America Behind the Color Line (27 page)

This is going to happen only through work. Hard work. Time will not solve it. Building churches that go through the healing process, that work through the separation of black and white, will help solve it. Suffering. Suffering. If Dr. King came back from the grave right now and took a tour of Birmingham, he’d be sad. I haven’t done the statistics, but I bet when he preached the sermon on the American dream, he was talking about the number of black children who were in integrated schools and the number of black children who were in poor, low-quality schools. The quality of a school in America is still determined by whether it’s white or black, and he would be very sad about that. He would also be brokenhearted that the black leadership in America is not continuing his struggle for justice and inclusiveness, but has gone after the greed thing as the form of integration. Bad. Bad. Learning to be as greedy as us white males.

Dr. King would also be devastated by the poverty in America today. Poverty in America is atrocious, and it’s being hidden. He would be deeply devastated by the prison system and by what’s going on in the prisons, and by the number of black men and women that are in prison and the unbelievable abuse they’re receiving. He would be terribly devastated, without question. The percentage of women in prison in America who are black has gone up about 800 percent since the federal drug laws brought on mandatory sentencing in 1986. That’s compared to a 400 percent increase in the number of all women in American prisons since 1986. The number of black women in jail rose twice as fast as the number of women prisoners from the population as a whole. A third of black men in America are in prison, on parole, or on probation. The percentage of black men in jail in America is eight times what it was at the height of apartheid in South Africa. And it’s still legal in America to have slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment is still legal. Slavery has been eliminated except in the punishment of a crime. All those work gangs in the prison constitute slavery. They make you a criminal, then they make you a slave.

My daddy was a manager of the Norton plant in Huntsville. The way they dealt with the labor issue in Huntsville was to make sure the guy that was stirring up the labor trouble got hired at the Redstone Arsenal, got a big job that pulled him out of the way. All the black leadership was getting the big jobs; they’re moving into the white system. So the American dream becomes the equivalent of being white American, of having what white America has, not the vision of justice and human dignity for all people. Come, let us make money together. And you use the criminal justice system to keep the poor and the blacks down.

We have a black mayor, we’ve got a black city council, we have black people everywhere in Birmingham. But that’s not progress. Power is not in the elected officials anymore. It’s in the same place it’s always been. One of the real pains of my journey in Birmingham has been seeing our elected officials made out to look like fools all the time, ’cause they’re elected by the populace but the populace has no power. The black elected officials have no power to do anything, so they become the pawns of the same power structure. They’re just a different color; the same kinds of things get done.

That’s how it was with the Metropolitan Gardens. It’s the best public housing community in Birmingham, probably the best in the southeastern United States. It was torn down, and the people who lived there dispersed. It’s the same thing that took place in South Africa, same thing that’s taking place in Israel. They didn’t sell the property to yuppies; they gave it to yuppies. They gave it to contractors to build a new public housing community that is inclusive and mixed income. But they used the Greater Birmingham area as the basis for determining the city’s median income. They came up with $35,000, $40,000, when the real mean income of the city is much lower. The average income of the population that had been there was six thousand. So everybody who lived there is excluded from moving back there.

This may appear very clever politically, but you can’t keep doing that without someday incurring massive violence. You cannot do it. You cannot continue to relocate poor people who live in areas with the greatest concentration of poverty and crime—shove them out, use the police to keep them out, and criminalize them if they come in. The legal aspects of things are very different from the real power. Public accommodations are pretty well integrated. You can go just about anywhere you want to. But you’re not gonna have any power sharing.

Jesus said, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s why it’s important for the congregations to be mixed. Because until you’re together in worship and in community, you don’t know how to love. Until you can love somebody who’s different than you are, you don’t know how to love. Racial integration is a schoolhouse of love. If all you do is be with people like yourself, you don’t even know what Jesus was talking about. You don’t know what love can be or what it is being until you’re placed in the situation where you can’t ever do anything right, where you’re at cultural odds, caught between the culture and the counterculture, and you discover you can still love across those gaps.

