Black Lives, White Lives: Three Decades of Race Relations in America

By Bob Blauner

Now with a new foreword, this timely reissue features a remarkable collection of oral histories that trace three decades of turbulent race relations and social change in the United States for a new generation of activists. 

One evening in 1955, Howard Spence, a Mississippi field representative for the NAACP investigating the Emmett Till murder, was confronted by Klansmen who burned an eight-foot cross on his front lawn. "I felt my life wasn't worth a penny with a hole in it." Twenty-four years later, Spence had become a respected pillar of that same Mississippi town, serving as its first Black alderman.
The story of Howard Spence is just one of the remarkable personal dramas recounted in Black Lives, White Lives. Beginning in 1968, Bob Blauner and a team of interviewers recorded the words of those caught up in the crucible of rapid racial, social, and political change. Unlike most retrospective oral histories, these interviews capture the intense racial tension of 1968 in real time, as people talk with unusual candor about their deepest fears and prejudices. The diverse experiences and changing beliefs of Blauner's interview subjects—sixteen of them Black, twelve of them white—are expanded through subsequent interviews in 1979 and 1986, revealing as much about ordinary, daily lives as the extraordinary cultural shifts that shaped them. This book remains a landmark historical and sociological document, and an exceptional primary-source commentary on the development of race relations since the 1960s. Republished with a foreword by Professor Gerald Early, Black Lives, White Lives offers new generations of scholars and activists a galvanizing meditation on how divided America was then and still is today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780520386020

Bob Blauner

Bob Blauner (1929–2016) was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author who taught, lectured, consulted, and wrote on race relations. His work was funded by major groups such as the National Institute of Mental Health, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. His other books include Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry, Racial Oppression in America, and Resisting McCarthyism: To Sign or Not to Sign California's Loyalty Oath.   Gerald Early is Chair of African and African-American Studies and Professor of English at Washington University. He has written and edited numerous books, including This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s and The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

Book preview

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 1989, 2022 by The Regents of the University of California

First paperback printing 1990

ISBN 978-0-520-38601-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-38602-0 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 88-27769

Manufactured in the United States of America

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To the memory of my mother, Esther Blauner (1899–1986), and to the future of my children, Marya and Jonathan: may they live in a peaceful world.

Content warning: This book, originally published in 1989 and containing interviews that span the previous twenty-one years, contains racial slurs that can be disturbing or triggering. Throughout this work, we have chosen not to reproduce such terms in full, replacing some letters with asterisks. We do not want to sanitize what the speakers have said, but neither do we want to create additional harm via unnecessary and insensitive repetition of offensive terms.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Gerald Early

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE 1968

SURVIVING THE SIXTIES

Integration or Black Power? The Great Debate

1. The Politics of Manhood and the Southern Black Experience

Florence Grier My father was from Alabama

Len Davis Promised Land is just like the old plantation

Howard Spence I wouldn’t want to treat anybody like I’ve been treated in Mississippi

2. Whites on the Front Lines of Racial Conflict

Joe Rypins Stokely Carmichael ain’t no better than me

Gladys Hunt You break your neck to do something, and they give you a hard time

Joan Keres Sometimes you wish you were black

Virginia Lawrence I was the wrong color in my black man’s eyes

3. Four Black Women and the Consciousness of the Sixties

Florence Grier I’m tired of being scared

Millie Harding This is no dream world, baby

Vera Brooke Those that came from a different social experience I feared

Elena Albert Something happened in my childhood I’ve never forgotten

4. White Backlash: The Fear of a Black Majority and Other Nightmares

Maude Wiley They’re afraid the colored people are gonna move in and take over

George Hendrickson We’ve got the lowest, poorest type

William Singer We didn’t have a great sense of racial awareness

Bill Harcliff It’s just a strong apartheid on the street

Diane Harcliff The whole racial thing makes me burst with sadness

5. Black Youth and the Ghetto Streets

Richard Simmons White boys, they’re always innocent

Larry Dillard I would like to kill a white man, just to put it on the books

Sarah Williams The marching and demonstrations is stupid

Harold Sampson Denying you the right to be a man

6. The Paradox of Working-Class Racism

Lawrence Adams They’ve got the right to have every human dignity that I have

Jim Corey If I can help a colored man without hurting myself, I haven’t got anything to lose

Dick Cunningham My oldest daughter married a black man

7. Black Workers: New Options and Old Problems

Richard Holmes The Negro don’t want to work

Len Davis The postal system has become a Negro-type job

Mark Anthony Holder Being a man is being part of the world

Jim Pettit These people had been treating me bad all my life, and I didn’t know it

Frank Casey They call me an instigator

Carleta Reeves I’d come home bitching and yelling

Henry Smith This was my means of retaliating

PART TWO 1978–1987

GROWING OLDER IN THE SEVENTIES AND EIGHTIES

The Ambiguities of Racial Change

8. Still in the Struggle: Black Activists Ten Years Later

Howard Spence I’m going to protect this land

Millie Harding Dealing with the human issues

Florence Grier I haven’t changed that much

9. White Lives and the Limits of Integration

George Hendrickson The man is a damn fool who won’t change his mind

Maude Wiley That was such a strong time of change

Virginia Lawrence The world changed exactly the way I was going

William Singer We’ve turned life itself into a quota business

Bill Harcliff What I really do is live in a white neighborhood

10. Black Youth: The Worsening Crisis

Richard Simmons The American black man is a dying species

Larry Dillard Without [the Black Panthers], my generation would be a different generation

