Journey Through Two Americas

EVERYWHERE in the U.S. black and white perceptions of each other are distorted by fear and ignorance and resentment. Yet the pattern varies with the setting. To explore the nuances of black-white relations against different backgrounds, TIME Correspondents Jess Cook and Paul Hathaway toured a fast-changing area of a Northeastern city, a Deep South county with a heavy black majority, and a middle-sized bastion of Middle America.

Cook, who is white, talked to white Americans and found terror in a section of Boston, fatalistic self-pity in Alabama, smug indifference in Wichita. Of course there are islands of amity and good will, but right now they do not seem to be characteristic of the situation. Concludes Cook: "The final impression is one of sameness: universal opposition to busing children to once-black schools, annoyance at what strikes whites as special treatment for blacks seeking education or jobs, reluctance to admit that local problems have local origins. Whites prefer to put the blame elsewhere. They say it's black militants from outside who are making all the trouble."

Hathaway is black. "The journey through black America," he reports, "revealed that a new kind of silent majority is emerging among blacks. This is not the kind of majority that throws rocks or Molotov cocktails. Nor does it march or sing We Shall Overcome." This new black majority is aroused and vengeful, hardened by events-- the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., police raids on the Panthers, the pullback on integration. "All this has created new tensions, new fears in the black community," Hathaway says. "It seems to have drawn people closer together. Tragically, as that happens, black America pulls away from white America. There is a feeling that only black Americans can save black America. White America seems too divided, too torn, too caught up in its own problems, too concerned with its own salvation, to be of much help."

DORCHESTER-MATTAPAN, MASS.

The Mattapan section of Boston, once predominantly Jewish, has turned steadily black in recent years, as blacks have been crowded out of Roxbury to the north. Now Blue Hill Avenue is a mixture of synagogues and soul shops, kosher butchers and real estate offices.

What was for decades a Jewish wedding hall is now Elijah Muhammad's Mosque No. 1. Mattapan is peopled by whites too old or too poor to run, by blacks having nowhere else to go. Fear of black teen-age crime has envenomed Mattapan and Dorchester. New FOR SALE signs sprout daily on ragged lawns, and window posters bear the legend

BEWARE OF DOG.

Whites and blacks live side by side as uneasy neighbors. Myer Finkel, treasurer of Dorchester's Blue Hill Credit Union, complains: "These black kids have no respect. At one time I used to be this great liberal. I've been screwed by a few blacks, but I figured it was the course of business. Now I've become very hardened." At the G & G Delicatessen in Dorchester, once the social center for 50,000 Jewish Bostonians and now little more than a gathering place for old men who sip coffee, Julius Kolodny says bitterly: "Black and white can never mix. They burned my house to the ground, those kids. Then this woman comes and says why don't I make it a playground. I said drop dead I'll make it a playground."

Two butchers illustrate diverging white explanations of what lies behind the pervasive fear of black crime in Dorchester-Mattapan. Nathan Epstein thinks Supreme Court decisions have made policemen powerless. "Blame the fact that they changed our Constitution," he says. "At one time, if anyone would do something wrong, he would be punished. It isn't a question of the blacks. The police can't do anything." His colleague, Joseph Schaer, objects heatedly: "They gave you 45 stitches. They took my pants, for Christ's sake. It's a good thing they didn't murder me. Yes, I blame blacks."

Mrs. Janice Bernstein is a disillusioned idealist. "People like myself lived in a dream world that we could have a good, integrated neighborhood," she says. "Now I have to drive my boy to a movie he's walked to all his life. It's wrong to lump them all together. My black neighbors on the street are very nice. Everyone's out with a broom. They want us to stay, but it's heartbreaking because we're going to lose each other. You can't force integration down people's throats, because it hasn't worked here. I feel like a displaced person."

Blacks in Dorchester complain of police harassment. Mark Freeman, a high school junior, points at policemen parking in front of Youth, Inc., a social service agency; the police are making their daily visit. "I want to destroy all the stereotypes in the minds of people like those cops, who think we're all basketball players or thieves," he says. Robert Forts, black executive director of the Roxbury Federation of Neighborhood Centers, says mockingly: "Once Paul Revere rode through the streets to proclaim that the British were coming. Now whites run through the streets shouting, 'The niggers are coming!' "

GREENE COUNTY, ALA.

In Greene County, Ala., where 11,050 blacks overwhelmingly outnumber the 2,546 whites, they have turned that advantage into political clout. Before the 1965 Voting Rights Act, there were only 542 registered blacks; now there are 3,988 on the voting rolls, twice as many as whites. Blacks took four out of five seats on the court of county commissioners and won control of the county school board in elections last summer. Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King's successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, mounted the high dive at the once segregated swimming pool in Eutaw, the county seat, to proclaim victory. Since then, white disbelief ("Why, they had card files of voters," says an astonished and chagrined white assistant county agent) has turned into plaintive resignation.

The town dentist looks up during a trim at Johnny Perkins' barber shop: "Talk about niggers being human beings-- we're human beings too. We're just as much a minority here as the niggers nationwide. But what do you do when you're whipped at the polls? You join 'em." Greene is one of the nation's poorest counties. Esmal Wilson, 53, a white auto mechanic, contends gloomily: "Hell, nobody's going to do business with niggers. They couldn't get any more industry in here than that dog over yonder."

