In Search of W. E. B. DuBois…

 “The Road Not Taken”

I’m departing from my custom here for two reasons. First, I mentioned W. E. B. DuBois in a FB post quite critical of Samuel L. Jackson. I know he’s a student of DuBois. It would be impossible to graduate from Morehouse College without studying him intensively. He is historically as important as other gifted black leaders of the 19th century because of his emphasis on superior education as the best way out of the deeps of poverty and disrespect suffered by former slaves in a largely (though hardly completely) hostile white world. His message was muddied in its interpretation by mass audiences because of  his fondness for Marxism as an economic model superior to land- and industry-based capitalism. He came to be known in many academic circles as “the road not taken.” 

Both black and white Americans responded more easily to DuBois’s strategic rival, Booker T. Washington, who preached and exemplified success by the route of hard work, willingness to start anywhere and prove merit by doing more than anyone else and doing it better than anyone else. He got his first teaching job by accepting the humiliating challenge of cleaning a classroom overnight. He cleaned it within an inch of his life, even using a toothbrush to scrub the grit from between the planks of the floor. He got the job and rose to prominence from there.

DuBois, who had earned a PhD. From Harvard long before anyone has conceived of Affirmative Action, countered Washington’s bottom-up strategy with a top-down strategy, describing a process of identifying the most talented young people and providing them with a level of education that would enable to distinguish themselves in any field, from intellectual to technical an beyond. The early establishment of excellent black colleges, to this day referred (not patronizingly by most) as “The Black Ivies,” was the first step toward DuBois’s vision. The schools succeeded but DuBois became finally a footnote in Civil a rights history.

The sad thing is that “the road not taken” suggests the need for a decision between the two approaches. They were not contradictory in the least. Both roads should have followed, developed into super highways, and powered the emergence of competitive black middle and upper classes. Until the Democrat imposition of Jim Crow and brutal segregation laws rendered both roads for America’s black citizen impassible.

The cruelest historical irony in America’s experience with racial issues is the fact that clever and unscrupulous Democrats managed to steal the black vote from the Republican Party, which had been founded in the first place as an abolitionist organization. The party of Lincoln, the party of Ulysses Grant (who also accomplished major advances toward racial equality but is now slandered by academic/Democrat historians), the party of Dwight Eisenhower (who, in 1957, proposed and passed the first Civil Rights legislation since Reconstruction), and the party of Martin Luther King, who lived, voted, and died as a registered Republican. The Civil Rights bill of 1964, taken credit for by Lyndon Johnson, was passed against fierce Democrat opposition, winning only because of lopsided majority support by Republicans in Congress.

So what happened? Lyndon Johnson happened. A lifelong racist who was surprisingly free with his use of the N-Word, LBJ proposed and passed a huge set of spending programs to build what he called “The Great Society,” whose centerpiece was lavish redevelopment of historically black urban neighborhoods with affordable housing complexes (i.e., “projects”), generous welfare benefits for the unemployed and single mothers, muscular federal support for integration of schools (i.e., busing) and public facilities, and in an inspired symbolic move the appointment of the first black Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall. What went wrong?

Everything. In addition to positioning himself as the new Civil Rights messiah, LBJ was also waging a huge and growing war in Vietnam with forces built by conscription and thrown into vicious guerilla combat without any territorial or other strategic military objectives beyond killing enemy troops, who included women and children. The war tore the nation apart, and the young in particular protested in every way they could think of, dropping out of society in droves to rebel against authority by conspicuous consumption of drugs, sex, and increasingly raunchy rock and roll bands. 

Meanwhile, black members of the Great Society were drafted into a war nothing had prepared them for, and their families and friends back home in the new warren-like “project” housing were sitting ducks for the infusion of illegal drugs in huge quantities. By the time the war’s effects reached city streets, black neighborhoods of generations’ standing had been bulldozed, and the family units who had lived in them were dispersed in a kind of diaspora that separated fathers from children, wives from husbands, and teens from both parents in exchange for gang affiliations that offered the opportunity for easy money selling drugs. Men and their sons migrated in large numbers to prison. Women with no men to rely on became a new demographic labeled “welfare 1queens,” who were able to maximize their personal personal incomes by having more babies, usually sired by different “baby daddy’s,” and were left with little time and less opportunity for productive employment. 

The projects became  breeding grounds for violent crime, theft and rape and assaults and gang shootings, and the buildings decayed into graffiti-defaced de facto prisons, from which there was no escape. The big cities as a whole grew more dangerous, and their tax base eroded accordingly, as those with means emigrated to the suburbs. And schools that served the projects (busing was dying…) had less funding, more expensive trade union teachers demanding huge pensions as compensation for perilous working conditions with students who could no longer be brought to order in a classroom.

There were no fathers, no mothers, no teachers to provide the children with a good example at home. Before the Great Society, most urban black adults were married and lived in supportive neighborhoods with multi-generation families surrounding them and aiding in the process of caring for children, keeping them safe, and disciplining them when necessary. In just a few years, the percent of families with two parents married to one another plummeted. Illegitimate births skyrocketed. Welfare rolls expanded. Prison populations exploded. Drug addictions were epidemic, involving many drugs that hadn’t even been available on the streets a decade earlier.

There was no need for Jim Crow. LBJ’s Great Society, and its demon companion the Vietnam War, had re-established a plantation culture as escape-proof as the agricultural forebears in the ante-bellum south. All held in place and made invulnerable to reform by the skin of liberal propaganda that covered the transformation and destruction of the lives of black Americans with loud words, carefully chosen causes (Tawanna Bradley), and the emergence of a new black leadership consisting of race-hustling parasites who had a vested interest in not solving the problems they pretended to be working so tirelessly to solve.

And then came crack. And rap. And the First Black President. No, not him. Before him. You’ll see.

Which leads us to my exercise for today. A visit to a subway stop in my 1999 work Shuteye Town. The destination is Afrian-Amerian Station, and your mission is to find your way back to “the road not taken.”

It can be done. Along the way, you’ll think I’m a terrible racist. One of the risks of satire, which is often showing you yourself, the parts that are in there but have to be denied even to yourself. 

You will start in the live file sequence here, on the train.

But you won’t be going anywhere yet. That’s what happens in Part II. Stay tuned…