Sarah Williams I had him and everything just changed

Jim Pettit Two counts against me: I’m black and I’m gay

11. Blue-Collar Men in a Tight Economy

Jim Corey He’s just a boy, Daddy

Dick Cunningham Even Walnut Creek, it’s integrating

Lawrence Adams The federal government and AT&T screwed up

Joe Rypins Smelling like a rose

Mark Anthony Holder Peoples of forty, they’re no longer thinking about a race thing

12. Men, Women, and Opportunity

Harold Sampson I have not been able to achieve selfhood through the civil rights movement

Frank Casey If they had gave me the green light

Carleta Reeves To grow and develop with the times

Henry Smith If I were a white guy . . .

13. Keeping the Spirit of the Sixties Alive

Vera Brooke The caring factor

Joan Keres The way that you view humanity and the earth, those are the main things

Len Davis My whole damn culture’s gone

Elena Albert I as an individual will continue to resist

Conclusion

Appendix: Methodology

Notes

Bibliographic Essay

FOREWORD

The answer I settle on—which is by no means original to me—requires a shift in metaphors, one that sees our democracy not as a house to be built, but as a conversation to be had.

BARACK OBAMA

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN

1.

The sociologist Bob Blauner’s Black Lives, White Lives reads very much as if it were a documentary film put on paper, with ever-shifting talking heads, ever-changing perspectives on race relations in the United States at these distinct moments, 1968, 1978–1979, and 1986. It is both immediate and epic. It can be emotionally overwhelming in its testimony at times; repetitive occasionally; performative and histrionic, as people feel flattered and self-regarding because they are being interviewed; and overly long, as people can sometimes fall in love with the sound of their own voice; but it is nonetheless always fascinating. One never wants to stop reading, as if mesmerized by a film that is presenting a profoundly poetic revelation while it shows a monstrous train wreck. Perhaps that is what the relationship between White and Black in America is: a remarkable fable about human affinity, intimacy, and sympathy nestled in a narrative of negation, racial hegemony, exploitation, and violence. A considerable trade-off, to be sure, or a considerable paradox.

Since the book is about, as Blauner states at the outset, the racial experience and consciousness of black and white Americans (p. 1), there is, in its design, also, a Rashomon-esque sense of never quite nailing down the reality of its subject. It is inevitable that there would be little common cause between how Whites and Blacks experience racial consciousness. As Blauner writes, American whites had been able to confine their ‘whiteness’ to remote corners of their consciousness, identifying themselves primarily as Americans, or as Irish or Italians, Catholics or Baptists. Outside the South (and the minds of transplanted southerners), whiteness per se was rarely a significant component of personal identity (p. 17). For Blacks, their racial identity was all they had; they could not escape it, and their situation was such that they were forced always to think of it, because the nation never failed to remind them of it. Whiteness was a gift and a privilege; Blackness was a stigma, a harsh, unrelenting form of social confinement. If Whites could be universal, the mark of humanity itself, then Blackness was a form of provincialism necessitated by survival and a lack of alternatives.

But there is more than just this broad difference—White evasion and Black entrapment—that makes Black Lives, White Lives seem like a conflict about what crime people have just seen or if they have seen a crime at all. The hippies, the longshoremen, the Black activists, the Black teenagers, the Black clerical workers know an aspect of the subject but struggle with a larger meaning or struggle with the reactions the subject elicits that make them not quite understand themselves. There is always a sense, when people are speaking honestly or candidly about race, that they are on the verge of being out of control. There are brief moments of consensus among the subjects, the witnesses, but by and large, everyone sees something a bit different in the American racial dilemma. And of course it is all centered on talk, speech, discourse, interviews, edited into a kind of exchange.

2.

In February 2009, at a Black History Month event at the Justice Department, the then attorney general Eric Holder accused the United States of being essentially a nation of cowards. The country needed, according to Holder, a national conversation between Blacks and Whites to discuss aspects of race that are ignored because they are uncomfortable.¹ This is not, to be sure, a new idea.

Consider a film like Stanley Kramer’s 1958 prison escape drama, The Defiant Ones, which stars Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as runaway southern convicts who are chained together. In some ways, this setup is nothing more than a dramatization of an interracial conversation about race. And to show how difficult it is to have, the two men are forced into it only by the circumstance of being chained to each other. The film, hamstrung by industry conventions and censorship, liberal good intentions that come off as preachy, and the need to succeed in the market, feels stilted and earnest. The characters never seem to speak to one another in a way that is authentically southern or authentically racial for the type of men they are supposed to be. Viewers today would find the film badly dated.