Big Bill Lee, a white who is the latest in a long family line to hold the sheriff's office, protests that he will run for re-election as an independent. His reason: running on a Democratic ticket headed by George Wallace for Governor would be political death in Greene County. Greene was one of four Alabama counties that voted against Wallace for President in 1968. Lee figures he needs "1,000 nigger votes to win," and adds: "I haven't arrested a nigger in 15 years. They come in on their own."

At least 100 black tenant farmers have been evicted by white landowners, and blacks still enter white-owned cafes by the back door--even though legal discrimination no longer exists. Whites have accepted black school enrollments up to 22% without much fuss, but when desegregation orders raise black representation to at least 66% in September, those whites who can afford the $400-a-year tuition will doubtless pour into the private cement-block Warrior Academy. One young teacher there explains: "There's so much low intelligence among the blacks."

One of the new black county commissioners, Levi Morrow, a 66-year-old farmer, remembers that a few years ago the white-run highway department tarred the road to within 30 ft. of his front door and then stopped. The foreman explained: "We ain't paving in front of no nigger's door." Says Oscar Williams, a black Peace Corps veteran who now works as administrative assistant to the county commissioners: "We have justice in mind. Black should be beautiful for everyone, not just for black people. But if an agency that has a history of discrimination comes before us, we're going to take a second look at whether we should do anything."

With black and white political roles reversing in Greene County, cliches turn about as well. One black commissioner says of the whites: "All they've ever done is farming. They're too lazy to work." The Rev. Thomas Gilmore, who will run against Big Bill Lee for sheriff, is more compassionate: "Whites have been trained never to listen to blacks. Their minds are so messed up with hate, they just can't understand the problems of black people." Sitting in a gas station, Ernest Brown, 58, takes a longer view of the success of his fellow blacks. "All this is fine," he says, "but it can't make up for all the wrong that's been done. It can't ever do that."

WICHITA, KANS.

Wichita is as far from Boston's Dorchester-Mattapan section as it is from the Deep South. It is a prairie city, at 300,000 the largest in Kansas, a center of oil and agriculture, a major aircraft producer (Boeing, Beech, Cessna). It is also Middle America. Blacks make up just 12% of its population; it is only by accident of rotation that the single city commissioner who is black will become its next mayor. Wichita is a "placid" sort of place, says outgoing Mayor Donald Enoch. It is deeply conservative; the town fathers banned a proposed Wichita production of Hair. Chester Lewis, a former regional N.A.A.C.P. director who now practices law in Wichita, observes: "The Silent Majority is what this city is all about."

Lewis adds, "This is a community that says to blacks: There'll be no more tokens, no more favors. You've made all the progress you're going to make.' " That has not been very much. Wichita is one of the most residentially segregated cities in the U.S.; by recent estimates, less than 1% of its blacks live outside the ghetto in the northeast section of town. Carl Bell Jr., a former mayor, figures that if black movement out of the ghetto increased tenfold, it would still be some 40 years before black housing became diffused enough for Wichita schools to reflect the city's present black-white population balance.

Schools and busing are Wichita's chief focus of racial strain, as they are for so many U.S. cities. Of 13,000 children who ride school buses, 3,000 do so for purposes of integration. Some 1,000 white mothers clutching preschool tots with I DON'T WANT TO BE BUSED placards recently marched on the board of education headquarters and dispersed only after reciting the Lord's Prayer in unison. The school superintendent, Dr. Alvin Morris, insists that "there is a national revolutionary group at work." "It's not a matter of racial prejudice," Mayor Enoch argues. "The blacks don't want to be bused either." Enoch goes on to say that breaking up residential segregation is the way to integrate the schools, not busing.

Federal model cities' funds for Wichita have already been frozen, and the city is threatened with suspension of federal education aid if it does not move ahead on school integration. There are serious black grievances in employment as well. A survey of 92 Wichita firms several years ago showed Wichita's 12% black population to be seriously underrepresented at the top, with only 0.4% of executive or professional posts; at the bottom, however, black men had 25% of the unskilled service jobs, and black women 36.3%. In the aircraft factories, by and large, blacks have less seniority and lower skills than whites. Yet the blacks seem to take it passively.

"Some of them have been working for 16 years, and they just shrug their shoulders and say, 'Oh, well, a better day is coming,' " observes Larry Howard, 22, a Wichita State senior. "In Wichita, the peckerwood studies you and finds out where you're most vulnerable, and then he cuts you deeper. This is deeper than the way it's done in the South, and it isn't as open. There they say, 'Nigger, I don't like you, so what you gonna do about it?' Here they smile in your face and then stab you in the back."

Paul Woods, president of the First National Bank of Wichita, is proud of his few black employees. "There's one right there," he points out to a visitor. "Five years ago," he reflects, "when one of our girls sold her home to a white who handed it over to a black family, I received calls telling me to fire her. Of course, I didn't. Today I doubt there would even be pressure."

They put up a brave front, but the city's white leaders now admit that they have lost communication with Wichita blacks. Says Mayor Enoch: "I used to have good contacts with--how shall I say it without giving offense?--the more stable element there. Now it's far more difficult. It's a disastrous thing." These days Wichita blacks have trouble communicating with each other. A. Price Woodard. the incoming black mayor, insists: "I have faith in the white community. We are too prone to complain." But other blacks see Woodard as more of a white representative than a black one and consider his faith naive. "Wichita is built on hate," says Juan Kennedy, a 19-year-old Wichita State freshman. "Hate and fear. Whitey gives up as little as he can."

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