Voices in Our Blood (82 page)

“I could
swear
that boy doesn't know what a castration complex is,” I said, thinking how the bravest black “testers” in the past had seemed to crouch over themselves when they came out of the water.

We started to laugh, thinking of what a small, insignificant thing this sight should have been. It reminded us of the day we saw a young black man casually strolling down a street near the center of town arm in arm with his high-school sweetheart, a tiny brunette. We had been with a friend of ours who was in no mood to witness such “incorrect” behavior, and who moaned, without a trace of humor: “Oh, why is it that as soon as you do start seeing signs of freedom they're the wrong ones!”

But would one really prefer to turn back the clock? I thought of the time, when I was a child, when black people were not allowed to use the town pool, and the town leaders were too evil to permit the principal of my school to build a pool for blacks
on his own property.
And when my good friend a teenager from the North (visiting his grandmother, naturally) was beaten and thrown into prison because he stooped down on Main Street in broad daylight to fix a white girl's bicycle chain. And now, thinking about these two different boys, I was simply glad that they are still alive, just as I am glad we no longer have to “test” public places to eat, or worry that a hostile waitress will spit in our soup. They will inherit Emmett Till soon enough. For the moment, at least, their childhood is not being destroyed, nor do they feel hemmed in by the memories that plague us.

It is memory, more than anything else, that sours the sweetness of what has been accomplished in the South. What we cannot forget and will never forgive. My husband has said that for her sixth birthday he intends to give our daughter a completely
safe
(racially) Mississippi, and perhaps that is possible. For her. For us, safety is not enough any more.

I thought of this one day when we were debating whether to go for a swim and boat ride in the Ross Barnett Reservoir, this area's largest recreational body of water. But I remembered state troopers descending on us the first time we went swimming there, in 1966 (at night), and the horror they inspired in me; and I also recall too well the man whose name the reservoir bears. Not present fear but memory makes our visits there infrequent. For us, every day of our lives here has been a “test.” Only for coming generations will enjoyment of life in Mississippi seem a natural right. But for just this possibility people have given their lives, freely. And continue to give them in the day-by-day, year-by-year hard work that is the expression of their will and of their love.

Blacks are coming home from the North. My brothers and sisters have bought the acres of pines that surround my mother's birthplace. Blacks who thought automatically of leaving the South ten years ago are now staying. There are more and better jobs, caused by more, and more persistent, lawsuits: we have learned for all time that nothing of value is ever given up voluntarily. The racial climate is as good as it is in most areas of the North (one would certainly hesitate before migrating to parts of Michigan or Illinois), and there is still an abundance of fresh air and open spaces—although the frenetic rate of economic growth is likely to ugly up the landscape here as elsewhere. It is no longer a harrowing adventure to drive from Atlanta to Texas; as long as one has money one is not likely to be refused service in “the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.” The last holdouts are the truck stops, whose owners are being dragged into court at a regular rate. Police brutality—the newest form of lynching—is no longer accepted as a matter of course; black people react violently against it and the city administrations worry about attracting business and their cities' “progressive” image. Black people can and do vote (poll watchers still occasionally being needed), and each election year brings its small harvest of black elected officials. The public schools are among the most integrated in the nation, and of course those signs “White Only” and “Colored” will not hurt my daughter's heart as they bruised mine—because they are gone.

Charles Evers, the famous mayor of Fayette, is thinking—again—of running for the Mississippi governorship. James Meredith is—again—thinking of running for the same position. They make their intentions known widely on local TV. Charles Evers said in June, at the tenth commemoration of his brother Medgar's assassination, “I don't think any more that I will be shot.” Considering the baldness of his political aspirations and his tenacity in achieving his goals, this is a telling statement. The fear that shrouded Mississippi in the sixties is largely gone. “If Medgar could see what has happened in Mississippi in the last few years,” said his widow, Myrlie Evers, “I think he'd be surprised and pleased.”

The mountain of despair
has
dwindled, and the stone of hope has size and shape, and can be fondled by the eyes and by the hand. But freedom has always been an elusive tease, and in the very act of grabbing for it one can become shackled. I think Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr., would be dismayed by the lack of radicalism in the new black middle class, and discouraged to know that a majority of the black people helped most by the Movement of the sixties has abandoned itself to the pursuit of cars, expensive furniture, large houses, and the finest Scotch. That in fact the very class that owes its new affluence to the Movement now refuses to support the organizations that made its success possible, and has retreated from its concern for black people who are poor. Ralph Abernathy recently resigned as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference because of lack of funds and an $80,000.00 debt. This is more than a shame; it is a crime.