Another film, a documentary, The Cry of Jazz, made a year later by the Black composer Edward Osmund Bland, shows a more spirited and realistic conversation—a debate, if you will—between Whites and Blacks about the racial nature of jazz and the music’s future. The Whites in the film, both men and women, are unpersuaded of the idea that only Blacks could have created jazz and that Blacks, because of their past suffering, are exceptional and unique in their perspective on the United States and in the expression of their humanity. The Whites argue that what Blacks feel and express is universal. Everyone has suffered, after all. But for the Blacks, to paraphrase T. E. Lawrence, the point is that everyone has not suffered equally. Of course, this filmed conversation is not spontaneous but scripted. Moreover, there is an interracial sexual tension that complicates the dynamics of the group’s discussion. From a Black perspective, though, what the liberal Whites say here approximates how Blacks experience such people in real conversations: defensive and convinced of their own sincerity and that the Negro is the same as everybody else, that only the Negro’s immense self-consciousness creates his sense of being special. (The film has been criticized for featuring no Black women.) The Blacks win the debate to the extent that they convince the audience that they are the ultimate authorities of themselves and that their perception of America is truer than that of the Whites.

What these films symbolized for Cold War America, at least in the more liberal and progressive corners of our society, was a desire, a craving for some sort of talk across racial lines, a conversation, a dialogue, perhaps a reconciliation of some sort, or at least an honest airing. It was the age of integration, after all, as well as the age of pluralism, requiring people to strike a fine balance in being recognized both as members of a group and as individuals who transcended that group. A few real-life examples of conversations across racial lines come to mind: the fierce dialogues between the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s pacifist, middle-class, idealistic, and college-educated whites and the poor, lesser-educated Blacks who made up CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) in its early days in the 1940s,² as well as the Margaret Mead–James Baldwin conversation published as A Rap on Race (1971), although no one would consider either of these accomplished intellectuals as everyday representatives of their races. President Bill Clinton’s One America in the 21st Century initiative, announced in 1997 and with an advisory board headed by the eminent African American historian John Hope Franklin, was probably one of the most ambitious efforts to have a national conversation about race. The results satisfied no one.

The guiding idea of having an exchange, which Attorney General Holder said twelve years ago was still needed and which was renewed more recently by such noted figures as the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, the African American scholar Peniel Joseph, and the South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn, is that the two groups have to understand each other if they are to live together as equals. Whites may have something to say to Blacks, to be sure, but what Blacks have to say to Whites is felt to be more imperative. And everyone has to be honest.

Black Lives, White Lives is the closest we have in print to a kind of constructed conversation, although the participants never speak directly to one another. It is divided into alternating sections, one featuring Black informants, the other Whites. This pattern gives the book the rhythm of conversation. Moreover, the interviews are edited to underscore the speech, the oral art of the speakers. As Blauner writes, For this book I adopted a preservationist philosophy. Not only do I value the richness of the varieties of American speech, the distinctiveness of Afro-American, white working-class, and late-sixties hippie language styles, but—beyond folkloric and aesthetic appeal—I felt that a book about identity and consciousness, about the way people see the world, had to respect and reproduce people’s actual language. For our language symbolizes as well as expresses the distinctiveness of our personal identity and our most important group memberships and identifications: family, ethnicity, class, peer group, and life-style enclave. He continues, The language style of black Americans in particular makes important sociological as well as personal statements (p. 361). In short, this book is as much about the power of dialect, how dialect, rightly rendered in its varieties, is a form of honesty and clarity. For instance, when speaking about how middle-class liberals have scapegoated the White working class as racist, Blauner points out, Also contributing to the blue-collar worker’s racist image is the style of working-class speech: no-nonsense straight talk, even exaggeration for effect. Blue-collar people don’t apologize for their racial feelings or soften their stereotyped views, unlike middle-class people who often mask theirs, prettying up their prejudices and talking in generalities (p. 138).

Blauner came to his project with as much seriousness about speech accuracy as Twain did in constructing the dialects of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The preoccupation with speech and the complexities of orality is what makes Black Lives, White Lives come alive, actually work, as a conversation, the informants speaking not only with and against the others in their racial section but with and against others in the section where the informants of the other race are holding forth. Four hundred people, Black and White, men and women, were interviewed for this project. Twenty-eight are featured in the book, sixteen Blacks and twelve Whites.

Although this is, in its way, a longitudinal work, 1968 is the key year here. It was certainly one of the most traumatic of post–World War II America, a year when the country came as close to a national race war as it ever would and when what bound it together seemed to have come undone in a gigantic nervous breakdown—the year of emancipation, resistance, and subversion. As one of the informants, Vera Brooke, put it years later, There are a whole lot of people who do not understand that the nuclear plants, the ecologically sound housing and living arrangements, the quality of health care, what happens to women, Chicanos, to gays, et cetera, really is, goddammit, rooted in the sixties (pp. 322–23). The 1960s, for Brooke, was the decade of radical redefinition. It was the 1960s that gave us racism as a common term.

