Days of Grace (23 page)

What shocked me finally, however, was not their hatred of the police, which one might expect, but their attitude to the beating of the white truck driver Reginald Denny during the riots. Denny, driving his truck, had found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. With a television camera in a helicopter broadcasting the event, several young black men pulled him from his truck and beat him savagely and without mercy. Although some people had tried to blame Denny for the attack by saying that he had provoked it by making racial slurs against blacks, Denny’s only crime probably was that his skin was white. Naively, I expected the Crips and the Bloods, despite their hatred of the police, to concede that the beating of Denny was unjustifiable, that it had been wrong. Their response was exactly the opposite. Denny meant nothing to them. His innocence meant nothing to them. The principle of right and wrong meant nothing to them. Society despised them; they would despise society and its ideals.

Watching the television screen and listening to these two young black men, I felt sick. That’s not us, I thought. That’s just not us. It was as if spirits from another planet had come to earth and invaded black bodies. We were once a people of dignity and morality; we wanted the world to be fair to us, and we tried, on the whole, to be fair to the world. Now I was looking at the new order, which is based squarely on revenge, not justice, with morality discarded. Instead of settling on what is right, or just, or moral, the idea is to get even. You get even, although doing so is almost always a short-term proposition that ultimately leaves you further behind than where you started. Reginald Denny has not only recovered, but is talking humanely and idealistically about forgiveness. As I write, the young men accused
of beating him are in custody, awaiting trial, and recalcitrant.

Not long afterward, I saw the television journalist Ed Bradley questioning a group of youngsters about morality, about the determination of what is right and what is wrong. In my boyhood, right and wrong were clear and unequivocal; but to the boys present, everything was shaded, compromised. Is it right to steal? Sometimes. Often? In practice, yes. Is there a moral aspect to sex? Not really. You get what you can from a woman. Do you have an obligation to a child you father? No; that’s the mother’s problem, not mine. Is it all right to cheat in school? Yes; just don’t get caught. Getting caught is stupid. And so on.

What went wrong within black America? We might as well ask what went wrong with America as a whole. What happened to blacks is, to be sure, only a heightened degree of the national weakening of morality and standards. As for black America, I don’t know of any single answer to that question, only several possible answers. However, the cruel irony of African American history is that although we are not nearly equal to whites in terms of opportunities and freedoms, we have declined as a group exactly at the time we achieved the highest degree of freedom we have ever had, and secured the largest number of rights we have ever had. It is almost as if the new rights and freedoms
caused
the decline, which of course is not true. At least, not completely.

I know that the deterioration occurred in my adult lifetime. Thus, I must bear part of the responsibility for the way in which African American culture has declined. Not I myself personally, but my generation collectively; if we wish to take most of the credit for what is creditable, then we must shoulder most of the blame for the amount that is discreditable. I see 1965 as the major watershed in modern African American history. That year dwarfs 1954 and
Brown
v.
Board of Education
. In 1965, when I was twenty-two years old, Stokely Carmichael (now Kwame Toure) promulgated the “doctrine” of Black Power and inaugurated
the Black Power movement. He did so in one brilliant harangue in Greenwood, Mississippi, from which, in my opinion, black America has never adequately recovered. Carmichael was a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a youth-oriented offshoot of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

In promulgating Black Power, Carmichael wittingly or unwittingly (the former is much more likely) turned his back on the moral emphasis and genuine nonviolence of King’s leadership and moved toward a radically secular philosophy of racial emancipation. In retrospect, 1965 was the beginning of the end of the dominance of morality in African American culture. Instead, the amoral quest for naked and vengeful power would rule thereafter. No one should have to wonder where Black Power came from. It came out of the evil record of slavery and segregation, from the willful attempt by whites to keep blacks in a state of subservience through the denial to them of decent, just treatment in a society allegedly built on law. I am completely in support of the idea that blacks should garner as much power and wealth as we legitimately can. Nevertheless, I believe that Black Power, as promulgated, may have created many more problems than it ever solved, because legitimacy was deliberately excluded as a criterion.

