Revolution Incomplete : Gains Made, but Racism Runs Deep

They seemed the nightmares of some earlier decade--a time when a bottle-throwing mob in Georgia might rout civil rights marchers, or when a terror-stricken black man might be run down on a New York parkway trying to escape a white gang.

But they were headlines from the present, not memories from the past. And that was part of their jolt. Americans may not have thought racism cured, but, by and large, they presumed it was in remission.

Instead, the nation was delivered shorthand names for new racist outrages--Howard Beach and Forsyth County--updated images of an indelible bigotry.

And it was left with a troubling question, one awful to confront 19 years after a sniper took the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: Is racism on the rise across the land?

Hard to Monitor

The answer, as in most matters of race, is complicated, for the nation’s racial pulse is as hard to monitor as 240 million heartbeats.

And yet, from most indications, the answer appears to be no .

During the last 40 years, surveys have shown that whites increasingly favor equal treatment for blacks. Several shocking, much-publicized spasms of racism are not evidence that this has changed.

“You have to be careful not to take some flamboyant racial incidents and make them indicative of something bigger, something nationwide,� said sociologist Jonathan Rieder, a Yale University expert on race.

In fact, the incidents in Forsyth County and Howard Beach have been as remarkable for the indignation they provoked as for the dreadfulness of the deeds.

“Similar incidents have been cropping up year in and year out, though not all are in major media centers (like Howard Beach, Queens) and none so symbolically timed to the Martin Luther King holiday (like Forsyth County),� said Steve Suitts, executive director of the Southern Regional Council, which has been doing research in the field of civil rights for more than 40 years.

Other Incidents

Last summer, 75 anti-Ku Klux Klan demonstrators in Chicago were chased from a rally at a Southwest Side park by a threatening mob of thousands of whites.

And in 1985, near Anchorage, a black tow truck driver was shot to death by a man whose Jeep he had hauled from the mud. After the shooting, the man told friends, “He’s just a nigger--no one’s going to care.�

Neither of these events--nor dozens more like them--created a national furor. “It’s hard to figure out what will make a splash,� said Bill Stanton of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.

The center is one of a number of groups that attempt to keep a tally of crimes motivated by race, ethnic or religious prejudice. But all rely mainly on newspaper clippings. It is hard to compile reliable numbers.

A bill pending in Congress would require the Justice Department to keep track of so-called hate crimes, but even those statistics would not be an accurate barometer of whether racial bias is up or down.

Rieder, the Yale sociologist, points out that an increase in racial incidents does not necessarily mean an increase in racism.

“If blacks feel they can move into a neighborhood where they would never have moved before, they might meet the resistance of some die-hard racists. Does that indicate a step forward or a step back?� he said. “It gets complicated.�

But if it is difficult to chart whether racism is resurgent, it is all too easy to see that it persists, malign and deep.

The evidence lies in recycled slurs and re-fashioned stereotypes, in neglected inner-city slums and white flight to the suburbs, in widening economic disparities.

More Blacks Poor

Measured against the median income of whites, the median income of blacks has gone down in the last 10 years, the National Urban League says. Now, a greater percentage of blacks live below the poverty line than in 1975.

Many who are predisposed to fault the Reagan Administration are quick to blame it for many of these problems as well, alleging that there has been a neglect of social programs, a distaste for affirmative action and busing and a lack of moral leadership.

“While this Administration has said some of the right things, at the very critical points where rhetoric could have translated into real action, it has either taken a walk or walked in the wrong direction,� said the Rev. Charles Stith, a Boston political activist.

Clearly, the civil rights revolution remains incomplete, and its pace has slowed.

The scaffolding of segregation is gone, along with the respectability of judging a man by his skin color before his character. But the sense of unfinished business is widespread.

Mix of Progress, Resistance

In interviews with dozens of scholars, activists and politicians, as well as in closer looks at three cities--in the Northeast, the Deep South and California--The Times found that race relations are a mixture of progress and resistance, genuine change and cosmetic show, public compliance and private resentments.