I want to advance the proposition that there are two languages of race in America, Blauner writes in an essay that momentarily reflects on Black Lives, White Lives. Blacks and whites differ on their interpretations of social change from the 1960s through the 1990s because their racial languages define the central terms, especially ‘racism,’ differently.³ He argues that part of the major shift, the major act of redefinition that occurred in the 1960s, was the rise of the word racism as a more powerful political and sociological substitute for discrimination and prejudice, then the more common terms to describe the exclusion that Blacks experienced in American society. The shift to racism gave Blacks an extraordinary weapon to use against Whites, for the word was ideologically far more loaded, as it suggested that what Blacks experienced was not simply the acts of misguided or ill-intentioned or mentally ill individuals but the concerted actions of a race that was determined to control them in most aspects of their lives and to confine them institutionally, aesthetically, economically, emotionally, psychologically. Racism was not a neurosis or a psychosis merely causing bad or unjust or dehumanizing behavior that could be corrected by well-meaning people; it was a totalizing, intricately constructed, and deeply intelligent system that had to be attacked root and branch. As Blauner explains, his White students found it hard to accept the idea of racism as an ‘impersonal force.’ ⁴ Clearly derivative of Marxism, the concept of racism actually put Whites on the defensive, probably because it so effectively combined ridicule and an inexorable, irrefutable logic of oppression. Crystallized in the 1960s, racism became so compelling as an ideological weapon that, certainly by the 1980s, for a White to be accused of it was even more damning and stigmatizing than for a White to call a Black a n*****. Blacks were now on the offensive with this word, rather than the defensive, reacting to what Whites did or said. Whites, in self-defense, responded with the term reverse racism in the face of affirmative action, which brings to mind Crow Jim, the expression that Whites used to describe discrimination against Whites during the era of Jim Crow. It was the concept of racism that led to various forms of cognitive liberation: the Black Aesthetic, Afrocentrism, and critical race theory. The growth of the idea of racism, its penetration throughout the ruling and intellectual elites, made Black Lives Matter and the startling public reactions to the police killings of Michael Brown in 2014 and George Floyd in 2020 possible. Accusations of police brutality and police killings had sparked race rebellions in the 1960s in cities like Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles (Watts), Cleveland, and Detroit. But the responses to the deaths of Brown and Floyd were of a new order, as so many influential White opinion makers did not merely sympathize with rebelling Black protestors but supported and joined them. The pervasiveness of the concept of racism did this. Interestingly, as Blauner points out, By 1979 many of the African Americans in my study, particularly the older activists, were critical of the use of racism as a blanket explanation for all manifestations of racial inequality.⁵ Although these people were certainly not conservatives, they felt that the idea of racism made it seem as if Blacks could not help themselves, because Whites were responsible for all their problems, and Blacks, as a result, had to live their lives as a form of unending protest. They also thought that many younger Blacks were using the concept as a way to avoid personal responsibility. It was part of the disillusionment about race that followed 1968 for the activist generation of that period.

In this way, the follow-up interviews of Black Lives, White Lives in 1979 and 1986 feel like extended codas. The 1968 portion of the book is significantly longer than the subsequent sections. By 1979, the Democratic Party was headed for a major crack-up: as a severe energy crisis, a lackluster economy, and the general sense that liberalism had run out of ideas were exhausting the entire country, the Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy challenged sitting president Jimmy Carter for their party’s 1980 presidential nomination. Disco was big in the 1970s, as was cocaine, and the decade saw growing public acceptance of hardcore pornographic films. All of this seemed an escape from or an utter avoidance of the activism of the 1960s. The conservative Republican Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, exploiting the national mood of malaise and promising to return the country back to greatness, and the Democrats would not win the presidency again for twelve years. The year 1986 was in the middle of Reagan’s second term, which was marred by scandal and the sense that the president, though still popular, was a disengaged leader. The Black community was riddled with problems, exacerbated by Reagan’s cutbacks in social programs and the general conservative temperament of the country, which had lost interest in civil rights and repudiated the efficacy of large swaths of the welfare state. Many scholars of various political persuasions had come to believe that government intervention had not ameliorated poverty but rather bureaucratized and regulated it. Class stratification made Blacks a less unified group as the growing middle class escaped the city for the suburbs. On the other hand, the activist minister Jesse Jackson had mounted the most serious campaign ever launched by a Black person to try to win the presidential nomination of a major party. It was a time of considerable Black activism in the realm of electoral politics—for instance, Harold Washington became the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983 and Wilson Goode of Philadelphia in 1984—which would pay dividends in later decades. The informants had grown older and, not mellower by any means, certainly more contemplative, more enriched by experience, and more humbled by the contradictions and brevity of life itself. There is a poignancy in reading their testimony as they age. Black Lives, White Lives is a book about race, but it is, more importantly, a book about the humanity that informs what race is, a horribly flawed idea in which people have found moments of extraordinary redemption. In the interviews, the provincialism of the Blacks grows elegant and the universalism of the Whites finds itself often struggling against its own crabbed misconceptions. It is this humanity that Black and White Americans express about themselves and finally only they can understand and recognize in one another.