A friend of mine from New York who was in SNCC in the sixties came to Mississippi last week to find “spiritual nourishment.” “But I found no nourishment,” he later wrote, “because Mississippi has changed. It is becoming truly American. What is worse, it is becoming the North.”

Unfortunately, this is entirely possible, and causes one to search frantically for an alternative direction. One senses instinctively that the beauty of the Southern landscape will not be saved from the scars of greed, because Southerners are as greedy as anyone else. And news from black movements in the North is far from encouraging. In fact, a movement
backward
from the equalitarian goals of the sixties seems a facet of nationalist groups. In a recent article in
The Black Scholar,
Barbara Sizemore writes:

The nationalist woman cannot create or initiate. Her main life's goal is to inspire and encourage man and his children. Sisters in this movement must beg for permission to speak and function as servants to men, their masters and leaders, as teachers and nurses. Their position is similar to that of the sisters in the Nation of Islam. When Baraka is the guiding spirit at national conferences only widows and wives of black martyrs such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Queen Mother Moore can participate. Other women are excluded.

This is heartbreaking. Not just for black women who have struggled so
equally
against the forces of oppression, but for all those who believe subservience of any kind is death to the spirit. But we are lucky in our precedents; for I know that Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman—or Fannie Lou Hamer or Mrs. Winson Hudson—would simply ignore the assumption that “permission to speak”
could be given them,
and would fight on for freedom of all people, tossing “white only” signs and “men only” signs on the same trash heap. For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle, and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged. And that is also my experience with the South.

And if I leave Mississippi—as I will one of these days—it will not be for the reasons of the other sons and daughters of my parents. Fear will have no part in my decision, nor will lack of freedom to express my womanly thoughts. It will be because the pervasive football culture bores me, and the proliferating Kentucky Fried Chicken stands appall me, and neon lights have begun to replace the trees. It will be because the sea is too far away and there is not a single mountain here. But most of all, it will be because I have freed myself to go; and it will be My Choice.

A Hostile and Welcoming Workplace

The Rage of a Privileged Class,
1993

E
LLIS
C
OSE

The evening had been long and the dinner pleasant, with hosts who were a portrait of success. Their suburban home was spacious and tastefully furnished. Their children—three away in college and two in elementary school—were academically accomplished, popular, and athletic. Both parents held advanced degrees from Harvard and were well respected in their fields. For two whose beginnings had been fairly modest, they had more than ample grounds for contentment, even conceit.

As the husband and I sat nursing after-dinner drinks, his cheery mood progressively turned more pensive, and he began to ruminate on his achievements since earning his MBA. By any normal standard, he had done exceedingly well. Within years after graduation, he had risen to a senior position in a national supermarket chain. Shortly thereafter he had taken a job as manager of a huge independent supermarket and had used that as a base from which to launch his own business. He had thought the business would make him wealthy. Instead, he had gone bankrupt, but in the end had landed on his feet with yet another corporate job.

Still, he was not at all pleased with the way his career was turning out. At Harvard, he had always assumed that he would end up somewhere near the top of the corporate pyramid, as had most of his white peers. Yet shortly after graduation he had begun to sense that they were passing him by, so he had opted for the entrepreneurial route. Now that his business had failed and he was again mired in the upper layers of middle-management, he found it galling that so many of his white classmates had prospered with such seeming ease. A considerable number had become corporate royalty, with seven-figure compensation packages, access to private planes, and other accouterments of status and power about which he could only dream. Despite the good life he had, he felt he deserved—and had been denied—so much more.

In the course of conducting interviews for this book, I heard that complaint again and again—not always with the same degree of bitterness or the same doleful sense that opportunity had permanently slipped away, but always with a sadness born of the conviction that for black superachievers success not only came harder but almost invariably later and at a lower level than for comparably credentialed whites.

Wallace Ford, a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, is characteristic. Comparing himself to whites with similar skills, experience, and education, Ford concluded, “I should probably be doing more than I'm doing now.” At the time he was New York City's commissioner for business services and, though only in his early forties, had already held a series of impressive-sounding positions: president of the Harlem Lawyers Association, first vice president at Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., president of the State of New York Mortgage Agency, and others. Still, by his lights, he had underachieved, whether because of “bad luck, bad decisions, race,” or “a combination of all three,” he wasn't sure. But wherever the primary fault lay, he was certain that race had played a role.

