A Saga of Triumph, a Return to Poverty : Black Middle Class Has Grown but Poor Multiply

For Sharon McPhail, the last two decades--the years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.--have been a saga of struggle and triumph. For Donald Scott, the years have brought a sharp slide back into poverty.

McPhail grew up in Cambridge, Mass., so poor that “my brother said if we hadn’t had roaches, we wouldn’t have had anything to play with at all.” Today the 39-year-old McPhail, with a law degree from the University of Michigan, is Detroit’s chief criminal prosecutor, earning $65,000 a year.

And she credits King with helping to make her achievements possible. “I don’t think many of us would have been in any of the colleges we were in if it hadn’t been for that movement,” she said.

Scott, in sharp contrast, has fallen back nearly to where he was two decades ago. Early in the 1970s, having worked a series of odd jobs out of high school, he landed a position as an equipment operator on an offshore oil platform in Louisiana, the sort of well-paying blue-collar job that had been barred to Southern blacks until the civil rights movement.

But just before Christmas, 1986, “everything shut down,” said Scott, 41. He lost his $24,000-a-year job and, with only a high school education, has been unable to find full-time work since.

For the American black community as a whole, the two decades since King’s assassination have been the story of Sharon McPhails and Donald Scotts.

As blacks poured through the gates forced open by the civil rights movement, the upper reaches of the black middle class have grown in size and vibrancy. Moreover, having secured good jobs with major--formerly all-white--companies, blacks seem to have far greater security than did the black middle class of an earlier day, whose income was heavily dependent upon the economy of the black community it served.

Burden of Racism

At the same time, however, the changing American economy--plus the still-heavy burden of racism--has deprived millions of other blacks of their tenuous hold on a decent living, forcing them and their families back into the ranks of the poor.

Black unemployment rates soared during the economically troubled years of the late 1970s and early ‘80s and never fully recovered. Over the last two decades, more than a million blacks swelled unemployment rolls.

And in the decaying hearts of Northern and Midwestern industrial cities, the combination of unemployment and isolation has helped to destroy family structure and fostered an underclass seemingly condemned to lives of abject poverty and random violence.

What has happened to the black community as a whole--growth in the ranks of both the very poor and the relatively well-to-do--is strikingly reflected in the income of black men in their prime earning years of 25 to 55.

Income of Men

Since 1969, the year after King’s death, the proportion of these men earning less than $5,000 a year soared from 8% to about 20% (with incomes measured in 1984 dollars to adjust for inflation). At the same time, the share of these men earning more than $30,000 a year jumped from 8% to 14%. Offsetting these increases was a corresponding crash in the proportion of men in the middle income levels.

Black women show a similar pattern. Those with jobs have made spectacular gains. Once primarily confined to the role of domestic servants, black women in the 1970s and 1980s have largely left such work for the professions and for clerical and technical jobs. In the 1970s and 1980s, black women virtually eliminated the racial wage gap separating them from their white counterparts.

But while fewer black women in the 1980s are cleaning white people’s houses, more and more are heading their own households. Female-headed black households--now 43% of all black families--have the highest poverty rate and the lowest average incomes of any type of family in the country, and in 1986 roughly 44% of all black children lived in poverty.

In the white population, as well, income inequality has worsened in the last 20 years, particularly the 1980s. But among whites, the change has been minor slippage, at most. The black population, by contrast, has polarized.

Donald Scott’s story illustrates why the incomes of so many blacks have slipped so far. Beginning in the 1940s, and then in increasing numbers in the 1950s and 1960s, blacks left the land and the rural South for industrial jobs in the Northeast, the Midwest, growing Southern industrial centers such as Birmingham, Ala., and the Southwestern oil fields.

There, black men possessing little education but willing to work hard could win decent incomes and hope for the future. Steadily, although slowly, the income gap between blacks and whites narrowed.

A typical black worker who took his first job in 1940 could expect to earn 47 cents for every dollar earned by a typical white worker. By the end of the 1960s, blacks were up to 60 cents on the dollar.