I met Stokely Carmichael at least twice during the 1960s. In 1968, the year of the speech that got me in trouble with my army superiors, he also spoke at the Church of the Redeemer in Washington, D.C., at the invitation of the Reverend Jefferson Rogers. Something of Stokely’s militancy may have rubbed off on me and moved me to deliver my own remarks, although they were tepid compared to his language. Viscerally, emotionally, I admired Carmichael. His raw courage inspired me. Then, gradually, he and other young leaders at the time like H. Rap Brown and Huey Newton (of the Black Panthers) lost me. They lost me because they seemed to abandon principle in their thinking and their actions. What started as a movement toward liberation
ended too often as a regime of dogmatism, coercion, hatred, violence, and what would later be called sexism. I saw a chilling similarity between the segregation that ruled my youth and the proposed new order under Black Power. For the first seventeen years of my life, white people in Virginia had told me what I could do, where I could go to church, in which taxi I could ride, where I had to sit on the bus, in which stores I could try on a coat. Then, in my second seventeen years, militant black people were trying to tell me, once again, exactly what to think and do. I rebelled.

In many respects, Black Power was an improvement over the old ways. Undoubtedly, an emphasis on morality led many blacks toward passivity, obsequiousness, and even self-hatred. Black Power promised a long overdue emphasis on gaining self-determination, self-definition, and wealth. Looking back, however, I see the simple truth that the old emphasis on morality was far more consistent with the acquisition of money and power than the doctrine of Black Power ever was. Defined by an excess of racial romanticism and chauvinism, Black Power as often as not drove a wedge between young black Americans and the very thinking and behavior that would enable them to achieve positions of power. The main tool for the acquisition of wealth and power is knowledge and self-discipline. In this way, young blacks could take advantage of the new freedom afforded by the civil-rights acts and the changing mores of the nation. But Black Power almost completely discredited the acquisition of knowledge and the rigor of self-discipline.

The discrediting of formal education as it existed in the United States was perhaps the most disastrous result of Black Power. Unquestionably, our formal education had ignored black history and culture. But when the idea of a black student learning Russian or Polish, medieval history or quantum physics, became anathema in the more militant circles, as it did, a disaster was in the making. Such an education, it was said, amounted to a betrayal of our racial
heritage. The only legitimate areas of knowledge were those that could be defined through their connection to Africa. The assumption seemed to be that Africa itself did not need experts on Russia, Poland, medieval European history, or quantum physics, in addition to experts on Africa. If the discrediting of education started with the curriculum, it did not stop there. White teachers and professors became suspect or worse. The discipleship of student to professor, which is the principal method by which deep learning is passed on, so that experts nurture experts, became nearly impossible; how could a proud young black man subject himself to a white figure of authority? Finally, in increasingly wide circles among teenage blacks, learning itself became discredited. To study hard, to aim for good grades, has become to “act white,” which is supposed to be the gravest charge one can level at a young black man or woman today. However, since the best students in the United States increasingly are Asian, perhaps “act Asian” should be the charge; in which case the element of color disappears.

I LEARNED MUCH
about the changing face of blacks and education during the lively “Proposition 48” and “Proposition 42” debates of the 1980s. Eventually implemented in 1984 by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the governing body of college sports in the United States, “Prop 48” sought to raise the high-school academic requirements for students entering college who wished to compete in intercollegiate athletics. Incoming freshmen who did not meet these academic requirements could be given scholarships but could not play for their schools during their first year. “Prop 42,” passed later, sought to deny athletic scholarships to such students. Behind the proposals were not only a spate of recent scandals in which former college athletes with degrees proved to be semi-literate but also a deepening sense that many athletic departments had subverted the true mission of their colleges and universities in the name of athletic Success. The issue became charged
with racial tones because a disproportionately high percentage of college athletes in the major American sports—football, basketball, baseball, and track—are black.

