Jul 24, 2020

Article #15 of Multi-Article Series >>>>> A Short Course in African American History


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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