It was during the 1960s that King and the civil rights movement matured and won their greatest victories. They were years of steady economic growth in which an increasingly prosperous America dismantled the legal and social constraints that had reserved the fruits of prosperity for “whites only.”

Economic Growth Slowed

But in the years since King’s death, two unrelated economic trends combined to hammer the black working class.

First, overall economic growth slowed. The nation’s heavy manufacturing industries--those in which black workers were particularly concentrated--took the greatest beating.

At the same time, the huge number of children born during the “baby boom” years from 1946 to 1964 began to enter the labor force. Blacks who were displaced from their jobs found themselves competing for work in a weak economy against large numbers of younger, better-educated white workers.

“The kind of jobs they were in got really smacked,” said University of Maryland economist Frank Levy. At the same time, “there’s this enormous wave of labor coming in.”

From employers deluged with applications from 21-year-old college graduates, the reply to 41-year-old high school graduates like Donald Scott was simple and dismissive, said Levy: “Who needs them?”

Entreaties for Work

For the last two years, that has been the response Scott has been receiving to his entreaties for work.

Born in New Orleans, Scott graduated from high school in the delta town of Houma, La., in 1963 and went to work as a sandblaster, painter at a shipyard and stock clerk at a grocery store. The oil field job, although grueling, was a major step forward for him, a move to a higher level of income and more stable employment.

“My whole life just changed around,” he said. And then his job disappeared when the oil boom died in the mid-1980s. “The bottom just fell out,” he said.

“It don’t seem like I got any prospects for the future,” Scott said. But “I got to hang in. For my kids. I got to try to give the kids a future.”

Fortunately for Scott and his two daughters, his wife, Ola, earns $1,000 a month as a laboratory technician at Union Carbide, enough to keep the family off welfare. To save money, the family has been forced to leave its home in Houma and move back to the small town of Greensburg, La., where the living is cheaper.

There, Scott spends his days reading want ads and listening to rejections. He has put together a resume and received tips on how to handle a job interview, but to no avail.

“I try to get whatever work I can,” he said. “I go to interviews and fill out applications. Just the other day I called a lady for a job as a yardman, and she said she was interested. But I haven’t heard from her yet. People just give you the runaround.”

The Scott family is one of millions that fall into that nebulous category known as the “working poor.” Far more desperate is the plight of another growing segment of the black population, the urban underclass.

The underclass claims only a small proportion of the roughly 30 million blacks in America. It is a small percentage even of the part of the black population that is poor. Researchers at Washington’s Urban Institute, who have developed one widely accepted definition of the underclass, estimate the entire population at about 2.5 million people, some 1.5 million of whom are black.

In the popular view, the underclass is populated by violent, drug-dealing teen-agers and unwed mothers on welfare. By the Urban Institute’s criteria, underclass members live in neighborhoods marked by “welfare dependency, female-headed families, male joblessness and dropping out of high school.”

“This is clearly an area where things are getting worse,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, who headed the Urban Institute’s study of the underclass. During the 1970s, the number of people living in “underclass neighborhoods” more than quadrupled. And while final numbers on the 1980s will not be available until the 1990 census, existing evidence indicates that the growth has continued.

‘Large Social Costs’

“Although it is a small population,” Sawhill said, “still it can impose large social costs.” The living conditions of the underclass, for example, are largely responsible for grim statistics such as these: Blacks nationwide are six times more likely than whites to be murdered, three times more likely to be raped, more than twice as likely to be robbed and nearly four times as likely to be arrested for a violent crime.

AIDS, once primarily identified with white male homosexuals, rapidly is becoming more often a disease of black drug users and their sexual partners. And murder has emerged as the leading cause of death for young black men.

The development of the underclass has had particularly harsh consequences for black women. Despite popular stereotypes, census data and other records studied by historians indicate that the family structure of the black community survived slavery and emerged largely stable from the turmoil of Reconstruction.

Not until the 1960s did the modern disintegration of the black family begin. Less than one-third of adult black women are now married and living with their husbands. More than half of all black babies are now born out of wedlock.

