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Autumn 2002 | Vol. 12, No. 4
Job Loss Didn’t
Make the Underclass The history of Indianapolis
John H. McWhorter shows that culture is
mightier than economics.
t’s summer 1993 in Indianapolis, and we’re at SoulFest, an
annual event supposedly celebrating black culture and black
enterprise. But a taint hangs in the air. Since the first SoulFest
back in the early seventies, too many of the young blacks who’ve
shown up to “celebrate” seem to equate black culture and
enterprise with nasty scuffles and petty theft. This year, though,
disorder turns to tragedy: young black hoodlums shoot to death
an 18-year-old black boy. City officials, fearing more violence, cancel
SoulFest the following year. It reopens in 1995, but now with a heavy
police presence hard to square with a sense of community
achievement. Three years later, another black-on-black homicide mars
the festival, prompting its cancellation again in 1999. In 2000, the event
is back on, but in a scaled-down version, renamed “Family Fun Fest”
and moved to a new location.
The SoulFest episodes grew out of a dysfunctional inner-city culture—a
culture of violence, illegitimacy, substance abuse, and non-work—that
took root in Indianapolis over the past few decades, as it did in other
American cities. But what caused that pathological culture in the first
place? Delinquency and crime are age-old problems, but the savagery
on display at SoulFest and the desolation of the city’s poor minority
neighborhoods —these are things we’ve only had to endure since the
sixties. How had a segment of Indianapolis ’s black community gone so
wrong?
The conventional explanation on the Left (and among many blacks) is
economic and social. The dogma—it began to take hold among
sociologists as far back as the sixties but became a verity among elites
in the eighties with the publication of Harvard professor William Julius
Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged and various papers by social thinker
John Kasarda—runs like this. In the sixties, the blue-collar jobs that
supported previous generations of urban blacks moved out of town,
beyond the reach of public transit. Left behind by this
“deindustrialization” was a core of ill-educated young blacks. With little
hope of finding employment, these young people understandably
became skeptical of the value of work. With an attitude problem
imposed upon them by forces beyond their control, they then frightened
off any potential employers who might be willing to set up shop in the
inner city, thus completing the vicious circle.
Those who hold this view see the self-destructive behavior of today’s
black underclass as a natural response to an economically unjust and
institutionally racist society. The only humane—or realistic—solution: a
radical restructuring of society.
But the influence of an idea can result as much from its repetition as
from its validity. We need to verify a theory before we accept it, and the
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from its validity. We need to verify a theory before we accept it, and the
history of black Indianapolis radically undermines the
deindustrialization hypothesis. In fact, that history makes it painfully
clear that what really did in the city’s poor blacks was not a dearth of
jobs but instead a destructive cultural mix: equal measures of the
blame game and the formulaic rage that goes along with it, the welfare
dependency that a sense of black grievance fostered, and the
condescending “benevolence” of white liberals who championed rage
as admirable and dependency as justice.
Blacks began moving to Indiana from the South right after the Civil War
put an end to slavery, but it wasn’t until the Great Migration of the teens
that their ranks in the state really swelled. By 1920, Indiana was home
to more than 80,000 blacks, up from 11,000 or so in 1860. The black
immigrants flocked into the cities: by 1930, fully 90 percent of the state’s
black population lived either in Indianapolis or in Gary, concentrated in
overwhelmingly black neighborhoods.
Virulent racism was a fact of life for the newcomers. Despite the
passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869, black suffrage didn’t
become a reality in Indiana until the 1880s; blacks couldn’t join the
state militia until the late 1930s. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was
Indiana’s largest and most powerful social organization, with 40
percent of the native-born white adult male population belonging to it.
Indianapolis ’s mayor was a Klansman, and the Klan controlled the
legislature and the governor’s office—the Democratic party was
essentially the Klan at the polls. In 1924, 6,500 Klansmen paraded
through downtown Indianapolis to a cheering crowd of 75,000
onlookers after Klan election victories. For good reason, black
Indianapolis became home to an anti-lynching league. One of the last
recorded lynchings north of the Mason-Dixon line occurred in nearby
Marion in 1930.
Indianapolis ’s migrant blacks confronted in-your-face job
discrimination. They could join few unions and only rarely found open
paths that might take them beyond low-skilled jobs. Typical black
workers in Indianapolis were laborers, shelf-stockers, custodians, and
domestics, not doctors or diplomats. In factories, blacks usually found
themselves in low-level, poorly paid positions and indefensibly
underrepresented as craftsmen. The occasional promotion of a
talented black into higher positions sometimes ignited revolts among
white factory workers.