Many well-educated black people choose to live in predominantly black neighborhoods, with other well-educated black people. Well, nothing is more wrong with that than white folks choosing to live in white neighborhoods with white folks. It’s segregation, and it will breed supremacy and inferiority. It cannot but do that.

Segregation is still a sin. Human beings ought to be able to interact together equally and freely. We can be as black as we can be and as white as we can be and we can love one another and we can care. You can care for my children and I can care for yours with all the passion of our heart. And until we can do that, then we’re headed down the road to hell.

We hear so much about the New South, so much about the new Birmingham. We hear that Birmingham has shed its skin, has turned the corner. There’s a new horizon. Well, all right. It is new. It is very new, very good. We have started an interracial church in Birmingham. That’s it; that is the new. Of course, we’re not primarily considered interracial anymore. We’re a church for the homeless, and so we’ve been categorized as the church for the poor.

Finally, thank God, on May 22, 2002, a jury convicted Bobby Frank Cherry of first-degree murder in the killing of the four girls in Birmingham in 1963. Thomas Blanton, Jr., was convicted in 2001. And so it is a new Birmingham. Richard Arrington Jr. Boulevard runs all the way from the crest of Red Mountain to the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Complex, and it encompasses about twenty-five city blocks in the heart of downtown Birmingham. It’s been a battle, a horrendous battle. And Birmingham knows that Birmingham cannot exist if we don’t first deal with the racial issue and then put forth that better image. We work hard at an image. We spend a lot of money on image and sharing that image and sharing that history. King said the thing he feared the most was going from a small ghetto to a bigger one. In Birmingham, there’s a big black ghetto, except for the city center.

We want to let people know that people who are different can love one another and worship together and be in church together. You can write all the books you want to about this, you can do anything else you want to, but if you haven’t got money, it doesn’t mean a thing. We have a black and white church; rich and poor church. We have to work on both race and class issues. Racist attitudes have never been addressed theologically in Birmingham. The Southern Methodist and Southern Baptist Churches still hold the theology of America, not just in the South but throughout America.

Over the years, I’ve turned to four spiritual friends who help sustain me. I read and listen to Martin King’s sermons, and they never dry up. A second friend is John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. A third is the great African-American theologian Howard Thurman, whose book
The Strange Freedom
has nurtured me. And then William Stringfellow, a lawyer, a layperson who worked in Harlem in a ministry similar to mine and who was a great theologian even though he was not trained as a theologian. I spend a great deal of time with these guys. I live with them. I interact with them. And I ask them a lot of questions.

I got a call from the Promised Land at midnight one night. I answered the phone and it was a couple and they said, Preacher, we’ve got an apartment with carpet on the floor. Our kid is in day care. I’m enrolled in the community college, and there’s public transportation here; we don’t even need a car, Preacher. And they called from the Promised Land. It was a dream. There’s still no landlord-tenant bill in Alabama. Our constitution is still the same old constitution. Change is slow, but it’s happening. Scott Douglas went to Huntsville to a meeting on constitutional reform, and that’s wonderful. It’s a beautiful thing. In twenty or thirty years from now, race relations in the South will be better. A lot better. It’s different now; it’s better. They haven’t killed me; they don’t kill people who stay with it. Right, now. All right. That’s a big thing. I honor that big thing. It is a huge thing. The laws are better. If a black couple goes out together in Birmingham, nobody’s gonna lynch them anymore out in these hollows. But they better be careful. It’s sad, but it’s for real.

I did a wedding for a mixed couple—black man, white woman, married right here in the church—and they suffered massively. It was probably three years ago. The woman had a baby boy from a previous relationship with a black man. They were living in an apartment and the landlord would not fix the gas leak and the kid got CO
₂
poisoning. They called me, and I had to carry the child to the hospital ’cause their car was broken and the guy where they’d had it in the shop wouldn’t fix the car because they were an interracial couple. Now, that was a black mechanic, and he wouldn’t fix the car because the black man was married to a white woman. The man’s rage was unbelievable because of the experience that he had, suffering like that. They finally bought a ticket to California and left Birmingham.

