Books : Researchers Take the Racial Pulse of a Tumultuous Era

Black Lives, White Lives: Three Decades of Race Relations in America by Bob Blauner (University of California Press: $25; 350 pages)

“Black Lives, White Lives” is, quite literally, the life’s work of a dedicated Berkeley sociologist who set out to discover the linkages between race and politics, culture, history. Along the way, Bob Blauner observes, he encountered nothing less than “the stuff of literature.”

Sixteen black Americans and 12 white Americans, all living in Sacramento and the San Francisco area, were interviewed by Blauner and his fellow researchers at intervals over a period of nearly two decades--first in 1968, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and racial conflict reached a flash point; again in 1978-79, and most recently in 1986. In “Black Lives, White Lives,” Blauner gives us an annotated and ordered selection of what these men and women have to say about race in America.

Echoes of Their Lives

Much of what Blauner elicited from his interview subjects is the raw material of a vast historical saga. The black men and women offer brief glimpses and echoes of their lives in the Deep South and the urban ghettoes, their struggles to survive and grow, their most cherished dreams and their most anguishing fears; the whites, by contrast, talk mostly about fear alone. And even when they are ostensibly talking about politics, Blauner’s interview subjects are revealing their hearts and souls. Thus, in a 1968 interview with a black welfare mother, we perceive the rumble and flash of potent memory in her comments about the transformations that she is beginning to see in her own people:

“Dr. King is conditioned to think two or three times before he makes a statement. Because you’re used to making it sound palatable to the white man,” the black mother says. “Oh, how many times have I heard my grandmother say, I’ve heard old colored women say, when they were whipping kids with a stick: ‘Now I’m going to beat the hell out of you to keep that white man from killing you! I’m gonna bend you now!’ . . . And then you see the young Negro, and baby! (Laughs.) This is a new Negro! He won’t think two or three times! He hasn’t had to go to the white man’s kitchen . . . he hasn’t had to go bow for him, he hasn’t had to wash windows ‘n’ dig in his yard or anything like this.”

Re-Creating the Clamor

I found the 1968 interviews to be the most poignant, the most illuminating, the most intriguing. Blauner re-creates the clamor of those emotionally charged times and reminds us of how seriously we took every confrontation, not only the skirmishes on the streets but also the making and unmaking of heroes and causes. When we hear black voices and white voices debating over the militant tactics of Stokely Carmichael--the very name, of course, is deeply nostalgic to veterans of the ‘60s--we are reminded of how much seemed to be at stake in that tumultuous era.

“I like the boy,” says an old black man, the grandson of a slave and a slave-owner, back in 1968. “They say get an education, clean up, straighten up. We done all of these things. And still we’re not accepted. So what is left for the boy to do? I think before they talk about Stokely Carmichael they should talk about the Ku Klux Klan.”

Blauner captures some of the grotesque, frightening and even comical aspects of the ‘60s. We meet one young black man, an ex-con at 17, who boasts in a 1967 interview: “I would like to kill a white man, just to put it on the books, man.” And then we hear from Bill and Diane, a couple of white kids who are virtually a parody of the well-intentioned but fuzzy-minded and freaked-out hippies of Haight-Asbury:

Passage of Time

“We’re both kind of mystically oriented, you know,” Bill says. “That means we see good and evil in very long-range terms, and not so much in immediate political, tangible terms. If someone tries to help himself by getting power, then he’s barking up the wrong tree. He can only help himself by finding out where he’s at, and some kind of internal changes, to which power is largely irrelevant.”

It’s fascinating to encounter Blaumer’s interview subjects after the passage of time. By 1979, the young white racist is a “walking boss” on the waterfront and a middle-aged suburbanite: “I’m not quite so eager to jump out of the car and snatch somebody that made me mad and smack them in the face,” he says. By 1986, the young black ex-con is the father of two teen-agers, a crack addict, a drug dealer: “I be selling drugs to support my habit,” he says. “I could be rich if I didn’t have a habit.” And, by 1979, the black welfare mother is a community organizer and a dedicated Christian Scientist--she is frustrated over the lack of progress for black Americans, but she is not embittered:

Law of Love

“The Christian Science concept is the law of love and it says that there is no race of man. There’s one race,” she says. “I don’t go into any place and I’m sitting there--these are white people and I’m black. It’s tremendous not to have that feeling anymore. That’s how I’m able to get out there on the street and fight the police department. Because they have no right to do anything but love.”

“Black Lives, White Lives” is a sociological study with a vivid face and a warm heart. Blauner was clearly won over by the men and women who shared their lives with him and his readers-- and so was I.