The Ghetto: From Bad to Worse

By WALTER SHAPIRO

A raid on an after-hours "blind pig" bar in Detroit, a scuffle between a Newark cabdriver and the police -- these were the flash points 20 years ago as the summer of 1967 erupted into the Fire This Time. Ghetto despair gave way to grotesque destruction: 43 dead in Detroit, 26 killed in Newark, injuries and arrests in the thousands. By September more than 100 cities had been scarred by rioting, an alphabetical roster of shame that stretched from Atlanta, Boston and Cincinnati to Tampa and Toledo. National Guardsmen patrolled the streets, and a federal commission probed the causes.

Out of the ashes came pious promises from politicians and the rhetoric of renewed resolve. "The only genuine long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack -- mounted at every level -- upon the conditions that breed despair and violence," proclaimed President Lyndon Johnson. No one seriously thought the inner city could be transformed overnight. But few were cynical enough to envision what actually happened: an entire generation would pass as life in the black ghettos of a rich nation went from bad to almost unimaginably worse.

"You tell me what went wrong," asks Jonas Walker, 33, at the end of another long summer's day of hanging out on a street corner in Liberty City, a ghetto north of downtown Miami. "We got civil rights, we got welfare," he says. "But look around here." For emphasis, he kicks at a pile of empty beer cans littering the sidewalk. A high school dropout, Walker gave up his last job, bagging groceries, two years ago. "When I was growing up in Mississippi, we were poor all right, but we didn't have the madness," Walker recalls. "Now we're just stuck here in this poor-ass ghetto, watching Oprah Winfrey on TV and listening to the damn gunshots at night."

What went wrong for the 4 million black Americans still trapped in festering inner-city ghettos? Why do one-third of all black families remain mired in poverty? Why is the jobless rate for black teenagers 40%? Why are 60% of all black children born out of wedlock? And why has the American ghetto become a self-perpetuating nightmare of fatherless children, welfare dependency, crime, gangs, drugs and despair?

Theories abound, but answers remain elusive. Perhaps the most promising approach grows out of the work of Black Sociologist William Julius Wilson of the University of Chicago, who popularized the concept of the underclass in his 1978 book The Declining Significance of Race. Wilson and his philosophical allies reject the simplistic single-factor theories of cause and effect, which range from the permissiveness of welfare to the pervasiveness of racism. Instead, they stress the ever widening social and economic gap between ghetto residents and the rest of American society, both white and black.

It is hard to remember that until the 1960s ghettos from Harlem to the South Side of Chicago were beacons of hope for blacks fleeing from the rigid segregation of the Jim Crow South. Jobs -- dirty, low-paying, but regular -- were available in thriving urban industries to anyone with a mind to work and a back strong enough for heavy lifting. Although pernicious, segregation at least compelled a sense of community, with black professionals and businessmen living among those who were far less successful. "These figures served the black community well as visible, concrete symbols of success and moral value, as living examples of the result of hard work, perseverance, decency and propriety," writes Elijah Anderson, a black professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

All that changed with the successes of the civil rights movement. The breakdown of rigid patterns of segregated housing offered middle-class blacks the opportunity to move beyond the ghetto walls. "The most upwardly mobile are the first to leave," explains Walter Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University. "Then the next best, the church members and civic leaders, leave. They are replaced by those who care less. There is cumulative decay."

Where once the ghetto provided a mix of black social classes, now residents are bound together under the yoke of poverty and impoverished aspirations. In a forthcoming book, The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson argues that those who have been left behind in the ghetto have inherited not "a culture of poverty but social isolation." Inner-city residents can go weeks without encountering anyone, black or white, who is a middle-class achiever.

Take Carla Smith, 25, a welfare mother who lives with three of her four children in Passyunk Homes, a public housing project in South Philadelphia. She and her children rarely leave the four-block project except to walk to the nearby grocery and discount-clothing stores. "I'm young, but I might as well not be," says Smith. "I don't do nothing. I don't go nowhere. My partying days are over. I just stay here with my kids all day long."

Much of the recent debate over poverty has stressed the need to provide jobs and training for welfare recipients like Carla Smith. But by making welfare the crux of the problem, both liberals and conservatives have ignored the single most serious cause of the misery of the ghetto: the shockingly high jobless rate among young black men. Unskilled and ill-educated, these young men are the true victims of America's dramatic transition away from a manufacturing base. Even when there is decent-paying work available, Wilson contends that social isolation excludes the black underclass from the "job- network system" that permeates other neighborhoods. One statistic tells it all: in 1985, 43% of all black male high school dropouts in their early 20s reported earning no money whatsoever. As recently as 1973, that figure was just 12%.

Of course, some of these ostensibly unemployed young black men do earn money illegally, often from selling drugs. But the explosive growth of the ghetto drug culture further erodes the work ethic. In a recent paper, Anderson laments the growing cleavage between what he calls "old heads and young boys." Old heads were the traditional neighborhood mentors of ghetto youth. Their message, Anderson writes, "was about manners and the value of hard work, involving how to get a job, how to keep a job, how to dress for a job interview, how to deal with a prospective employer." But with work scarce and cocaine permeating the ghetto, young blacks now tend to dismiss old heads as old fogies preaching a message as irrelevant as antidrug lectures.

A lack of jobs for young black men translates into a lack of ability for them to take responsibility for the children they father. This, Wilson argues, helps explain the staggering growth of inner-city illegitimacy. A recent study by the Children's Defense Fund found that 90% of all babies of black teenage mothers are born out of wedlock. As Harriette McAdoo, professor of social work at Howard University, puts it, "Men are unable to maintain themselves in the labor market, and they are unable to maintain their families."

What can be done to break this iron triangle of social isolation, black joblessness and single-parent families? Even 20 years after the ghettos of Detroit and Newark erupted into the fires of long-suppressed rage, Americans cling to the sanguine faith that some magic formula can end this cycle of poverty and social pathology. More money for social programs, a welfare system with stronger incentives to succeed, the teaching of values in the schools: these are the familiar answers of policymakers. But compared with the gravity of the problems of the black underclass, almost all the standard remedies amount to little more than changing the bandages on a festering wound.

Twenty years of failed programs, from community development to public housing, point to a depressing conclusion: little will be done to make the ghetto an acceptable place to live and raise children. This by no means suggests abandoning those trapped in the inner city. Rather, the emphasis of both government and private philanthropy must be on helping the black underclass escape the social isolation of these inner-city wastelands. What successes there have been come not through cosmetically improving the ghettos but by providing residents with opportunities through jobs and education to rise out of them. Saving people, not inner-city neighborhoods, may be the only way America can redeem the promises that were made against the charred urban landscape of that terrible summer of 1967.

With reporting by Jack E. White/Chicago, with other bureaus