Racism is an addiction. It’s an addiction to power. An addiction to privilege and supremacy, and that’s very addictive stuff. And to lay that down, to acknowledge that you’re powerless over those things, is to begin to relate to people and identify the humanity and value of every human being, and to give up what the white male God provides for you. But doing that is a lifetime journey. Recovery from racism is recovery for life. It’s a healing, a wholeness that you have to work through in order to get reconnected with human life. Crack cocaine is the flip side of racism. That’s why we have such a huge hunger for crack cocaine. People have internalized the racism, so they stone themselves, they get stoned. We even use that language. And so the racists stone people, de-humanize people, classify, categorize, and discriminate against people. Recovering from a crack cocaine addiction is the flip side of recovering from the racism addiction—from addiction to the power and privilege and domination.

Birmingham was the center of so much hatred and so much evil. It’s a symbol for racism. So many terrible things happened here that it would be marvelous if Birmingham could symbolize the transformation in American race relations. But Birmingham as a city is not yet a recovering racist. We want to deal with the image, not the reality. We want to do the things that look good, that make us feel good. But when it comes down to walking down the street and dealing with all of these issues, we don’t want to do that. We’re a whole lot more comfortable, black and white, in our respective segregated contexts.

CARMEN JOHNSON
The Big House

When I first moved to the East Coast from California, I lived for five years in Atlanta and then moved to Snellville, where I’ve been for the past seven years. Snellville is about twenty miles northeast of central Atlanta, in Gwinnett County, which is known for its school district. I’m a Realtor.

My mother was in computers before they were widely used; she worked as a data processor at Hughes Aircraft. My father was a car salesman in Los Angeles. He was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1913. But once he moved away, he never wanted to come back because of the prejudice that existed here in Georgia.

My father has been dead thirty years now, and he would never have dreamed in a million years that his daughters would want to move back to Georgia. But Georgia now is a melting pot, and a black mecca. It is culturally diverse. Entrepreneurs are drawn here. My sister and I own a Coldwell Banker franchise in Snellville. I don’t think I would have ever been able to own a Coldwell Banker in California. Several other black franchises have opened here in Atlanta this past year. The white businesspeople here have opened the market to us. I think they have realized the power of the black dollar. In the past year, Coldwell Banker has actively recruited minorities to come into the franchise. So with all the big corporations that have relocated here in the last twelve years, along with the highest percentage of black entrepreneurship and black-owned companies in the Fortune 500, Atlanta has drawn blacks from the North.

The first black woman mayor in the United States was elected here in Atlanta. Shirley Franklin won the election of November 2001 and was inaugurated on January 7, 2002. We’re very proud of that. It has helped African Americans to feel very comfortable about relocating in this area and starting their businesses here. Of course, when Maynard Jackson was elected mayor of Atlanta in 1973, he was the first African American to serve as mayor of any major Southern city in the nation. And then we had Andrew Young and William C. Campbell as mayors. So since 1973, every mayor of Atlanta has been African American.

I think Atlanta is the only place in the world with such a high incidence of black entrepreneurship. The government is predominantly minority. Therefore, it’s very easy to come in with a company and get a network among your peers here in Atlanta. The ethnic makeup is so diverse in Atlanta that it is easy for someone to come here and go into business and be successful.

People of African-American descent from the North are coming back to the South. They’re coming back for all the economic advantages we have here, like employment opportunities and the affordable cost of living, and they want to live here with other black people. I think it’s no different than in other cultures. People tend to want to be around their own for social reasons. They want their children to be exposed to their own culture. Those are the types of reasons I’ve heard from people moving down here. They want to live near family and friends from their own communities.

And then there’s the property tax. You can get so much house down here at such a low property-tax rate that it’s a win-win for people retiring out of the North with big homes they can sell. They come down here and pay cash and live regally. Our property tax, on average, is 1.25 percent of the sales price of the house, whereas up in New York it’s 3 to 4 percent. So you could come here and have a beautiful home for half a million dollars while up in New York, for the same amount, you’d have a relatively small home on a very small lot.

People from the North come down and ask, how much is that house again? How much land is that house on? They are so pleasantly surprised. What we’re finding is that when we sell to someone coming down from the North, within a month or two we have their sister looking down here, their mother, and their best friend. The referrals just keep coming, because once they get down here and get situated, they scope out everything for the family. Then the family starts coming down here piece by piece as they put their affairs in order up in the North. Whole families are moving down here together, and friends are too.