“It's always a factor somewhere,” said Ford. “It may not always be up front. It may be in the bushes, or lurking in someone's mind, but it's always there.” Not that in the circles he frequented people were likely to vent racial animosities freely. “But you look at a situation and say,
I know.
By having gone to places like Dartmouth and Harvard . . . working with the governor, working with the mayor, [working with] people who are moving up . . . you realize that there's no magic.” Yes, some of the stars who had briefly flickered near him before shooting high into the sky were brilliant and extremely well educated, but never so bright that he was “blinded from across the table.” So he found himself asking:
Why can they do fifty-million-dollar deals with little more than projections on the back of an envelope?
And why were others, blacks who were “offering to give up mom, dad, and all their kids,” able to get only crumbs? “You realize that a lot of it has to do with a lot of factors—race, who you know. Certain people are accorded the opportunity to do X. As you go up the ladder, much is made available to a few.”

Even the few blacks who get near the top, who become senior executives in Fortune 500 companies, must ask themselves why they are “not next in line to be chairman [or] CEO of the whole thing,” Ford surmised. Just as those brainy blacks who went to top law schools and then found themselves woefully underemployed must ask themselves:
Why?
“My mind cannot accept the fact that of all the [black] people I went to law school with, only half a dozen of them have achieved partnerships in any of the New York law firms.”

In his alumni publications, Ford reads of so many whites succeeding so spectacularly, and he wonders why does it not seem to happen for blacks: “With degrees up and down the line, you get jobs, you get opportunities, but you can't achieve any pinnacle that you might think you'd like to compete for.” The result is frustration and confusion. “You usually end up suspecting that race is a factor,” but the truth is difficult to know. “People aren't saying, ‘You black son of a bitch.' ” The only real solution, Ford muses, may be for blacks to start more businesses themselves.

Such pessimism from one blessed with so many advantages may strike many readers as strange. But among those of Ford's race and class, his perspective is widely shared.

Darwin Davis, senior vice president with the Equitable Life Assurance Society, came along at a time when opportunities such as those enjoyed by Wallace Ford were all but unimaginable for blacks. After getting his bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Arkansas in 1954, he returned to his hometown of Flint, Michigan, marched into General Motors headquarters, and inquired about a job. He was told politely but firmly that applications for the management training program were not accepted from “colored people.” Devastated, Davis went into the army, then got a master's degree in education and went on to teach mathematics in the Detroit school system. Ten years later, when America's cities erupted in riots, corporations began to open their doors to blacks; Davis got a job at Equitable and did well there. Still, for all the barriers thrown in his way, he believes that those now making their way through the corporate labyrinth may be having an even rougher time. “They have even worse problems because they've got MBAs from Harvard. They went to Princeton. They went to all these places and did all these things that you're supposed to do. . . . And
things
are supposed to happen.”

Instead of “things” happening, instead of careers taking off, blacks are being stymied. They are not running into a glass ceiling, says Davis, but into one made of cement and steel. So many young people of his son's generation have about them an “air of frustration” and are surrounded by a wall of gloom “that's just as high now as it was thirty years ago.”

Davis's observations are similar to those of management consultant Edward Jones, whose surveys tapped into the frustration raging among black graduates of the nation's top business schools—apparently not a phenomenon that the schools themselves have chosen to explore. Calls to the public relations departments of several of them, including the business schools at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern, elicited a curious sense of incuriosity about how their minority graduates were faring in the outside world. No one had any idea, I was told again and again, of how well black business graduates were doing relative to whites. But the research being done in the area, carried out largely by black scholars, tends to confirm the perceptions of Ford, Davis, and Jones.

Several years ago, Edward Irons and Gilbert Moore, professors of finance and economics, respectively, conducted a pioneering study of black professionals in banking. The scholars interviewed 125 black bankers in ten different states, distributed one thousand questionnaires (of which nearly one-third were completed and returned) to black bankers in twenty-two states, and reviewed sixteen years' worth of relevant Equal Employment Opportunity Commission statistics. The result was
Black Managers: The Case of the Banking Industry,
published in 1985. Despite the authors' dry prose, their findings were compelling, painting a poignant and depressing picture of the plight of blacks in banking.