On the surface, much has certainly turned for the better. Ernestine Elliott, the black director of a social services program in Decatur, Ala., recalls a time when no black in town even dreamed of getting a government job as good as the one she now has.

When she was a girl, blacks could buy goods at the downtown department store, but when they wanted a drink, she remembers, they were shunted off to a fountain marked “colored� and the water came out warm. At the fountain for whites, the metal was dewy from the chill.

Name-Calling

“My most vivid memory was of a little white boy standing on the L&N; railroad tracks, frozen with fear as a train came,� Elliott said. “A black man pulled him free and the conductor shouted to the boy’s mother, ‘It’s OK! That nigger saved him!’ �

But Elliott still hears the word “nigger� darting from an occasional tongue when a white applicant for aid does not like a decision she makes. “And there are plenty of them thinking it too,� she said.

For 40 years, national pollsters have been surveying racial attitudes. The results show a dramatic shift from bigotry to tolerance. The proportion of whites who favor integrated schools, for instance, has climbed from 32% in 1942, to 65% in 1963, to more than 92% in 1985.

In 1944, only 44% of whites said blacks deserved an equal chance at any kind of job, but by 1972 the total had climbed to 97%.

By the early 1970s, whites so completely supported the desegregation of hotels and restaurants that pollsters stopped asking the question.

Belief, Action Differ

Nevertheless, there is a difference between what whites believe about racial equality and what they are willing to do to advance it.

Although whites overwhelmingly support fairness in hiring, a majority has steadfastly opposed any special help--such as racial quotas--for blacks in the job market.

And although whites overwhelmingly approve of integrated classrooms, their support declines sharply at the suggestion that white children be sent to a school with a black majority, especially if that involves busing.

Some researchers say these contrary responses merely reflect tough choices between competing interests: If having school integration means busing children out of the neighborhood, then whites simply prefer to sacrifice the former to avoid the latter.

But others say the nation’s tolerance is shallow, and a few suggest that racism has changed cloaks, developed a new vocabulary and gone on to a new generation of expression.

New Stereotypes

This updated racism, they say, combines traditional biases against blacks with resentments based in new stereotypes--that blacks push too hard, benefit from special treatment and live easy lives on welfare.

Stanley Greenberg, a political scientist with a New Haven, Conn., consulting firm, has interviewed dozens of white blue-collar workers around Detroit and found that many blame their own hard times on blacks.

“They feel the government that was supposed to protect them has instead given everything away to the blacks: Blacks get the jobs; blacks get the welfare; blacks get the loans . . .� he said. “They have no historical memory of racism and no tolerance for present efforts to offset it.�

Like everyone else, they have their own view of America, seeing race through their own special prism of time and place and experience. Here is a look at racial change and racial attitudes now in three American neighborhoods and cities:

South Boston

“Southie�--the scene of long and ugly busing violence in the 1970s--has always been an entity unto itself. It is an ethnically homogeneous community, predominantly Irish Catholic, low-income and working-class, and is physically isolated from the rest of Boston by a network of expressways and the Fort Point Channel. Until a few years ago, blacks entered the enclave only at their own peril.

Along the quiet residential streets that run off West Broadway, South Boston seems on the surface to be unaffected by the tide of two decades’ social change. The three-story wood-frame homes are still all white-owned, and in the taverns and variety stores that guard each corner one senses that he is among a singular people, scared of change, suspicious of outsiders, protective of turf.

Few can articulate the precise fears that integration raised. Was it the potential loss of jobs? Of territory? Interracial marriage? A dislike of people with different-colored skin? Special privileges for the blacks through affirmative action? Or simply the unknown?

“Yeah, probably all of that,� said one Southie longshoreman.

Softened Attitudes

The district today is hardly a hotbed of liberalism and tolerance, but undeniably, attitudes there have softened. Raymond L. Flynn, who helped lead the anti-busing crowds a decade ago, is still a South Boston resident, but now, as mayor of Boston, he is promoting blacks into positions of political leadership and was among the civil rights advocates who marched recently in Forsyth County.