I moved from California to Atlanta because of my children’s education. In California, a lot of the children don’t go on to college, and I knew that in Georgia, a higher percentage of the children do attend college. I’m very glad I made the move. Both of my children turned out to be college graduates and have a great career ahead of them. My older daughter is a computer database manager. My younger daughter did her undergraduate work at Clark, and now she’s at Meharry Medical College.

Two weeks ago, I moved into a house I built for myself, and I’m already thinking about selling it. It’s too big for me—8,100 square feet. It’s got five bedrooms, five baths, two half-baths, and five fireplaces. If I decide to sell the house, I’ll put it on the market for $850,000—a steal for 8,100 square feet of new construction in Atlanta. For this neighborhood, $850,000 is at the high end, but it’s an incredible value for the money. Because I built it myself, I was able to save a lot of money and pass on those savings to the new purchaser. The standard building in this area runs about $150 a square foot, and a buyer would be getting this house for about $110 a square foot.

I designed my house, and it took me two years to build it. But I can give it up because I can go and do it again. I’m in the business. If I were to buy a new house, it would be somewhere around 6,000 square feet with a finished basement. I’d be saving 2,100 square feet compared to the house I’m in now.

We’re still doing some of the punch-out. It’s a nice house. We did a lot of millwork, which you don’t find in many large homes here in Atlanta. There’s lots of detail—dentil and pilaster moldings on the sides of the doors, and lots of arching. The house has a limestone foyer with granite squares and a dome ceiling, and crystal chandeliers almost twenty-five feet high. You change the lightbulbs with a very tall ladder. There are crystal chandeliers and sconces throughout the house, and it has an overlook where you can stand and see your party arriving and greet them as they come in.

The breakfast room overlooks the water. Near the kitchen there’s what we call the keeping room—an informal family room—where the family can relax while dinner is being prepared. Above the fireplace in the keeping room is an outlet for a large-screen cable-ready television. The fireplace vents out and not up, so the TV is completely safe. The grand room serves as both a formal dining room and a living room, like the Schultz plans designed for South Florida. The dining room goes where the chandelier is, and then the living room is separated off. But the two rooms are combined, which makes the area a lot more functional.

The master wing is on its own level and has its own foyer, with a dome ceiling and crystal chandelier. The bathroom in the master wing has mosaic lime-stone tile and a steam shower, with full walk-in double heads. There are three guest suites on the second floor, all with huge walk-in closets and private balconies overlooking the lake. One of the suites is for my granddaughter, who is ten years old. She has the witch’s hat ceiling in her bathroom, the kind of ceiling that comes to a peak. And I built a princess tower for her.

The basement is finished and is waiting only for the floors to be done and the carpet to be selected. The bar itself is being custom-made and will be here in about six weeks. There’s room for a billiard table next to the wet bar. The basement is the biggest recreation center in the house.

Then there’s the home theater. Depending on how it is outfitted, it would have three platforms with three rows of captain’s chairs. There’s a place to store all the equipment for watching movies, like a projector and a screen. And over in the corner will be the bar with the popcorn and such.

The deck is almost eighty feet long, and down below you can enclose the patio to create an outdoor kitchen. The plumbing is already there, and the patio can be fully insulated. We have full sun at the back of the house at all times, which is great for a pool lot.

The subdivision has three lakes, and about eight residents in my neighborhood have houses on the first lake. My house has the best view of the water— high and unobstructed. Boats that use the lakes cannot be gasoline-powered, only electric-powered. The lake is thirty feet deep in some places and stays clear all the time. It’s fully stocked. My granddaughter pulled out thirteen fish in one hour.