Like every other researcher I know of who has asked any large number of black professionals how they are faring, Irons and Moore found a cornucopia of discontent. Interviewees repeatedly complained of being left out of the informal communications network, of “not being in on things.” Few reported having “mentors” or anyone high within their organizations who took a supportive interest in their careers. By and large, they judged themselves less likely to be promoted than their white peers and felt they had to expend an inordinate amount of effort trying to make whites “comfortable” with them. They admitted to being under great stress, and many (particularly among the black men in the sample) seemed to be fleeing the field—which led the authors to observe that “black males who have the same high self-image . . . and aggressive personality as white males must either ‘walk softly' or face the prospect of being driven out of the industry, out of frustration.” Irons and Moore, who had been prepared to find some measure of unhappiness, expressed shock at the magnitude and pervasiveness of the problems they uncovered.

Phyllis Wallace, professor emeritus at Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported equally dismal results after systematically examining the experiences of her former students. For five years (from 1980 through 1984), she tracked recent Sloan graduates, trying to compare the progress of blacks and whites who were “similar . . . in every way.” She found that virtually from the outset the blacks began to fall behind the whites in terms of income and status in their companies. In part that had to do with the professions they entered. Numerous whites, for instance, went into financial services and management consulting—fields that tended to pay young people extremely well and to promote rapidly during the years of her study. Yet “not a single one of our black students went into the management consulting industry,” perhaps, she speculates, because those companies sought employees they thought had potential to attract big-spending clients. Blacks, who “were not seen as able to bring in million-dollar contracts,” generally gravitated to Fortune 500 firms.

Once there, said Wallace, they tended to get “stuck in a staff job,” and they progressed significantly more slowly than whites. “It was just more difficult for them to be promoted,” she observed. “They had to demonstrate over and over again that they were worthy of promotion.” Wallace was so concerned by the discrepancies in mobility that she kept in touch with many of the black graduates beyond the period of her research. Eventually, after six or seven years, she found that some received a “double promotion.” After initially being held back, they were “finally given the stamp of approval.” The result, said Wallace, if not exactly parity with their white classmates, was at least a partial closing of the gap.

Ella Bell, a visiting associate professor at Sloan who has also taught at Yale's school of organization and management, agrees with many of Wallace's findings, but she believes that more recent graduates (unlike those studied by Wallace) have learned to avoid the sinkhole of corporate staff jobs. “The ones that I know of are in bottom-line positions. They are not going into staff positions. . . . They are savvy enough to know you do not do that.” What they have not learned, however, is how to stay on the same track as similarly credentialed whites.

“Once they get into these companies, they're astounded,” said Bell, “because they feel, ‘I went to Yale. I went to Harvard, Sloan, or Stanford. Somehow that's supposed to polish the floor for me so I can just slide on through.' And that does not happen, for a lot of different reasons—race being a factor in that. What usually happens is that blacks will get in with these credentials. They'll make it one or two years, and then all of a sudden they start getting this real fuzzy kind of feedback—what I call static feedback—from their supervisors. Somehow they're ‘not good team players.' They're ‘too outspoken, too aggressive.' Another favorite one is that they ‘just don't know how to develop people.' All of this is subjective, nothing that you can fix. . . . And when you ask for examples it gets even flimsier.”

As a result, blacks find that “they're not where they want to be. . . . They knew—some of them knew—it was going to be tough.” But they also assumed that they would be okay. “Then reality sets in, that they're not going to be okay. They're not getting the positions. They're not getting what was promised . . . a chance to really do some cutting-edge work. So there's a lot of disappointment, and a lot of turnover. . . . A lot of my students, particularly from Yale, [change jobs] within the first two years. One was a brilliant guy from Ghana. He's now gone back to Ghana. . . . I know two others who are looking for jobs right now. It has not turned out the way they thought it would be.”

Bell acknowledges that some do “cross over and make it,” but they seem to be exceptions to the general rule. And though she believes that white uneasiness with blacks may play some role in black disappointments, the reality is “more complicated.” Once upon a time, she recalls, many whites seemed painfully uncomfortable with blacks, “and there are still signs of that. But I've spoken to managers, white males, who are very high up . . . and they talk about having their black colleagues to their homes, to Christmas parties. . . . It's not comfort that's the issue.” The issue, as she sees it, is whether those managers are able to see blacks as capable of carrying the company forward, of representing to the company's myriad constituencies the same things white senior executives would represent.