Bob Pacilio's Metaphor Cafe.blogspot.com: To All Students and Teachers: What Caused Intercity Ghettos? [Part 1 of 2]

On February 10, 2017, I watched Chris Hayes' "Chicago in the Crosshairs"and it took me back to my classroom in 1990, when I gathered my students around the TV to view a PBS Frontline entitled: "Throwaway People" written by Professor Roger Wilkins. Bring a white teacher in a predominately white suburb, I was more than a little curious why drugs, gangs, violence and prison all intersected in a place America referred to as "the Ghetto." Watching Chris Hayes try to find the answer to this question in a town hall meeting reminded me of the lesson that ought to be taught during Black History Month...

I told my students: "You don't know where you are going...until you know where you've been." So, what are the causes of the inner city violence?

In 1990, Shaw was a black suburb of Washington, DC, just blocks away from the monuments people visit. Shaw had three times the infant mortality rate in the industrialized world. Crack was the major connection to the international economy for young black men.In Shaw, there were "more murders than days.This was 26 years ago. It's not Chicago, 2017--no, but history has a habit of repeating itself.

What most people do not understand is that the lives of blacks were not always this way. Racially segregated from the rest of DC, the community of Shaw was strong because rich, middle class blacks and poor were all walled off from the rest of Washington. The same was true of Chicago's South Side, East St. Louis, etc.

Professor Roger Wilkins, 2009

Slavery caused Shaw. Northern cities were an escape for poor, uneducated southern blacks who had endured the worst treatment of slavery and Jim Crow. They came north looking for the American Dream. And for a time, low income wages and jobs sustained them. Six million came north from 1910-1970 in the "Great Migration." The 1940's were a better, but bitter, time in that 80% of the black men had jobs, 75% of the children had mother and father living in same home, and poverty rate decreased, despite segregation that walled them off from the rest of the world.

But then, from 1955-1968, Civil Rights Movement and Dr. King's dream centered around the right to vote, to be educated in integrated schools, and the right to integrated housing. It succeeded for the most part. A quarter of a million blacks left Shaw and towns like it to "move up" to suburbs, in the Second Major Migration, leaving the poor, old, and undereducated behind. It happened in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and other formerly segregated cities. "No one could have predicted this effect. However, Dr. King's assassination blunted the movement for better jobs," wrote Roger Wilkins. Riots followed King's assassination. These foreshadowed the Rodney King's LA riots in 1990. Out of frustration and anger, the Black Lives Matter movements continued in 2016 in Ferguson).

In 1965, President Johnson's "War on Poverty" lost funding as the Vietnam War diverted the money away from social programs to educate and train blacks. The recession of the 1970's came crashing down on all Americans, but the loss of jobs hurt black men the most: 25% unemployment jumped to 40%; women led households went from 20% to 40% and average wages for blacks fell a startling 50%. Then jobs were exported. The result: divorce skyrocketed as men lost their power to become breadwinners according to Frontline.

One of my heroes is Pete Peterson, a businessman who ran a courier service employing young, black men back in the '90's. He told Frontline: "Kids must know they too are apart of

America

. Kids today (in the 90's) have no heroes in the home"; they find them in sports and music. But these heroes cannot teach them; they are not there for dinner, they are not really a part of the community. Frank Wright, a social worker, explained how the drug culture came seeping down on places like Shaw: "Drugs were not allowed in teenagers hands until the late 60's-70's when the 'hustler' gave the drugs to a kid to 'hold' the stash. It took little time for the holder to become the seller."

The fate of drug dealers leads to two roads: either death or prison. 33% of the black men under the age of 30 were arrested for drugs in 1990. Today, "African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the 2.3 million incarcerated population," according the to the NAACP. Wilkins concludes: "The Black man's crisis is the central destructive fact in community life."

Pete Peterson looked out wistfully at his town. These people have lost their dreams, "And when a man loses his dreams he's dead. They develop a fatalistic attitude where they don't care anymore about living and dying because there is no hope. They don't care about society's norms because, as far as their concerned, society has stuck it to them anyway- so they act out. There are a whole lot of people in this society that wish these black people would just disappear." They are the Throwaway People.