Racism On The Rise

By Otto Friedrich

Their hair was grayer, their faces more lined, but here they all came, marching proudly out of history and onto the newest battlefield of racial conflict. Coretta King, Hosea Williams, Joseph Lowery, Andrew Young -- some of them had demonstrated with Martin Luther King in Montgomery, and some in Selma, and some in Washington, and now they had gathered with more than 20,000 supporters to march through Cumming, in Forsyth County, Ga., to protest the immutable racism there and the resurgence of racism elsewhere. And though King had been shot down 19 years ago, this was the week for observing his birthday as a national holiday, and so, in a sense, King was there too.

Jeering at the marchers along the roadway and at the county courthouse in Cumming was a mob of about 1,000 whites wearing the face of hatred. White- robed thugs from the Ku Klux Klan shouting "Go home, niggers!" Out-of- state zealots who call themselves Aryans and dementedly pledge allegiance to Adolf Hitler. Young kids too, in checked shirts and baseball caps, waving the Confederate flag. A few stones were thrown, and one woman was hit by a bottle.

But the marchers, protected by 1,700 National Guardsmen and 500 Georgia state troopers, went on. "Hey, hey, ho, ho, K.K.K. has got to go!" they chanted. And in one of the largest demonstrations in the Deep South since the 1960s, they joined in singing King's old anthem, We Shall Overcome. Declared Bernice King, daughter of the martyred leader, at a closing rally: "On behalf of a new generation of civil rights leaders, we graciously accept the leadership when you hand it over."

Though it seemed at times like a reprise of the wild civil rights battles of the 1960s, with television cameras once again dancing attendance, some important things had changed since the days of red-neck heroes like ex- Governor Lester Maddox (who made an appearance with the white supremacists). Said Georgia's current Governor Joe Frank Harris: "We do not and will not tolerate a rabble-rousing, troublemaking element that casts a negative image on a state whose race relations have been marked in large measure by harmony, goodwill and peaceful coexistence." William Bradford Reynolds, head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, was there watching and vowing that violence would not be permitted. As lawmen in helicopters surveyed the long lines of demonstrators throughout their 1 1/4- mile march, the arrays of state police and sheriff's deputies enforced those promises and prevented the noisy confrontation from degenerating into a bloody clash. When it ended, the civil rights leaders and their newly aroused supporters headed for home to Atlanta, New York, California.

Cumming is an odd place for such a highly charged collision. On the western banks of Lake Lanier, about 30 miles north of bustling Atlanta, it is an amiably sleepy town of about 2,000 souls (all of Forsyth County has only 38,000). Its biggest employer is a poultry-processing plant; its biggest social activity for adolescents is drag-racing outside the K mart. But for all its bucolic torpor, Cumming bears a dark stain on its history: an 18-year-old white woman was beaten and raped there one day in 1912 and, before she died, named three blacks as her attackers. One was lynched, the other two tried and hanged before a gloating crowd. There were so many threats against the remaining 1,000 blacks in the county that they all moved out, and not a single one has lived there since.

This latter-day apartheid dismayed Charles Blackburn, a bearded karate instructor who had moved to Forsyth County from California. So he began organizing what he called a walk for brotherhood. Amid threats and lack of support, he called off his plans. Others insisted on going ahead. Soon local Klansmen let it be known that, as Sheriff Wesley Walraven put it, "they want to exercise their rights also."

When a busload of marchers from Atlanta arrived on Jan. 17, they encountered a swarm of about 300 opponents, some in Klansmen's sheets, some in military fatigues, who greeted them with rocks, bottles, clots of mud and chants of "Go home, niggers!" Four of the 90-odd marchers were injured, and eight attackers were arrested before the march broke off. "It is amazing," said Atlanta City Councilman Hosea Williams, who was hit twice by flying stones, "that this kind of racial violence can happen in this country in 1987."

That set the stage for the civil rights demonstrators to reorganize the march on a much larger scale last Saturday. It also raised anew the painful questions about the "amazing" persistence of American racism: Where does it come from, and why is it still so strong?

The Liberty Bell in Philadelphia began ringing at the start of Martin Luther King Day last week, and that set off a barrage of high-minded oratory. President Reagan told a TV audience to be "totally intolerant of racism anywhere around you." At a church service in Atlanta honoring King, Secretary of State George Shultz said, "He redeemed the country he loved." Other speakers stoutly argued that such redemption is not yet at hand. "Certainly things have improved over 20 years ago," said Richard Arrington, the black mayor of Birmingham, where Bull Connor once ruled the streets with his attack dogs and fire hoses. "But in the past seven or eight years racial progress has been at a standstill, and I'm inclined to say in a slight retreat."

One indicator -- by no means the only one -- is simply the number of racist attacks all over the U.S. That number, which is not all inclusive, has increased from 99 in 1980 to 276 last year, according to the Justice , Department's community-relations service. Depending on how "racist attacks" are defined, other listings go much higher. In New York City alone, the police department's bias-incident investigating unit reported that such occurrences increased from about four a week to ten a week in just the past month.

Both cause and symptom of that New York City increase -- and lately a symbol of racism everywhere -- is the name Howard Beach. That now stands for the ugly pre-Christmas scene in which a gang of eleven youths beat up three black men, one of whom died under a passing car as he tried to escape. After disputed charges of a cover-up, a state-appointed special prosecutor finally took the case before a grand jury last week.