Some of the striking passages from Black Lives, White Lives:

Want me to tell you the absolute truth about it? I’m the mother of five kids, but I think that the Negro at this particular time will have to take the Black Panther route. And that’s killing, isn’t it? Hardy, I’m gonna be frank with you, because I’m frustrated now! But if we can’t get this white man to think no other way—and I’m a mother—if we can’t get him to see any other way—kill some policemen, the way that they’re killing us. (p. 74) (Florence Grier, domestic worker, welfare recipient, Black mother of five, 1968)

My generation had the feeling that if by our speech, by our appearances, by our . . . pretense of accepting the standards of middle-class white America, that we might grow to be Americans. But now at sixty, I realize that there’s no reason I should try to be an imitation middle-class white woman. I am not. (p. 96) (Elena Albert, Black amateur historian in San Francisco, 1968)

My taxes, in just a small home, have tripled. In ten years. On this block, any one of these people’ll tell you the same story. If it triples again, I’ll be long gone. I can’t even afford to retire on my social security and my not-too-bad little pension. And I’m getting more and more and more resentful of having to pay for broken windows and smashed typewriters and dirt and filth in buildings that have been taken over and burnt. Now these rats and these demonstration types, these militants are not going to get anywhere because they’re in the minority and their tactics are wrong. In the long run you’re going to find that these riots, these sit-ins, are going to fade and die. (p. 106) (George Hendrickson, White printer, grew up in India, father an English officer in the Boer War, 1968)

And I was looking at the ground and I saw someone, like peripheral vision, and I relaxed—somehow I had classified myself as safe. And I looked up and noticed that they had blond hair. And all the other things about them weren’t safe: they were big and strong, they had a wine bottle, they had boots on. And so I noticed that I not only have a predilection toward whiteness, but toward blond hair too. . . . Yeah, I think I’ve got a lot of very deeply rooted racism in me. And that kind of leads me toward pessimism, you know. Racism goes very, very deep and it’ll take a lot more than civil rights bills to do something about this country. (p. 118) (Bill Harcliff, nineteen years old at time of interview, White hippie, worked with and independent Black business, 1968)

Getting a job, trying to make a living for his family, and trying to take care of his home, and don’t be going around goofing off. He should treat his girlfriends or his wife with respect, make sure they have everything they supposed to, [but] not go overboard trying to buy everything that he think the wife want and don’t think about his kids.

Most of ’em these days, they don’t want to do for theirselves. But they expect a woman to go out and do for herself. He should do his best and not go around feeling sorry for hisself, thinking people supposed to give him handouts. Everywhere I go, that’s the attitude they have. (p. 130) (Sarah Williams, Black clerical worker, 1968)

I’m not very good with people who are dying. I’m too sentimental. When I talk to them, I get all choked in my voice, and tears come to my eyes. So whenever possible with my cancer patients, I send them to the chemotherapists. The chemotherapists seem to know how to handle this. (p. 315) (Henry Smith, Black physician, 1981)

Now whenever you get in a group, you count the number of this or the number of that. When we gathered before, we gathered in common, it was an association, and before the awareness wasn’t there. This great awareness that we have to meet quotas, it holds back the whole thing. There’s the initial felling of uneasiness. You can communicate a lot better when you don’t have this uneasiness. So we’ve turned it, life itself, into a quota business. (p. 234) (William Singer, native White Californian, wealthy business consultant, 1978)

All of that dying and destruction bred the Office of Economic Opportunity. The president was too busy with Vietnam; he didn’t want to deal with n*****s in this country then. Pacify them folks so they’d get off our backs. So they gave some money. I knew that money was short-lived. As soon as they got that thing resolved with the upper-middle-class white America, they were gonna come home and kick n*****s’ butts for running out and get somebody’s attention. And we as black women decided to take in all the training and expertise we could gather, so they can’t take what I got up here when the money ran out. There’s some very capable women, not only in Sacramento, but all over this country. Most of us are products of that OEO money. (p. 203) (Millie Harding, Alabama-born, Black community activist, 1979)

The sixties gave us people in higher places. But the rank and file is worse off than they was then. They’re on a destruction course. We have more killing, more murder. We have dropouts. Our schools is gone. Our churches is gone. And our business is gone. I’m going to say this—you don’t have to accept it—if we could do it over again, I don’t think I would suggest integration as what we want. It didn’t work. What we should have done was sue for separate but equal. (p. 192) (Howard Spence, rural Mississippi–born, sleeping car porter, small business owner, ex–NAACP field secretary, 1979)

There are a number of classic post–World War II sociological texts, works that actually gained popular audiences, like C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and such influential race studies as Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie, William Julius Wilson’s The Declining Significance of Race, Tricia Rose’s Black Noise, and Charles Keil’s Urban Blues. These books, in one way or another, changed my mind and moved my heart. Bob Blauner’s Black Lives, White Lives is another.

Gerald Early

Washington University

Saint Louis, Missouri

NOTES

Epigraphs. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006), p. 92; Henry David Thoreau, "Walden and Resistance to Civil Government," 2nd ed., ed. William Rossi (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 6.