Yet despite this hard-edged injustice, Indianapolis ’s black migrants
didn’t sit on their hands or become an underclass. Their response to
racism and discrimination wasn’t to lash out or to become passive
victims but to push ahead.
Indianapolis ’s blacks worked, taking whatever jobs were available.
While the unemployment rate was higher among the city’s blacks than
whites, most blacks managed to find enough work to get by. Black
employment steadily increased after World War II—in unskilled but
solid jobs —thanks to new federal fair employment requirements that
civil rights leaders had sought as just compensation for blacks ’
services during the war. By the early 1960s, whatever employment gap
remained between blacks and whites was closing.
Despite the overt racism they faced a century ago, Indianapolis’s blacks
created a flourishing world-within-a-world. An energetic black business
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created a flourishing world-within-a-world. An energetic black business
district grew up on Indiana Avenue—the “Grand Ol’ Street” as locals
called it. Madame C. J. Walker, whose hair-care empire made her
America’s first self-made female millionaire, moved her vast operation
to the district in 1910, employing 3,000 people. Her yellow-brick Walker
building, boasting a theater, a fancy restaurant, and ample office space,
anchored the Grand Ol’ Street.
A small but growing black bourgeoisie peopled the elegant six square
blocks of Ransom Place. Among Ransom Place’s residents were
accomplished individuals like Henry W. Furniss, an African-American
doctor and onetime U.S. ambassador to Haiti. As early as June 1901,
the Recorder, a black-owned newspaper, could publish a surprisingly
long list of Indianapolis ’s blacks worth $5,000 or more—a comfortable
sum at the time.
Civil society flourished in this enterprising community. Branches of the
National Association of Colored Women, the National Negro Business
League, and various lodges thrived; churches were ubiquitous. Indiana
Avenue played host to a crackling-hot music scene. Old black
Indianapolis also enjoyed four lively African-American newspapers. In
addition to the Recorder (now in its 107th year), you could read the
fiercely Republican Leader, the Freeman (probably America’s first
illustrated black paper), and the World. The Recorder focused on local
affairs, publicizing black-owned businesses and urging readers not to
patronize white stores that refused to advertise in black newspapers.
The paper often ran contrasting front-page stories, one highlighting the
latest example of black progress, the other lambasting a remaining
racial inequity.
Reflecting its hardworking, striving spirit, old black Indianapolis
hungered for education. In 1927, when the segregated school system
opened the brand-new, all-black Crispus Attucks High School— staffed
by rigorous, often college-educated African-American instructors, for
whom teaching was one of the few challenging careers available—
demand was so high that 1,300 students showed up for instruction in a
school built for 1,000. Night school became popular among
Indianapolis blacks unable to attend classes during the day.
By the late sixties, at the very moment that blacks were winning political
victories ensuring their civil rights, this enterprising, hardworking
community was rapidly coming undone. One could now see the
stirrings of a new black Indianapolis —a place where, three decades
later, the SoulFest murders would be regarded more as same-old,
same-old than as aberrations. Indianapolis had its first race riot in
1969, set off by a clash between black radicals and white cops on—
ironically—Indiana Avenue. By 1973, central Indianapolis’s black
neighborhoods were so threatening that special escorts now ushered
black kids to and from school.
Out of the shadows crawled black “leaders ” whom the old black
Indianapolis would have run out of town in a week. Even before the
1969 riot, a petty crook, Snookie Hendricks, got the ear of a local white
establishment jittery from seeing the race violence engulfing other
American cities. Claiming that he was uniquely well placed to “maintain
stability” among blacks, he won from city officials a municipal
position—only to lose it for dealing drugs on the side. Fred Crawford, a
Black Panther from Oakland, set up shop in Indianapolis, spouting
regulation Panther rhetoric: “I don’t feel we can gain our freedom
without a revolution. This could only happen if the white man raised his
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without a revolution. This could only happen if the white man raised his
fist off the black man’s neck, but I don’t think he’ll ever do that.”