On Broadway, blacks can walk today (though few do) without fear of harassment, and black taxi and bus drivers no longer refuse to cross the Broadway Bridge into South Boston. Perhaps just as significant, South Boston is becoming gentrified: Now the new outsiders who portend change and look different drive BMWs and wear three-piece suits.

At South Boston High School--which never had a minority student from its founding in 1899 until the troubles of 1974--the enrollment is now 39% black and 35% white, and racial incidents are virtually nonexistent. Last year the senior class president and vice president were white; this year they are black. In a recent poll for the yearbook, the senior class elected a white as the most popular boy and a black as the most popular girl.

‘Work Things Out’

“I never doubted for a minute that if you left the kids alone, they’d work things out,� said the principal, Jerome Winegar, who had to travel with bodyguards and check into a Boston hotel under an assumed name when he came to Massachusetts 12 years ago from Minnesota. When he expelled a white student for beating and kicking a pregnant black girl in the mid-1970s, his car was firebombed.

“There’s no way to tell what happens 15 years down the road, but I can tell you South Boston is a better place today because of busing,� Winegar said. He nodded toward two black teachers in the faculty cafeteria. “For one thing, those two ladies can walk down the street now without fear for their safety.�

A few blocks from the school is the small, three-story home where Paul and Cilla Miller have lived for 12 years. There is an autographed picture of Flynn in their living room, though they remember him more fondly as a protector of their neighborhood than as a mayor advocating an open city for everyone. The Millers have 10 grown children, and except for a son who is a chef in Florida, all still live in or near Boston.

‘Got Along Fine’

“I don’t think there was ever hatred of the coloreds here,� said Miller, 70, an interior house painter. “We used to sit on the benches and talk and everyone got along fine. It was just the busing that divided people. It was like a plot launched in the Kremlin. But the coloreds, as far as I can see, the only problem arises in marriage; there’s no other prejudice here.�

“Oh, there’s prejudice in Southie, Paul, plenty of it,� said Cilla Miller, 69, who participated in the anti-busing demonstration in Washington and who now sends $16 a month to World Vision International to sponsor a 9-year-old Ethiopian child named Kedida Siraj. “But since the police started putting them (the whites) away for causing trouble, they’ve learned to keep their hands off the coloreds.�

“There’s been some benefits from busing,� said their son, Bill, 42, who moved from South Boston to the suburb of Canton a decade ago in opposition to busing. “First, blacks and whites are getting along better in the city because of the exposure to each other. The city’s more open. It’s not ‘nigger, nigger, nigger’ anymore. It’s just blacks. I think we all realize now that both sides have got niggers.�

“I wouldn’t want my school to be all white,� said his son, Bill, 20, the Millers’ grandson, who is studying business at an integrated junior college. “Black, white, yellow--it’s better that we all learn from each other. Most of the kids around I know have acknowledged that, well, you gotta do what you gotta do; you got to get along. You can’t fight all your life.�

Pasadena

The police patrol car slipped through the Pasadena night, a white officer at the wheel, his black partner in the seat beside him. They turned up into the hills of the city’s Hastings Ranch district, moving past a private school--enrollment, mostly white--and elegant homes with views of the San Gabriel Valley below.

Tim Sweetman, the driver, followed the road into the valley, cut across town on Orange Grove Boulevard, where the Rose Parade floats line up on New Year’s Eve, and headed north on Lincoln Avenue, through the impoverished black section of northwest Pasadena.

“This is where the crime, the drug traffic is heaviest,� said Sweetman’s partner, Dennis James, who has a degree in business. “. . . Some of the people here maybe look on me as sort of part of the white Establishment--it’s a little of that Uncle Tom thing--but basically it’s how you treat them as people that determines how they’re going to respond to you, and relations between us and the community are pretty good.�

Half Population White

Despite its national image as a white, upper-class enclave, the Pasadena that Sweetman and James patrol is today a city where whites represent only about half the 130,000 population and less than 30% of the enrollment at Pasadena High School.

Significant strides have been made in promoting racial equality since the city’s schools were ordered to desegregate in 1970 by a U.S. District Court, yet in many ways Pasadena remains two distinct cities, one poor and black, the other affluent and predominantly white.