1.  Attorney General Says U.S. a Nation of ‘Cowards’ When It Comes to Race, New York Times, November 8, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/world/americas/18iht-18holder.20285924.html.

2.  Tamar Jacoby, Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration (New York: Free Press, 1998), pp. 15–26; August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942–1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 5–11.

3.  Bob Blauner, Some Self-Critical Reflections on Colonized and Immigrant Minorities, in Still the Big News: Racial Oppression in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), p. 195.

4.  Ibid., p. 198.

5.  Ibid., p. 199.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For a project as long as mine, the list of people who made a real difference to its completion is staggering, and I apologize in advance to those whom I may have left out.

First I want to thank the research staff from the late 1960s, in particular David Wellman, who directed the interviewers: Hardy Frye, Alex Papillon, Lincoln Bergman, Sheila Gibson Stevens, H. Edward Price, and Maurice Haltom. Imaginative and committed, they each had the technical and personal skills that made it possible for people to share with them their lives and deep beliefs. I am also indebted to them for helping me locate people for the followup interviews in the late 1970s. And at numerous stages of the project Wellman and Frye have also taken time from their very busy schedules to comment on my work in progress.

I have benefited greatly from the suggestions of an ongoing discussion group that has included Troy Duster, Lillian Rubin, David Matza, Elliot Currie, Norma Wikler, and David Minkus, in addition to David Wellman. Robert Alford read the manuscript at a time when I specially needed his wise advice. Todd Gitlin gave me useful criticism and support for the project. Helena Hershel’s enthusiasm for my approach to this book has been important to me. Lois Benjamin’s suggestions were extremely valuable; I have learned much from our exchange of ideas. Tomás Almaguer, Barbara Christian, and Earl Lewis directed me to some of the more recent literature in the field. Others who have read all or parts of the work include Michael Hout, June Murray-Gill, Steve Millner, Linda Collins, Ron Takaki, Michael Messner, Beth Roy, Angie Fa, and Eloise Dunlap. Peter Carroll made a number of important contributions, including the idea of a third round of interviews and useful suggestions for cutting an excessively long manuscript. Margie Gilford checked census data and Joselyn Stuart helped with footnotes.

Throughout ten years of writing, I have been sustained emotionally and in countless other ways by my comrades in what must be the longest ongoing men’s support group. Lloyd Churgin, Russell Ellis, Ron Elson, Bill Lawler, and David Deitch also read all or parts of the book. The friendship and critical suggestions of Bob Ehrlich; David Matza, Carole Julian, and Madeline Marcus have also been important to me.

Margaret Henderson typed most of the second-round interviews, with uncanny accuracy. Marcy McGaugh transcribed all of the third-round interviews and typed innumerable versions of the manuscript in its later stages. She did first-rate work, and I have also valued her deep understanding of the book’s content. Of the many typists who worked on earlier stages of the project, I give special thanks to Julie Lamont, Lois Macmillan, Susan Chu, Lynn Turner, and Olivia Inaba.

Virtually all the typing was paid for by the Committee on Research at the University of California; the committee’s long and patient support has been indispensable. The first phase of the research was financed by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. Support from the Ford Foundation in 1978 was important in making possible the second round of interviews. And a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1980–81 helped supplement two quarters of sabbatical leave from my teaching duties at the University of California, Berkeley. I want to thank also the staff members of the Department of Sociology at the university for their work and personal kindnesses.

I feel honored to have worked closely with James H. Clark, the director of the University of California Press. His continuing belief that a book would someday emerge—through all the diverse outlines, drafts, and passing years—was indispensable to my own ability to concentrate on the task at hand, that of turning the massive primary materials and sometimes inchoate idea of their organization into a workable result. I also enjoyed working with Laird Easton and Mary Renaud at the Press and want to thank my sister Sonia Saxon for help with the last-minute preparations. In the final stages the manuscript was immeasurably improved by Amy Einsohn’s outstanding copyediting.

I especially thank Marya and Jonathan for their patience and understanding of a father who always had a book to write.

My biggest debt is to the people whose life stories make up the book. They were willing to be interviewed not only once, but three times over the course of what must have seemed like a never-ending study. I want to thank them for their candor and their cooperation, and to single out, by pseudonym, three Sacramentoans who provided useful advice and help in introducing me to some of the people in the book: Millie Harding, Harold Sampson, and especially the late Florence Grier.

Introduction

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT THE RACIAL EXPERIENCE and consciousness of black and white Americans. What is unique about it is the attempt to explore race and racism within the context of people’s lives over the course of almost twenty years, a period spanning three decades each of which has had its own distinctive political and cultural climate. The subjects in this book were interviewed in 1968, again in 1978–79, and for a third time in 1986. The sixteen blacks and twelve whites speak in their own words about how their lives unfolded, how their political beliefs and racial attitudes changed or remained the same, and how they assess the social transformations they have witnessed. The long span of the study permits us to hold in view both historical shifts in the zeitgeist, or spirit of the time, and the processes of personal aging, as the individuals grow older, influenced by—and in turn contributing to—larger social changes.