Unmollified, a crowd of 3,000 blacks marched down Fifth Avenue with banners expressing anger over Howard Beach. "We are all angry, we are all oppressed!" cried Chris Griffith, brother of the dead man. To antagonists on both sides, Howard Beach is now a kind of battle cry. Two blacks reported last week that they had been attacked by a gang of white youths shouting "Howard Beach!" and two whites reported a similar attack by similarly chanting blacks.

Other names have become almost as symbolic as Howard Beach: for example, the Citadel, the Charleston, S.C., military academy where a black cadet was subjected to racist hazing; or Jefferson Parish, the New Orleans suburb where the sheriff (a Chinese American) made a suggestion (later retracted after a public outcry) that blacks walking in white neighborhoods might be stopped for questioning.

But racism goes far beyond specific incidents of violence and overt bias. It underlies the persistent and worsening economic gap between blacks and whites. Blacks' median income was 62% of whites' median income in 1975 and 56% by 1985, according to a report on The State of Black America by the National Urban League. Unemployment among black youths has increased from nearly 25% in 1960 to nearly 40% in 1985. At the same time, according to a 1985 survey, less than 1% of the senior executives at the major companies in the FORTUNE 500 were blacks. In one poll of black business-school graduates, 98% reported subtle forms of racism in their companies. Overall, a record 72,000 complaints of discrimination were filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last year.

Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, who issued the famous pronouncement that "violence is as American as cherry pie" when he was known as H. Rap Brown, finds it easy to spread the blame. "Racism is the state religion," says Amin, now the operator of a small dry-goods store in Atlanta. "Racism is to America what Catholicism is to the Vatican. Racism is the religion, and violence is its liturgy to carry it out." More thoughtful observers are less dogmatic. "What causes racism is the most researched question in all of American social science in 80 years," says Thomas Pettigrew, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The basic answer is that people still fear strangers or anyone who looks different, and many nations and ethnic groups (not excluding blacks) suffer the same disease in one form or another.

Though racism has ancient origins, it must be taught anew to each child, and the best way to teach it is through ignorance. "Separation of racial groups breeds fear and misunderstanding," says William Taylor of the Center for National Policy Review, a Washington civil rights group. Or as Jomills Braddock of Johns Hopkins elaborates, "When racial groups are separated by segregation -- de jure or de facto -- stereotypes form. When one group has economic, political and social advantages over the other, the group without becomes negatively stigmatized, and the group with advantages develops aversion to the group without."

There has, of course, been progress. Americans of middle age can still remember when blacks had to move to the back of the bus as it crossed the border from Washington into the Virginia suburbs, when Marian Anderson was not allowed to sing at Washington's Constitution Hall, when Jackie Robinson had to promise not to retaliate if spiked and spat upon as the only black in major league baseball, and magazines periodically published photographs of some charred black body dangling on a rope from a branch of a tree. "In the 1940s," says Pettigrew, "Howard Beach occurred every night of the week."

Postwar prosperity started to change all that, as did the Supreme Court's 1954 decision to desegregate all public schools and the Voting Rights Act of 1964. Black mayors now govern Washington, Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia, and there are now more than 6,400 black officeholders where there were only a handful a generation ago. Paradoxically, these limited but real successes bring a new twist to racism. "We have more hatred now," says Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the N.A.A.C.P., "because we've entered a new era, an , era of competition for jobs, attention, power. Now we are the people who may get your job, who may be living next to you, who may ask your daughter to marry us. We've come a long way, but it's like nibbling at the edges of darkness." John McDermott, the white director of urban affairs for Illinois Bell, attributes some of the continuing racial tension in this country to the fact that whites judge the same new era differently. "Black Americans are beginning to be seen as just another group in the American mosaic, not entitled to special privileges," he says. "So many white workers regard affirmative action as a kind of unfair preference for minorities."

Most experts who try to chart the course of racism over the years now believe that the substantial gains of the 1960s and 1970s came to a gradual halt after the election of Ronald Reagan. "The resurgence of racist feelings and continued illegal discrimination are fostered by the Administration's refusal to admit that racism may still be a problem," says Urban League President John Jacob. More specifically, he cites "its efforts to give tax- exempt status to segregated schools, its fight against extension of the civil rights law, its efforts to undermine affirmative action, to destroy the Civil Rights Commission, to stack the courts with right-wingers, its support for South Africa's apartheid government."

Administration spokesmen dispute such charges, claiming that the Reagan Administration has filed more civil rights prosecutions than any predecessor. But that argument was undercut last week by the resignation of Joseph Cooper, one of the highest-ranking blacks in the Administration, as head of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. "There seems to be a resurgence of racism," said Cooper, "and there are those who feel they can get away with it because of their perception of this Administration. There is no question that there is a perception that the Reagan Administration has not done much for minorities."

People look to the White House for some sense of what is acceptable, what is right. "Although I can't say Reagan made kids behave the way they did at Howard Beach," says Roger Wilkins, senior research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, "whites get the message that the leader of this country, the moral beacon, is saying it's all right to be racist." That judgment was considerably exaggerated, but it nonetheless remains true that any sign of indifference means that the beast is free to prowl.

With reporting by Joseph N. Boyce/New York and Joseph J. Kane/Cumming