The old, go-getting black Indianapolis hadn’t completely vanished. Its
spirit motivated schoolteacher Mattie Coney to found the Citizens Forum
in 1966, just as things began to go bad. The Forum helped blacks
clean up their increasingly disordered neighborhoods and point their
children toward success. It established more than 3,000 block clubs
over the years to sweep up trash and “de-rat-ify” vermin-infested
buildings. It distributed a pamphlet urging black parents to teach their
kids about cleanliness and polite conduct, and to take pride in
themselves. Coney came from a solid working-class family that taught
her that blacks’ road to salvation was to “quit feeling sorry for ourselves
and take advantage of opportunities.” Lyndon B. Johnson granted her a
special award for her efforts, and she won accolades from Presidents
Eisenhower and Ford.
But in the new black Indianapolis, the Snookie Hendrickses seemed to
outweigh the Mattie Coneys. The efforts of Coney and those like her
weren’t enough to prevent inner-city breakdown. By the early nineties,
the damage was inescapable and catastrophic. Blacks, just 21 percent
of Indianapolis ’s population, now committed 56 percent of its rapidly
increasing violent crimes. Roughly one in ten of the city’s black males
aged 16 to 24 was in jail; black boys were 43 percent of those in
juvenile detention. In 1989, the city had 68 homicides; in 1991, 101; in
1998, 160. The majority of these were black-on-black murders.
Lax parenting grew common in a community that once held its children
on a short tether. Indianapolis now had the highest rate of infant
mortality of any big city in America. The percentage of black children
living in one-parent homes was three times the white rate. In contrast
with the stampede on Crispus Attucks High School in the twenties,
dropping out was now commonplace. The black unemployment rate
was three times the rate among whites. Drug use was stratospheric.
All this is wretchedly familiar today. But blacks in Indianapolis in 1950—
to say nothing of blacks of Madame Walker’s era—would be staggered
to see what had befallen their community.
On the “deindustrialization” view, this swift slide downhill resulted from
two intertwined developments. First, a second Great Migration of
southern blacks settled in Indianapolis during the 1960s. Two-thirds of
these migrants were under 25, and three-quarters were women, many
of them fleeing failed marriages with their children. These newcomers
naturally settled in the low-rent inner city. Second, right at this time low-
skilled manufacturing jobs —the only ones the new arrivals were
qualified for—began leaving the city, primarily, in Indianapolis’s case, to
the nearby suburbs. Black rage and hopelessness multiplied.
Yet is it really plausible to blame the alienation and brutality that gave
rise to the black Indianapolis of SoulFest on factories moving a few
miles away? And that’s how far it was: a study documented that, in
1972, the average distance of manufacturing jobs from the inner city
was a mere 3.2 miles!
Granted, the transportation situation was far from perfect. Only 15
percent of the sixties migrants had cars to get to the new suburban
plants, while the local bus system, designed for the more centralized
city of yore, ran lines to the suburbs only infrequently, and often not late
enough to serve the night shift adequately. But then ask: if blacks had
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enough to serve the night shift adequately. But then ask: if blacks had
for decades been picking up stakes and moving thousands of miles
from their homes in search of work, why did some of them suddenly
lapse into criminality and dysfunction when work moved a few miles
away? Maybe they didn’t have many cars, but what about carpooling?
What about the community combining its resources and buying a few
vehicles at least viable enough to make it to the suburbs to work? What
about some entrepreneur buying a jalopy and ferrying his neighbors for
a small fee? Ordinarily, people make do: today, in Indiana’s third-
poorest county—the mostly white, rural Crawford—nearly 60 percent of
its workers commute to jobs outside the county. What made
Indianapolis ’s inner-city blacks so different?
And if factory relocation really did cause an epidemic of poverty in inner-
city Indianapolis, wouldn’t people living there have engaged in a
constant, agonizing search for work, even agitating publicly for it—at
least for a few years, until hopelessness set in? Wouldn’t this be true
even if, as John Kasarda might say, there was a geographical
“mismatch” between a growing number of uneducated blacks and the
region’s low-skilled jobs? But no community activist, scholar, or
resident attests that this kind of hustle was much in evidence.
Punching even bigger holes in the factory-jobs-moved-away
explanation is that, in Indianapolis, lots of them didn’t. Scholars Shane
Davies and Melvin Albaum found that, by the late sixties, center-city
Indianapolis had lost 43 percent of its blue-collar jobs, and that 228 of
922 factories had moved to suburbia. But that left 57 percent of the jobs
and 694 factories still in place. By the eighties, UPS, GM, Stokely–Van
Camp, International Harvester, Chevrolet Truck and Body, and many
other businesses offered jobs in the city for people of little skill.