On the day Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, April 4, 1968, we had already interviewed almost half of the blacks in the study and had just begun to interview the whites. The timing of our work intersected with the national tragedy to create a natural experiment, an unintended research design that enabled us to compare the reactions of blacks and whites to King’s death and also to observe the effect of his assassination on people’s opinions of his political philosophy and historical role.

There was a striking difference in the ways blacks and whites reacted. Most blacks we talked to mourned not only the civil rights leader himself but also the ray of hope that he promised, his dream that a just and integrated society might still be realized. How profoundly the assassination affected black people is suggested by the bursts of eloquence that the topic evoked. Even a year later, almost every black person could tell us exactly what they were doing at the moment they heard the news. A forty-year-old state office worker in Sacramento remembered that she was standing on a chair in her kitchen, reaching up to get something out of a cupboard, when the radio made an announcement. An eighteen-year-old in the Watts section of Los Angeles heard the news from a gym coach, who interrupted a schoolyard basketball game: Everyone just froze for about fifteen seconds, everyone just stood there . . . and we just stopped playing completely. Everyone sat down and wondered what’s going to happen in Watts. . . . It’s just going to boil like a volcano and blow up.

Virtually all the blacks we talked to felt an immediate and deep sense of loss, very much like a death in the family. Even people who did not entirely support his policies strongly identified with Dr. King and his bereaved wife. Before the assassination many people had disparaged King’s leadership, arguing that his moderate style and nonviolent philosophy had outlived their usefulness. Other criticisms concerned King’s opposition to the Vietnam war, his support of the striking sanitation workers in Memphis, and his plans for a Poor People’s March on Washington.¹

After April 4, these criticisms were muted by grief and by identification: They kill part of me when they kill [John] Kennedy; they kill the other part of me when they kill Martin Luther King, said a hospital worker in her fifties. Sorrow was infused by anger, even in some middle-aged black men who had been brought up in the South and been taught to suppress the very awareness of that potentially dangerous emotion. Many redoubled their determination to continue the struggle for racial justice. One unusually eloquent speaker proudly noted that King’s work had finally buried the myth that southern blacks were docile and would not fight back.

We heard surprisingly little generalized hatred of whites, but many blacks were repelled by what they saw as white people’s pretense of sorrow and concern. Yet many whites we interviewed didn’t even try to pretend sorrow or regret. A firefighter told us that his co-workers cheered when they heard that King had died. And when I reinterviewed people in 1979, in the second stage of this study, a suburban Sacramento housewife said that when she told her husband the news back in 1968, he said, They ought to shoot more of them. But such outright hostility was not typical. Overall, King’s death was just not that important to most white people. Almost no one introduced his or her reaction by fixing the moment in time when they first heard the news, and their thoughts and feelings were more abstract, less personal.

Although quite a few whites appreciated King’s historical role, for some it was a grudging appreciation. I thought he was a good man, but I think he did a helluva lot more harm than good, said a white resident of a predominantly black housing project. And a printer in his late sixties granted that King was a very great man, but immediately qualified his praise by saying that he was not the pacifist that he claimed to be, but instead was one of the most inflammatory speakers he had ever heard. Still other whites saw the martyred leader as a sinister force, a firebrand, and they held him personally responsible for the country’s racial troubles, including the violence following the assassination. Many whites felt resentful, even jealous, of the time television devoted in the wake of the assassination to documentaries about King and the civil rights movement.

It is also true that television educated some people. And there were other whites, particularly some of the San Francisco hippies we interviewed, who were deeply moved by the death of King. One young woman said: Most men until then had either gone to one side or the other. And he was still there keeping the two middle-class masses [black and white] talking to each other. And keeping them with hope. And then he was gone. A great big silence, a big emptiness. I remember the day; it seemed very quiet. [I felt] sort of abandoned.

As these responses to the assassination suggest, blacks and whites were sharply divided in 1968. A month before the assassination, the Kerner Commission had warned the country: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.* During interviews conducted with the same respondents in 1978 and 1979, in the second phase of this study, great differences in outlook still remained, with many whites believing that King’s dream of a racially just society had already come to pass, while blacks were adamant that relatively little progress had been made. But in their feelings about King himself, the two groups had come somewhat closer together. Whites sounded less extreme in their racial attitudes, perhaps in part because they were no longer confronted by a strong and aggressive black movement and because the public clamor and pressure for racial equality had abated. By 1979 the suburban husband who had wanted more of them killed had, his wife now said, mellowed to the blacks. Her neighbors, she added, look back and respect Martin Luther King’s work even though they felt very strongly against him during the time he was on his sit-down strikes. Among blacks who had derided King in 1968 as irrelevant or overly conciliatory, opinions had also changed. A longshoreman who came close to calling King an Uncle Tom before the assassination—turning one cheek, then the other, you’ll never get nothing over, brother—now likened him to Marcus Garvey in historical importance (though not, of course, in political strategy) and added that blacks would have been in a much better situation had King lived.

