Essay: Eyes on the Prize - 11/19/2008

I started the seventh grade a week after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous, “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Later, a teacher made us read it. I remember the part that struck me.

“We cannot be satisfied,” Dr. King had said, “as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.” This puzzled me. I knew that black people were mostly not allowed to vote in Mississippi, and that people were going down there to try and to do something about that.

But why would a black person in New York think they had nothing for which to vote? After all, they had Adam Clayton Powell, one of the few blacks in Congress. The riots which swept through Watts and Detroit and other cities were still in the future.

It wasn’t till I had grown up, absorbed all those experiences and read the famous Kerner report before I really began to understand what King meant when he talked about northern Negroes who had nothing for which to vote. Now, Thomas Sugrue has helped fill in the blanks by writing Sweet Land of Liberty, about the forgotten struggle for civil rights in the north. It is rich, wonderful and crucially useful in providing the backstory of the nation that just elected Barack Obama.

For many years, whites in the north, especially liberals, had a smugly superior attitude towards the south. We didn’t set police dogs and fire hoses on children. And we didn’t care if black people voted. Just as long as they didn’t move onto our street.

Years later, when I lived in Memphis, the difference was put this way. In the North, they didn’t care how “big” or important blacks got, as long as they didn’t get too close. In the South, whites didn’t care how close. As long as they didn’t get too big.

Sure, the north was better – largely because blacks didn’t have to live in fear of random terrorist violence, at least as long as they didn’t stray into certain neighborhoods at night.

If they attempted to buy a house in those neighborhoods, they might not be lynched, but they faced rocks through their windows and slashed tires. If they hung on and another black family arrived, the odds were great that the entire white population would leave.

For most of us in the first years of the twenty-first century, integration remains the time between the arrival of the first black family and the departure of the last white one.

Earlier this month, something like fifty-six million white Americans voted to install a black family in the whitest house of all. But the fact remains that many, maybe even most of them, would still vote against a black family moving next door.

And yet, as they say in the black churches, we aren’t what we should be, and hopefully we aren’t what we are going to be.

But at least we aren’t what we were.

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Comments

[Thrasher]

I am impressed with Segrue's book even though it leaves a lot to be desired nevertheless it has value..

I know becuase I am a real Black activist with a long cultural history and a lot of foot prints with regard to civil rights issues in the north..

My firm we do a lot of public speaking on racism in the north those interested in our speakers please contact

PLANEIDEA@MSN.COM