Stephen Goldsmith, Indianapolis ’s mayor from 1992 to 2002, says:
“Anyone who wanted a job could work.”
Moreover, inner-city neighborhoods across the country fell apart,
whether the deindustrialization was moderate, as in Indianapolis, or
more extensive, as in Chicago or Philadelphia. This would force the
deindustrialization theorist to argue that even some factory flight is
enough to trigger a collapse of civilization among a segment of the
black population—a dubious contention.
Aware of how weak the deindustrialization argument really is in
Indianapolis ’s case, scholars have groped for supplemental
explanations. The 3.2 miles subjected poor Indianapolis blacks to “lack
of job information,” says one. Or maybe there’s a “hard-core
unemployed’s conception of distance,” different from yours and mine,
says another. But obviously, the second Great Migration leaves these
speculations dead in the water. The person who gleans job information
from across state lines would have little trouble honing in on it from a
few miles off; the person who negotiates the distance from Mississippi
to Indiana presumably shouldn’t be stymied by the three miles from city
to suburb.
Nor can we blame racism. Sure, even after the 1960s, discrimination
existed in Indianapolis. But the limits on black aspiration were fast
falling away. To compare this era with the days when the Klan ran the
state and blacks were completely marginalized is an insult to the
achievements of old black Indianapolis. In the early seventies,
aggressive efforts to help poor blacks multiplied. The Indiana Chamber
of Commerce began affirmative action in hiring and called for
businesses to sign a pledge to start on-the-job training programs for
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businesses to sign a pledge to start on-the-job training programs for
people with limited skills. Similar state and federal programs followed.
Residual racism certainly didn’t hold back the large numbers of blacks
who established prosperous businesses in Indianapolis during the
1970s. William G. Mays, to take one, founded the Mays Chemical
Company and later became head of the Indiana Chamber of
Commerce. Walter Blackburn’s architectural firm specialized in building
churches, schools, and low-income housing. Informed movers and
shakers in Indianapolis, white and black, stress the high degree of
cooperation between white and black community leaders over the past
decades.
Racial discrimination may not have expired completely in Indianapolis,
but by no stretch of the imagination has it been a sentence for failure.
Strip away the jargon of “industrial dispersion,” and what you’re left with
is an argument that poor Indianapolis blacks turned their
neighborhoods into war zones because there weren’t enough buses to
take them up the road a piece. A constructive black history needs a
more plausible explanation for black failure in Indianapolis.
And that explanation is cultural. At the same moment in the sixties when
Indianapolis experienced a moderate degree of deindustrialization, the
black street began to embrace the entitlement-seeking, guilt-
mongering, society-is-to-blame worldview now so drearily familiar
among black leaders. This resentment-based ideology has dissuaded
legions of blacks from seeking the American Dream out of the
wrongheaded belief that the country is too racist and morally corrupt for
them to embrace it.
The new black ideology taught that dressing down whitey for the sins of
the past was “blacker” than facing what needed doing in the present.
Under this new mind-set, someone like Mattie Coney, tirelessly
seeking the uplift of the black community, was inauthentic—an “Aunt
Jemima,” working for the racist establishment. Mmoja Ajabu, who
during the nineties set up an Indianapolis branch of the New Black
Panthers and tried to assemble a “militia” to overthrow the government,
exemplified the authentic approach. “We know we are talking about
death and destruction and grief in a whole lot of people’s families,” he
said of his plans for social improvement. “But only then will they come
to the negotiating table and talk candidly about getting something
done.” Ajabu became embroiled in an arson case and then spent a
year behind bars for threatening a prosecutor in another case. Some
leader.
In Indianapolis, one could already see a symbol of this shift in values in
a booth display at the 1971 Black Expo, a showcase of black enterprise.
Called “Dignity Unlimited,” the display depicted a jail stockade in front of
a painting of a black man and boy in chains. The self-pitying defeatism
of the exhibit, at a time of such vaulting new opportunities for blacks,
would have baffled Attucks High’s principal Russell Lane back in the
thirties. To celebrate the school’s opening, John Wesley Hardrick, a
local black portraitist, presented Lane with a painting of black laborers
to hang in the school. Lane refused to mount it in the lobby, for fear of
discouraging his students ’ highest ambitions.