I don’t have a dock yet for the house. That was going to be the next project, after I got all the landscaping in. We’ve been having a lot of problems with the beavers this year. My lot was full of trees, and even with metal wrapped around the base of the tree, the beavers crawl up the metal and cut the tree off. Bucky Beaver took a thousand dollars’ worth of trees so far this year, just in the last three weeks. We went out and sprayed the remaining trees with a repellent to keep the beavers from gnawing. It gets rid of the beavers without harming them. The last couple of weeks, it’s been so hot that with the beavers taking the trees it’s been hard to get down there and do any landscaping. When it gets a little cooler, we’ll start with the landscaping again, once the beavers go into hibernation.

I love houses. I do. I build them, and then when I’ve finished them, it’s like, oh, well, I go on to my next project. When I travel, all I do is look at houses. I have the cabdrivers take me to the affluent neighborhoods so I can look at the houses. Everybody asks me, aren’t you tired of real estate when you go on vacation? It’s like, no; houses are my life.

People looking at houses here sometimes ask me how many black people live in a particular neighborhood. Well, I am not allowed to answer that. Realtors are governed by the Sherman Antitrust Act, and we’re not permitted to give information based on sex, race, or creed. I can’t go in and say that this is a black neighborhood. I can say it’s culturally diverse, but I can’t tell someone that it’s black. If someone comes down from the North and says, I want to live with other black people who were successful, I take them to those neighborhoods. But if they ask me how many black people live there, I cannot tell them. I can tell them to come back on Saturday and watch people washing their cars and mowing their lawns, and see the kids playing out in the yards. See for themselves. I can take people to the neighborhoods that I know to be culturally diverse, but I cannot tell them or name the people that are there. Nor could I say whether I know any white people who live there. I would simply suggest that someone look at who’s driving down the street.

As Realtors, we can be fined a stiff penalty and sent to prison if we answer any questions related to race, religion, or ethnic background. Women are protected; gays are protected; people with AIDS are protected. If someone asked me, I couldn’t say whether a person living in a particular house had AIDS even if I knew. If I don’t want to sell real estate—if I want to trade in my suits for a striped jumper—I would answer those questions.

I think the law was designed to keep everything integrated so that white people couldn’t come down and request to be in a white neighborhood and say, if there are any blacks that live in here, I don’t want to live here. So when a white person asks a Realtor, do any blacks live in here, she cannot answer that question. And if a rich white person says, I want an exclusive neighborhood, I tell them there are no exclusive neighborhoods. All neighborhoods here in Atlanta are integrated; by law, people can live wherever they choose to.

In many urban areas, the black people were left in the inner city when white people moved out to the suburbs years ago. Now it’s the white people who are reclaiming the cities, and black people are moving out to the suburbs. That’s how it is in Atlanta. A lot of the houses in Atlanta are being given away, pretty much. The African Americans who owned them are getting good dollar for them, but they’re coming out to the suburbs and getting a brand-new house. They’re thinking that they’ve made out, when actually the people who are buying those beautiful old homes in town are the ones that are making out. So we’re losing out once again. And the African Americans who are selling those old homes don’t understand it, because all they can see is that they’re going to have a bright new house out in the suburbs. Whereas if they just held on a couple of years more, they could almost make another 100 percent equity on top of the properties.

At this point, as far as choices are concerned, we all have a choice. We can live anywhere we want to live. And we choose to be with our own. So all that segregation, what was that all about? Because when it comes down to it, most of us choose to be among ourselves anyway. The difference now is that we do it willingly. It’s a willing decision to associate, not mandated by the law.

I believe Dr. Martin Luther King would be happy to know that we have the choice to live in all-black neighborhoods. That’s the difference: we have the choice. Dr. King’s wife still lives in the same house she and Dr. King were living in when he died. She has chosen to remain in their home and in that area. I don’t think Dr. King needed to prove himself by moving to an affluent neighborhood.

Yes, the Civil Rights Movement was about giving us a choice to live in white neighborhoods, but people can live where they want now. Blacks are no longer legally required to live in all-black neighborhoods, the way they once were. Many African Americans choose to live in the same neighborhood, and white home buyers often choose not to move into those neighborhoods. But they are welcome to move there if they want to. No one is keeping them out. Those who choose to are living in Buckhead, the prime neighborhood of Atlanta, which is less diverse. They don’t wish to live in a black neighborhood because there are fewer amenities, like malls and fine restaurants, though that is changing too.