The black presence in many colleges and universities is close to a sham. In 1983, an article by sociologist Harry Edwards in the
Atlantic Monthly
documented the sorry situation. Although entrance requirements were often pathetically low, 25 to 35 percent of young black high-school athletes could not meet them. In college, as many as 65 to 75 percent of blacks with athletic scholarships never graduated. Of those who graduated, perhaps 75 percent did so with degrees in physical education or some other major or concentration designed to reflect their athletic prowess but with limited use after school. (In 1993, ten years after Edwards’s article, a report revealed that one school, North Carolina State University, long famous as a power in collegiate basketball, had not graduated a single basketball player since 1985.)

Prop 48 allowed a freshman to play for one of the 277 Division 1 or top athletic schools only if the student had made a 2.0 grade point average (a C average) in high school and only if his or her courses included English, mathematics, the social sciences, and the physical sciences. It also required the athlete to have a combined score of 700 (out of a possible 1600) on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or 15 (out of a possible 36) on the rival American College Test (ACT). The SAT and ACT tests are mandatory steps at most American colleges. Previously, students required only a C average, without regard to the courses taken, and many of the courses were scandalously devoid of intellectual content.

These new requirements should present no challenge whatsoever even to the average student. In recent years, however, fewer than 50 percent of black students taking the SAT had scored as high as 700; on the ACT, only 28 percent reached 15. Meanwhile, more than 75 percent of whites achieved 700 or 15 on the tests. (If you scored 700 on the SAT and tallied 15 on the ACT, then 90 percent of
students taking the test outscored you in verbal achievement, and about 65 percent outscored you in math.)

Although these proposals would affect athletes of all races, some black college presidents, charging racism, led the opposition to them and threatened to withdraw their schools from the NCAA. Among white institutions, presidents were generally for the changes, while athletic directors generally were not; in black schools, however, opposition was often led by presidents. The president of Southern University in Louisiana, for example, called the proposal “patently racist.” The proposal was caused, he said, by the fact that “the black athlete has been too good. If it is followed to its logical conclusion, we say to our youngsters, ‘Let the white boy win once in a while. ’ This has set the black athlete back twenty-five or thirty years. The message is that white schools no longer want black athletes.” Another official pointed out, without embarrassment, that the new entrance standards for athletes would be higher than the general entrance standards for most black colleges and even some white schools. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Jesse Jackson through his Operation PUSH group, the National Baptist Convention, and other black organizations also opposed the change.

I was one hundred percent behind the proposed higher standards. Lobbying behind the scenes, I also wrote at least one letter to
The New York Times
calling for college presidents to stand up for education; the
Times
also published my essay “Coddling Black Athletes,” in which I urged that “we should either get serious about academic standards or cut out the hypocrisy and pay college athletes as professionals.” I published another essay in
Ebony
in which I talked about having visited black high schools where “the obsession with sports borders on pathology.” I agreed completely with what the respected football coach Joe Paterno of Pennsylvania State University said in his provocative declaration at the 1983 NCAA convention: “For fifteen years we have had a race problem. We have raped a generation
and a half of young black athletes. We have taken kids and sold them on bouncing a ball and running with a football and that being able to do certain things athletically was going to be an end in itself. We cannot afford to do that to another generation.”

I found myself opposing two nationally known black basketball coaches: John Chaney of Temple University and John Thompson of perennially ranked Georgetown University. Chaney called the NCAA “that racist organization.” As a highly publicized protest against the attempted passage of Prop 42, Thompson left the coach’s bench during at least two basketball games involving his team. Both of these men are genuinely interested in education, but the positions they took seemed on the wrong side of all the key issues involved in the devaluation of education among blacks in the United States. In a long, sometimes acerbic telephone conversation, Thompson explained to me in detail his objections. First, whatever the benefits to our society in general, blacks would suffer from the changes because fewer would meet the requirements and be allowed into college. Once again, he argued, when America decided on some rise in standards, blacks paid the lion’s share of the price for this change.