“People in Pasadena would drop dead if you said we had a reservation of economic deprivation here, but we do,� said George F. Regas, rector of All Saints Episcopal Church. “And when you look at how racism of 1987 differs from that of 20 years ago, I think the big difference is in how much clearer the economic dimension of racism has become. A city cannot be rich if it’s built on my affluence and your poverty.�

Start of Segregation

Pasadena’s early black residents--mostly settlers who came to staff mansions and hotels in the late 1800s--faced little discrimination. They became property owners and a middle class evolved. But a new wave of white migrants to the area early in this century brought less tolerant attitudes, and the beginnings of segregation in schools and housing took hold. Two homes of blacks on Cypress Avenue were burned; threats were made against blacks’ churches; blacks were barred from all but menial city jobs, and Pasadena’s first public swimming pool remained segregated from its opening in 1914 until 1940.

The school desegregation order of 1970 led to a long, bitter fight--Realtors opposed the order and Pasadenans elected a conservative school board in an effort to derail it--but was carried out without violence. Most wealthier whites took their children out of public school and enrolled them in private schools; some left Pasadena entirely.

‘No Big Loss’

“The loss of a bigot to a community is no big loss,� said Fred Zimmerman, assistant principal at Pasadena High School, where all students are now part of a generation that has known nothing but an integrated educational system.

What has emerged from the turbulence of the early ‘70s, when Pasadena was run by white businessmen and professionals, is a leadership coalition of blacks, whites and Latinos in which no single group dominates. As the population has become more diverse, the power base has spread, and the city has had a black mayor, now has a black police chief and is imbued with a healthy liberal spirit that cuts across racial lines. Economic means, rather than skin color, primarily defines individual limitations today in Pasadena.

Police Chief James M. Robenson believes that racism most commonly festers in an environment in which two groups of poor people are fighting for the same bottom rung. The violent conflict, he says, takes place in the transition zones where the majority of blacks live and racial territory abuts and overlaps. The demographics and affluence of Pasadena have spared the city this kind of confrontation.

“I can’t imagine there’s any neighborhood in Pasadena today where a black family couldn’t move into and make it,� Robenson said. “Oh, maybe there’d be a little noise, but the prevalent attitude would be, ‘If they can afford this house and keep it up, well, they’re probably OK.’ That’s the influence of economics.�

In the northwest district, to which police devote much of their law enforcement efforts, the toughest section is around Howard Street, near the home of the late Jackie Robinson, the man who broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947.

On one of the corners there, John Perkins, a black activist from the Mississippi civil rights days, has converted a former “drug house� into a community service center that provides counseling, rehabilitation, education and recreation. He has 80 volunteers, 60 of them white.

“I’ve been beaten (in Mississippi); I’ve been in jail; I’ve been through all kinds of things, and while pockets of racism certainly exist, racism is not as bad as it was 10 years ago,� Perkins said.

‘Moving Together’

“We’re not going backward as a nation like some people say. In fact, we’re dealing with racism much more creatively than we used to. What I see in Pasadena is blacks and whites moving together to become responsible for some of the problems of the neighborhood.

“Now, this neighborhood has got real problems and some of them are getting worse--the breakdown of the family, unemployment, people making babies and not having the will to take care of them, drugs. But we can’t try to blame these things on racism and not take any responsibility ourselves. If the problem is a racial issue then, yes, we should call it racism. If it’s education, then we’ve got to call it education. If it’s economics, then let’s call it economics.

“The government has to provide leadership, but we can’t shift our responsibilities to the impersonal state or federal level. We need better black leadership on the local level. The blacks have to get control of their neighborhood resources to bring in jobs, create skills. Neighborhood development is what will undermine racism. Until this happens, I think some of the white folks are backing off, waiting to see more positive black leadership emerge on the local level.�

Decatur, Ala.

