Monday, Sep. 08, 1997

YES, BLACKS CAN MAKE IT ON THEIR OWN

By THOMAS SOWELL

Those of us old enough to remember the civil rights revolution of the '60s and the profound social transformations that preceded it may find it hard to realize that most Americans today were not yet born when all this happened.

This lack of personal knowledge is, for the unscrupulous, a golden opportunity to create a history that serves their own purposes. One of the key self-serving myths to emerge is that blacks owe their economic and social advancement to the civil rights victories of the '60s.

Incessant repetition of myths does not, of course, make them true. Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom demonstrate in their newly published book that the economic rise of blacks was in fact more rapid in the '40s and '50s than in later decades.

That does not mean that the civil rights revolution was unnecessary. There were injustices that needed to be redressed and resistance to doing so, as the book acknowledges. But it also paints a vision of racial progress in America that we have seldom seen. Blacks have not advanced by being passive recipients of government largesse or by high-decibel rhetoric. Most have made money the old-fashioned way: they have earned it.

As of 1940, the average black adult had only a grossly inferior elementary school education. But as more blacks became better educated and left the South, incomes of black males rose faster than incomes of white males--all well before the civil rights revolution. More blacks rose into professional ranks in the years immediately before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than in the years immediately afterward.

Too many black "leaders" today have a vested interest in the application of old myths. They are like Moses in reverse--leading their people back into the welfare state, to a self-imposed isolation from the growing opportunities all around them.

THOMAS SOWELL, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of several books on race.