WHEN I WENT to report and live in the United States in the sixties, I was fortunate to make friends with some of the finest people I have known. They, and their work, left a lasting impression on me. Martha Gellhorn once described them as ‘the people with a wakeful conscience, the best of America’s citizens; they can be counted on, they are always there. Though the Government tried viciously, it could not silence them.’16
It is often difficult to see these people, and their achievements, through the façades of America today. When I first knew them, their influence was being felt in the political process, the courts and the media. They had pushed American liberalism to its limits and made real change seem possible. Much of this was illusion; but their glory was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year.
I saw a great deal of America then, especially the old Confederacy. My travelling companion was often Matt Herron, who, with his wife Jeannine, had been on the first ‘freedom rides’ that brought young people from the North to support the black emancipation movement in the South. Matt was a photo-journalist whose picture essays of struggle and outrage appeared in Life, Look and Hugh Cudlipp’s Daily Mirror and were to become a distinguished chronicle of the decade. Based in Mississippi, the Herrons and their comrades lived in fear of their lives; three of them were murdered. The murder of blacks was, of course, routine.
When President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Bill, it was a programme devised by Jeannine Herron that brought the first organised pre-schooling to some 5,000 children in Mississippi. Yet she and Matt remained circumspect in their celebration. ‘One victory’, they wrote to me, ‘doesn’t mean it can’t be taken away by other means.’
A cornerstone of the Civil Rights Act is the statute that makes job discrimination illegal. In 1971, the Supreme Court determined that blacks and other minorities could still be victimised by the imposition of impossible job qualifications. In passing judgement on what became known as the Griggs case, the court placed the burden of responsibility on an employer to demonstrate that the required qualification was an occupational necessity. This decision probably deserves more credit for integrating America’s workplace than any other.
During the years that followed, notably the Reagan era, the political character of the Supreme Court changed by design. In 1989, the Supreme Court overruled the Griggs decision and reversed the burden of proof. Employers no longer have to prove that the qualifications they demand have anything to do with the job on offer. This has had, wrote Anthony Lewis in the New York Times, ‘a drastic effect . . . it made it almost impossible for victims of alleged job discrimination to win lawsuits’.17 Lewis cited a common case: a fifty-year-old black man who had held a caretaker’s job at the same factory for fifteen years. When the factory closed, he applied for the same job elsewhere. He came with references praising his honesty and hard work. He failed to get the job because he did not have a secondary school certificate.
George Bush denies he is a racist. However, as a candidate for the Senate in 1964 he opposed the Civil Rights Act; and he now wants an entirely new civil rights bill that includes ‘quotas’. He and his White House coterie are working hard to undermine compromise legislation that has won bipartisan support in Congress. At the same time, Bush has nominated for the Supreme Court a black judge, Clarence Thomas, who has made a name by repudiating almost all the traditional civil rights agenda. His nomination relieves the president of the need to defend his position against charges of racism and makes it likely that, if Congress gives its approval, future Supreme Court decisions will serve to keep blacks in their place. Even the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, so often accused of Uncle-Tomism, regards Bush’s man as repugnant.
The effect of Bush’s insidious campaign will be to exacerbate some of the worst poverty in the world. In spite of significant black advances, such as the rise of a black middle class, poverty and degradation in black America has to be seen to be believed; and few white Americans, or visitors to America, see it.
Stepping over beggars on Broadway may leave an impression; but that is nothing to compare with a glimpse of what is now called the ‘underclass’ in those zones of American cities where the poor blacks and Hispanics are. For students interested in the uncelebrated effects of the doctrine that has brought about ‘the end of history’, I recommend a trip to the South Bronx in New York. When I was there twenty years ago a taxi would not take me past a safe point. It was worse than many impoverished Third World cities; certainly it was more menacing and its people more despairing. I had not seen anything like it in the Soviet Union, which is upheld as the vanquished model of all economic iniquity.
Today, the South Bronx is worse. One has only to read the reporting of Camilo José Vergara to understand how steep has been the descent of America’s blacks under Reagan and Bush, and how ruthless and sinister are the current measures to keep them down. Almost one American child in four is now born into poverty, and the majority of these are minorities who subsist in human rubbish dumps like the South Bronx. ‘Before the clock strikes midnight,’ wrote Paul Savoy in the Nation, ‘twenty-seven children in America will have died from poverty, violence and social neglect.’18
Twenty years ago black Americans put places like this to the torch. They staged ‘poor people’s marches’ and they and their white allies assembled in front of the White House to demand their rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Since then, their communities are petrified by an almost total absence of opportunity for young unqualified blacks, other than the opportunity of drug addiction and crime. Moreover, drugs have usefully depoliticised and contained the poor, thereby complementing the ethos of a system that at once raises expectations and dashes them.
The ghettos have become America’s gulags, which do not exist unless you have to live in them. In 1970, George Wallace, governor of Alabama, was right when he said that ‘you gonna see this whole country Southernised; and when that happens, we gonna seem like a Sunday School down here.’19 Reagan ‘Southernised’ much of America, and Bush is continuing his work.
In March 1991 a gang of uniformed white Los Angeles policemen viciously beat an unarmed black man as he lay on the ground after they had stopped his car. This was nothing unusual for a police force regarded as brutal by even American standards. But a witness had secretly videotaped the attack, which was shown on national television. The four policemen were eventually charged and tried a year later. When they were acquitted by an all-white jury, south Los Angeles and other ghettos across America rose as one. City blocks were razed; gun battles were fought from street to street, tenement to tenement. Only when the army was called out – its previous assignment was Iraq – was ‘order’ restored.
In June 1992 Amnesty International issued a report on America’s ‘affront to human rights’. Amnesty’s investigation of 40 cases in Los Angeles showed that suspects were shot by the police although they posed no threat, and that officers acted without fear of being disciplined. This represented a national pattern.20
So will another white American generation now arise with a ‘wakeful conscience’? Or have they been persuaded that only one Berlin Wall was built and one system of apartheid given root? The fire next time will not wait for the answers.
August 1991 to June 1992