A Time of Unfulfilled Expectations,
1973-1992
People in the United States were in the
doldrums for much of the 1970s. The oil
crisis hit during 1973-1974, Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 in the aftermath of
the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam War came to an ignominious conclusion in
1975, stagflation hit the economy by the middle years of the decade, and
Iranians seized American hostages in 1979.
The gains for women and people of color in the halls of business, higher
education, and political representation were palpable. But the gains realized as a result of
legislation of the 1960s and early 1970s seemed to take the nation only so far,
stalling at the attempt to secure an Equal Rights Amendment; and leaving the underclass of the central
city mired in poverty, ill-educated, and susceptible to all manner of pressures
impinging on family and community.
In the 1980s those pressures impinged with a
vengeance. Crack cocaine hit the streets
about 1980, moving profitability of the drug from the noses of the mostly white
wealthy to the pipes of the mostly black poor.
Into this market swept gangs, oftentimes moving into previously
unoccupied or lightly-trod areas such as Denver, Omaha, Kansas City, Des
Moines, and Minneapolis. As the white
and black middleclass moved to the suburbs, those left behind included the
mostly African American poor, the residentially mobile, the recent migrant who
knew little about the heritage of the community to which she and he sought more
tolerable terms of existence. School
systems that had seemed acceptable when serving substantially middle class
populations were now exposed as terrible, particularly in meeting the needs of
highly challenged populations.
Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 and
again in 1984; his vice-president
George H. W. Bush won in 1988. Jessie Jackson, who headed Operation
Breadbasket and the Rainbow Coalition, exerted a forceful presence as a
candidate in the Democratic primaries and caucuses in 1984 and 1988, giving
voice to the concerns of the underclass, especially those of his fellow African
Americans. But this was mere
counterpoint to Reagan’s talk of “welfare queens” who drove Cadillacs and to
the policy stupor of the Bush term, 1988-1992.
These were not people to whom African Americans at the urban core could
relate, and there was a distinct feeling that both their own leaders and those
of white society were failing them, bringing little in the way of new ideas to
the table that could address the degrade, violent, and ever-worsening
conditions of their own lives.
Democrats seemed more benign but no more
effective. Long after the Great Society
programs screamed out for reevaluation, Democrats stood by Aid to Families with
Dependent Children (AFDC) that helped families get by but did little to show a
way for extraction from the conditions of poverty; furthermore, because income ceilings were
pierced when an acknowledged male income was included in the familial coffers,
an unfortunate effect of AFDC was often to drive fathers away from the family
or to encourage nondurable and exploitative relationships with males who took
much but gave little to a household.
By 1992, then, there were two Americas. Some people characterized these in terms of
black and white, but the much greater distinction was between the middle class
and the underclass. Many African
American people, as was the case with women of all races, were becoming people
of considerable economic means, rising to assume the leadership of major
corporations and taking positions in law firms as attorneys and in hospitals
and clinics as physicians. But the
contrast with African Americans at the urban core, joined there by other
impoverished people of color and by poor whites, was extreme. The problem ached for a solution; that solution never came, but the rise of
a politician who talked in cadences that
resonated with African American people and delivered a message that at least
seemed to convey a caring disposition did make possible of the vision of a more
hopeful future for African American people and others living in the inner city.
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