Decline in Manufacturing

Experts disagree over the reasons for the growth of the underclass, although the decline in America’s manufacturing industries has clearly been one. Not surprisingly, said University of Michigan demographer Reynolds Farley, the places that once had the largest populations of black industrial workers--cities such as Chicago and Detroit--now have the heaviest concentrations of blacks mired in poverty.

Conservatives have blamed the breakdown in black family structure and the increased resort to welfare, which, they argue, fosters dependency. They say government should actively seek to reduce welfare eligibility while adopting policies such as tax breaks and urban “enterprise zones” that might encourage business investment in inner-city neighborhoods.

Those arguments have been influential with the Reagan Administration. But critics challenge the central premise that welfare has been the cause of family disintegration. They observe that the big increase in black affluence began during the 1960s, while welfare payments were increasing. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that the underclass exploded in size, even as welfare payments shrank.

Liberals, for their part, have until recently blamed racism for the phenomenon of the underclass. But they have had few answers to why some blacks have prospered while others have sunk.

Flip Side of Success

More recently, scholars have proposed a new set of explanations that concentrate on what University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson terms “social isolation”--the flip side of increased social and economic success for the black middle class.

Into the 1960s, Wilson noted in a recent study of the urban underclass, inner-city neighborhoods typically contained a mix of people of different income levels. “The movement of middle-class black professionals from the inner city,” he said, “followed in increasing numbers by working-class blacks, has left behind a much higher concentration of the most disadvantaged segments of the black urban population.”

Increasingly, urban poverty areas have become more impoverished and their residents more cut off from mainstream society, from successful role models and from the labor market.

“There is a whole group of blacks,” said James Smith of the RAND Corp., “who have basically severed their connection with the American economy.”

Robert Payne is one of the many blacks who have been able--in part because of the gains of the civil rights movement--to leave the inner city behind.

Payne, 52, is a postal clerk, a job that, like teaching, has traditionally been a beacon in black communities around the nation. It is a steady job with an equal-opportunity employer, offering black people one of the few avenues out of the factories and foundries of the industrial working class.

Payne’s father was a tavern keeper who set strict standards for his two children. “Nobody’s going to lay around here these three months,” he would tell them during summer vacations from school.

“In order to get what I wanted, I had to work,” Payne recalled. “I like good things, and I knew nobody was going to give me those things.”

When he left the Air Force and joined the Postal Service 29 years ago as a railway clerk, sorting mail on trains from Chicago to Memphis, Louisville and Indianapolis, Payne could hope to go only slightly higher in the ranks. The better paying, less arduous jobs at the service window were, at least in his hometown of East St. Louis, Ill., held for whites only.

Barrier Was Broken

But the civil rights movement broke down that barrier and, in 1977, Payne became a window clerk at the East St. Louis post office. “My family thought it was real nice,” said Payne, a cheerful man with an infectious chuckle. He now earns $28,000 a year.

As his income increased, Payne followed the route millions of whites had trod before him--out of the city to the suburbs. In 1985, he, his wife, Mallie, and their daughter Chauna, then 8, moved to a predominantly white neighborhood in nearby Belleville, Ill. There the windows on his home have no bars to keep out intruders, he said, and Chauna “can leave her bicycle and skates in the yard.”

In the suburbs, however, the Payne family has come face to face with a fact of black American life that many whites are loath to acknowledge: racism. His white neighbors shunned him, Payne recalled, looking the other way when he appeared.

“It took them at least six months to come around and say: ‘Hey, Mr. Payne,’ ” he said. “It made me feel kind of down. . . . A lot of times I’d be out doing yard work and I didn’t have anybody to talk to.”

Race discrimination, particularly in housing, remains rampant in the United States. With the exception of cities located around military bases and towns centered on college campuses, virtually all American cities remain heavily segregated, says demographer Farley. In almost any major American city, a simple line on the map would suffice to mark off 85% or more of the black population from 85% or more of their white neighbors.