“That’s the one!� said the stenographer; she said it was Tommy Lee Hines who had been peeping in her window. The Decatur police put the 25-year-old black man in handcuffs. Then one of the officers decided to ask about some unsolved rapes. “How many women did you rape, two or three?� he wanted to know. “Three,� Hines said.

None of this made much sense “across the tracks,� in Decatur’s ramshackle ghetto. Everybody there knew Tommy. He wouldn’t rape anybody, they said. For Heaven’s sake, Tommy was retarded--with an IQ no more than 40. These police had some story about Hines escaping in a car. Why, he couldn’t even ride a bicycle.

But in 1979 the blacks in Decatur didn’t have much clout. So they asked the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for help. Pretty soon, there were SCLC rallies almost every week and tents set up on the grass by City Hall. That riled up the Ku Klux Klan all over the Tennessee Valley. If the SCLC could pitch their tents on city property, the klan figured that’s where it ought to burn some crosses.

Four Shot

It all came to a head with gunfire. The two sides confronted each other at a bend in the road on Banks Street--black marchers with banners, the klan with a Tommy Lee effigy hanging by a noose on the back of a pickup truck. Too many there had guns. By the end of it, four were shot, two blacks and two whites.

Nearly eight years later, this North Alabama city of 42,000 along the Tennessee River remembers its days as a civil rights battleground. To blacks, it is a source of pride that they stood up to injustice. To whites, it was a time when outside agitators from both sides turned their city into a national spectacle.

“It was such a circus we had to turn the 7th floor of City Hall into a press room,� said Bill Dukes, the mayor then and now. A tired-looking man at 59, Dukes said blacks and whites got along well before the shootings and get along even better now. Oh sure, some are slow to change. “I’ll hear the word nigger every now and then, sometimes in a derogatory manner,� he said. But Decatur has too good an eye for attracting business to foul up its chances with racial trouble. It wants new plants to go along with Monsanto, General Electric and Goodyear.

Blacks in Office

These days, Dukes said, there is a black on every major city board, pretty good for a town where only 15% of the population is black. Some of the citizens wanted a street named after King. So be it. They wanted a change to district elections to assure black representation on the City Council itself. Come 1988, that will happen too. Until then, the council has named a black appointee, Russell Priest, the head of catering at a local hospital.

To most older blacks, such events are symbolic of how the city has changed. These days, the little children are bused to integrated schools. Blacks can get a hamburger down at Penn’s without having to go to the back door. Though most blacks still live “across the tracks,� a few are in almost every neighborhood, including the richer ones.

Lorenzo Jackson, 57 and black, is the principal at one of the elementary schools. “The big problem is jobs,� he says. The large plants hire a lot of blacks--true enough. They’ve got their equal opportunity quotas to fill. But the white businessmen up and down Central Parkway don’t want black help, Jackson says. Sad to say, he isn’t sure all the young men he knows are fit to handle a job. He sees them sitting on the steps of the grocery--�young guys looking beat down like old men�--drinking beer.

Economic Need

Black economics, that’s the ticket, says William Smothers, who publishes a black weekly newspaper. He and some of the people with the NAACP try to tell the white Establishment that they have a responsibility to help blacks start businesses. “Blacks need low-interest loans and guaranteed minority set-asides on city contracts,� he says.

But these are wild ideas to most of those around town. Priest, 55, the first black on the City Council, calls Smothers “a big-mouth and a boat-rocker.� First things first, he says. The city needs to worry about crime and garbage pickup and street signs, not some highfalutin nonsense.

“The South has come 1,000 miles since the old days,� Priest says. There are 6,500 black elected officials across the nation, where there were fewer than 200 before 1965. More than 60% of them are in the South. “Those people up North were always telling us what to do, but we’ve made more progress than them.�

Progress, sure. But it’s still good to keep an eye out.

Tommy Lee Hines was convicted of those rapes--though the verdict was later set aside. A second jury decided that he was incompetent to stand trial, and Hines was put in a mental hospital. They let him come home a few weeks ago for his mother’s funeral, and when he did, some of the folks thought it wise that he lay low.

“Somebody might have tried to hurt him,� one of them said. “Time has gone by, but you just don’t know.