Unit XI: Leader of the Free World: 1945-1975
Question/Problem 3: In what ways did the Civil Rights movement change the lives of African Americans?
BLACK PEOPLE are in trouble today.From Milton Meltzer, The Black Americans: A History In Their Own Words (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1984), pp. 285-286.America is in trouble today.
Look at what has happened in America in the past three years: Five million more people are poor. A third of all blacks are poor. Half of all black children are growing up in poverty. The black infant mortality rate in the United States is worse than the national rate of Bulgaria-- that's right, Bulgaria!
This is an America in which a black child born today has a fifty percent chance of growing up underprivileged, undereducated, and underemployed.
We read about an economic recovery in the newspapers. Where is it? It's the best-kept secret in history for black people. In this so-called economic recovery the official black unemployment rate is frozen at more than twenty percent. A third of blacks who want work can't find it. Two out of three black teenagers who want to work are unemployed.
Hunger and want stalk this land. Hundreds of thousands of homeless people search for shelter and for a scrap of food. Here in New Orleans the number of people in need of emergency food aid doubled last year. In Detroit, 50,000 people a month exist on surplus cheese handouts.
A lot of very nice people are upset about famine in Ethiopia, about refugees in Afghanistan, about suppression of workers in Poland. They're worried about the arms race. They're concerned about war in El Salvador.
But where is the concern about suffering right here in the U.S.A.? What about the millions of Americans, black and white, who go to bed hungry and thank the Lord for having a roof over their heads, knowing full well how many don't even have that.
Where is the concern for the millions of poor children, who face a bleak future, condemned to lives of desperation?
Where is the concern about the dangerous drift toward a divided nation, one part largely white and employed, the other largely minority and poor?
We ask these questions because the future of black Americans is at stake.