But as the new black ideology seduced many black educators, men like
Lane became a vanishing breed. Back in 1922, a letter from “16
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Lane became a vanishing breed. Back in 1922, a letter from “16
progressive colored citizens” of the Better Indianapolis League insisted
that: “No one section of the population can be isolated and segregated
without taking from it the advantage of the common culture.” In the
nineties, by contrast, several of Indianapolis’s predominantly black
schools were using historically dubious “Afrocentric” curricula,
stressing blacks ’ radical separateness from other Americans. And the
most vocal of the city’s black clergymen were spreading an anti-white
gospel, calling indignantly for “payback” and insisting that black
pathology is a legacy of slavery and segregation—a proposition that the
existence of self-reliant old black Indianapolis flat-out refutes.
The cultural change that undermined inner-city neighborhoods also led
to a vast expansion of the welfare rolls—a development that
accelerated urban black America’s downward spiral. Nationally, the
rolls swelled 107 percent from 1960 to 1970, after increasing just 17
percent over the previous decade. In Indiana, the rise in welfare
dependency between 1964 and 1977 was greatest in the three
counties (including Indianapolis) where blacks were concentrated. For
a segment of the black population, welfare became a dysfunctional,
dependent way of life—in particular, for the single-parent families that
became the inner-city norm.
In 1967 Indianapolis, a disturbed Mattie Coney was already warning:
“The idea of expecting a ‘great white father’ to hand one something for
nothing has created a class of irresponsible welfare slaves.”
Goldsmith, who worked in child support in Indianapolis during the
1980s, lost count of how many welfare recipients told him that life on
the dole simply paid better than holding down a job: “ ‘Give me a job
that pays better than welfare, and sure I’ll go to work,’ they’d say.”
Such a demoralized and dependent life -style would have shocked the
residents of old black Indianapolis. Back then, the black community
took care of its own. But black private charities such as Alpha Home
and Flanner House tirelessly conveyed the ideal of self-sufficiency to
those they helped. The ideal clearly resonated. Self-respecting people
worked to support themselves, however low their wages. Most blacks
sought charity only under truly pressing circumstances and generally
sought immediate provisions in a pinch rather than open-ended
support. Nor was this assumption that charity was a last-ditch choice
the result of a sense that blacks weren’t likely to get help. From 1894 to
1920, fully 96 percent of black applicants to the city’s private charities,
grouped under the umbrella of the Charity Organization Society, had
their applications approved. It’s just that it wasn’t right to become
dependent on others ’ charity.
In the sixties, though, such attitudes became passé. For the blame-
game crowd among blacks, the nation was too racist to allow blacks
opportunity, and anyway blacks deserved such reparations for the
injustices of the past. So where was the shame in open-ended
government dependency? By contrast, to find a way to make that 3.2-
mile trip to the suburbs to work a job that paid “chump change” was just
to conspire in one’s own oppression by an unjust system.
For many “concerned” whites, in turn, maintaining black people on the
dole became a substitute for true moral engagement—a cheap way of
showing “compassion” for the eternally piteous people so wronged by
the nation. Both blacks and whites pushed to reform welfare laws,
increasing benefits and loosening eligibility rules. The old one-year
state-residency requirement went out the window, for example, so
people could move from a less to a more generous state and sign right
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people could move from a less to a more generous state and sign right
up. Neighborhood service centers opened across the country to
encourage people to go on welfare who in the past would have steered
clear.
The deindustrialization theorist would blame the rapid expansion of
welfare on those same old vanishing manufacturing jobs. But in
feminist Katherine Rosier’s 1990 study of women on welfare in
Indianapolis, no welfare client speaks of “the factories moving away.”
Rosier’s interview subjects readily admit that the downward trajectory of
their lives began in the seventies with periods of drug abuse and
sleeping around—behavior that elite culture had largely de-stigmatized.
Culture matters.
We have a choice, then, between two factors that might explain the
descent of a previously dignified people into a violent, feckless
underclass. Choice one: a new culture emerged of dependency and
self-destructive hostility toward mainstream culture. Choice two: it got a
little harder to get to work. A black history that endorses the second
choice while dismissing the first substitutes playing the underdog for
common sense.
If we could play the tape again but keep all the factories where they
were in 1960, the inner city would have undergone the same sad
transformation.
[Table of Contents Autumn 2002]
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