By the summer of 1986, when I interviewed people for the third time, King’s birthday had become a national holiday, and the passage of time had softened some of the opposition to the man and his beliefs. The holiday itself is an extremely significant achievement—even if not recognized by all states. But as King has been turned into an official hero, his political agenda has been reduced to the advocacy of nonviolence. The national celebration, ironically, makes it easier to avoid facing squarely the evils of racism, economic injustice, and war that he struggled against. Furthermore, the canonization of Dr. King distorts the historical memory. The strong tendency to portray King as virtually synonymous with civil rights leads people to overlook the movement’s other brave and effective leaders and foot soldiers. Ronald Reagan, in particular, has used the holiday to suggest a national consensus about racial justice. But in truth no such consensus existed in the sixties, and none exists today.

Through the oral histories in this book I have tried to evoke the late sixties as those years were experienced then, as a period rife with conflict when America seemed to be dividing into two camps: those who were for the system and those who were against it. The first set of interviews took place from late 1967 through early 1969, at a time when relations between blacks and whites were becoming so polarized that many people contemplated the prospect of a race war and speculated about what they would do when it broke out. Racial conflict had intensified during the sixties, and by 1968 people’s nerves were on edge, their sensibilities razor-sharp, their convictions passionate. As the conventions that customarily inhibited frank discussion of sensitive issues relaxed in the anything goes mood of the sixties, people were eager to talk about race—but, in such a highly charged climate, only with someone from their own racial group. With few exceptions, we therefore used white interviewers to talk to our white respondents and blacks to interview blacks.

Our interest was racial consciousness, not only in its unusually pointed manifestations that year, but also as it developed in the course of people’s lives. We chose the method of a racial life history to explore the ways in which various beliefs and assumptions, implicit as well as explicit, became a part of the way people viewed themselves, their society, and other groups. We looked at the role of race and racism in the everyday lives of blacks and whites—in school experiences, at work, with the law, and in other institutional areas. We were interested in the personal as well as the political, but especially the connection between the two, concurring with C. Wright Mills that investigating the relation between public issues and private troubles is sociology’s special mandate.

So in addition to the life story, we focused equally on the racial politics of the day and asked people what they thought about civil rights leaders, integration, black power, nationalism, nonviolence, and other issues then under debate. We asked blacks about racism: how they coped with it day-to-day, how it affected their manhood and womanhood and the relations between the sexes. They talked about black culture, about the ways they were different from or the same as whites, and which aspects of the black experience were ethnic strengths to be preserved, which were group weaknesses. Whites were asked how they explained the inequality between the races, whether they believed racism existed or not, how they saw their own involvement in it, how important whiteness was as a part of their personal identity, and how they made sense of and reacted to the growing assertiveness and militancy of black people. We had a special interest in probing the tacit theories people had about the disadvantaged status of racial minorities. Did they blame the system for failing to provide equal opportunity, or did they fault the minority group’s culture and characteristics?**

Collectively, these interviews provide a picture of a decade of intensified consciousness and rapid social change in which the impact of the historical moment on individual lives was unusually transparent. They also show people going through changes, as the phrase went, changes in their political viewpoints, self-awareness, and personal commitments. But what happened to these new values and opinions as the political climate shifted in the 1970s? Curious about this, I began reinterviewing some of the same people in 1978.

By that time I sensed that the climate had changed enough so that I might be able to interview blacks as well as whites. It’s also true that I didn’t have much choice; in the prosperous sixties a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health had financed the interviewing staff. Even more important, I wanted the chance to talk to the people whose life stories I had been working on and was learning so much from. I was apprehensive at first, particularly about interviewing the more nationalistic and angry blacks, the more conservative or racist whites. But I didn’t have to be. Most people were pleased, almost flattered, to be remembered by a research project after so many years. No one refused to be interviewed and I sensed that only two—one white, one black—were holding back their real opinions. (They do not appear in the book.)

One goal of the followup interview was to bring the life history up to date, to catch up on changes as well as continuities in work, economic welfare, family situation, and life-style. I also asked people about personal issues—how they had grown or changed in their sense of self, how satisfied they were with their lives, how they were dealing with growing older.

Second, I was interested in consciousness. We were in a more conservative time, a more private era, and a period of relative racial peace and harmony. Racial issues were no longer on the front page, and public events in general did not capture people’s imaginations or intrude into their personal lives as they had in the sixties. Now the most pressing issues seemed to be economic: inflation and the soaring price of gasoline. So I was interested in finding out what had happened to black anger, militancy, and nationalist leanings. And what had whites learned about minority groups in the intervening years? Had people’s views changed with the new times, or were the perspectives of the sixties still a part of them?

Finally, I wanted to find out how people looked back on the 1960s from the vantage point of a very different era. How did they assess the decade’s impact on American society, on racial equality, and on their own lives? I was searching for the legacy of the sixties and its special racial consciousness: was its explosive impact as ephemeral as it appeared toward the end of the seventies, or had it left significant traces on the lives and worldviews of the people who had lived through its unique intensity?

During the 1980s the policies and philosophy of the Reagan presidency both reflected and set the national tone on racial matters. The administration cut programs for the poor, relaxed enforcement of various civil rights laws and executive orders, and tried—with some success—to roll back much of the momentum minority groups