anywhere) was tantamount to "heaven on earth" (even though I was then and am not now at all religious), African Americans could just put down their bibles and walk out on a passing cloud... harp with Methuselah... etc., etc., etc., Even now it still brings a grin to my face... I see it performed by two vaudevillian minstrels or even worse... by someone in "black-face" pretending to be uppity... gathering their humble belongings and taking them to a swank penthouse on the park... being fussed over by tailors... wistfully sampling hors d'oeuvre and half finishing fabulously expensive bottles of campaign. Buffoonery! Sheer Buffoonery!
But the promise of an uncomplicated life enamored with the fulfillment of familial ties and occupational success is one of the patently American Dreams, denied many African Americans, that we are still willing to chase at all odds... first to leave the rural south for the big cities and then... perhaps... to return...
No comments:
Post a Comment