But Payne has been willing to endure those difficulties because Chauna can get a good education in Belleville. “I save for her so she can go to a good school,” he said. “Once you get a good education, you can get a good job and won’t have to ask anybody for anything.”

Education has marked a triumph for the nation’s black population in the last two decades.

As recently as 1940, the average black man entering the work force had only six years of schooling. That level has steadily increased, first slowly, then more rapidly. Despite dropout rates in many inner-city schools that remain shockingly high, by 1980 the average new black worker was a high-school graduate.

Even more impressive have been the gains at higher levels of education. In colleges, black enrollment jumped from fewer than 350,000 students in the late 1960s--mostly in the nation’s roughly 100 historically black institutions--to more than a million today. At the nation’s law schools, black enrollment more than doubled. In medical schools where minority students were seldom found prior to the 1970s, blacks are now about 5% of total enrollment.

Overall, improvements in black education levels have been the single most important factor in narrowing black-white income gaps, according to a RAND Corp. study of black economic progress that James Smith and Finis R. Welch published two years ago. Blacks still earn less than similarly educated whites, but that gap--the price of continued racial discrimination--has shrunk sharply and for younger workers is now down to about 10%.

Black Enrollment Drops

But although the number of college-age blacks continues to increase, college enrollment of blacks has dropped from the peak of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Less dramatic drops have hit enrollments in post-graduate programs.

While the potential impact of the decline is clear, the reasons remain a puzzle. The cost of higher education, which has increased faster than inflation for a decade, “has to be part of the explanation,” said Sara E. Melendez of the Washington-based American Council on Education. So too does a shift in financial aid from grants to loans, a particular problem for blacks, 40% of whom still live in families with an annual income of less than $15,000.

But cost cannot explain why the decline mostly has affected young black men. Again, race discrimination--in this case the apparent increase in the number of racially motivated incidents on college campuses--may be a part of the answer. Increasingly, said Melendez, “we find black students who are very well prepared academically who go to a mostly white institution and find it so uncomfortable they leave.”

Despite all of the turbulence of the last 20 years--the growth of the upper middle class, the swelling of the impoverished underclass--material life has changed but little for many blacks. The majority of the black population remains as it was in King’s day--poor but not desperate, living in working-class neighborhoods of major metropolitan areas and poorer sections of the rural South.

In the tiny rural community of Max Meadows in the far southwestern end of Virginia, Langhon and Kathleen Holliday live off the land--always have, always will.

Born in nearby communities in Wythe County and married for 42 years, the Hollidays have traveled to big cities from time to time, but never once did they consider leaving their 100 acres to move to one. “We love the land; we love the outdoors,” said Kathleen Holliday.

They also like the civility and the absence of tension in the country. Black and white people “get along fine,” said Langhon Holliday. “Up in New York or Washington you can walk by your neighbors and they won’t even know you. Here people say ‘Good morning’ and ‘How do you feel?’ ”

Ramrod Straight

Langhon Holliday, a tall, slender man who at age 76 still stands ramrod straight, finished the seventh grade and worked at an ammunition plant for 26 years, retiring in 1973 when his wages were $3.50 an hour. Now he collects $180 a month in retirement income.

From time to time, Kathleen Holliday worked “in private homes,” she said, but mostly she works in her own home and garden, raising beans, broccoli, cucumbers, radishes and many other vegetables. She cans or freezes many of them.

They have known many black families who sold their land and went north searching for better lives. “They thought they could go up there and make more money, but they couldn’t,” Langhon Holliday said. “Then they would come back and have no land.”

On their land, the Hollidays have built a modest home overlooking the rolling foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. The land, passed on by Langhon Holliday’s father, a coal miner, stands as a monument to black Americans’ dreams of self-sufficiency, something to own and pass on to the next generation.

Although the Hollidays themselves have no children to inherit their land, they hope that other children will one day grow up in a world much better than theirs. But they have little faith that, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s movement notwithstanding, racial harmony will soon reign outside of their little part of the Virginia countryside.

“The Lord,” said Langhon Holliday, “might come before then.”