Public Education: Best Hope for the “New South”

By Monte Piliawsky

Vol. 1, No. 8, 1979, pp. 5-7, 25

The Myth of the “New South”

In the early 1970s, the media celebrated the emergence of a “New South” which was characterized primarily by the most successful advances in racial equality in American society. Some observers even viewed the South as the redeemer of the American soul. In 1971, Marshall Frady wrote: “It may be the South after all where the nation’s general malaise of racial alienation first finds resolution.” This dramatically changed interpretation of the South was capped off by the election of Jimmy Carter, a Southerner, to the White House in 1976.

Yet, despite all the talk about a “born again” South, the tone of hopefulness which characterized articles written about the South only a few years ago is changing. In midJune 1978, one could read an article entitled “Old Problems Persist in the New South’ ” in the Chicago Tribune, as well as a first-page article in Time magazine entitled “in Mississippi: The KKK Suits Up.” In October 1978, Tommy Lee Hines, a 26year-old mentally retarded Black man, was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison by an all-White jury for allegedly raping a White woman in Decatur, Alabama, the site for the trial of the “Scottsboro boys,” and exactly parallel case 40 years earlier. Clearly, there is need for an objective appraisal of the South to measure exactly how much progress has been made, and whether that progress is substantial or superficial. Where does the South stand today?

The issue of the New South is partly a definitional one. Contrasted to the worst excesses of the pre-1954 period, racial conditions have improved markedly. In the most significant areas of the Civil Rights Movement-political participation and access to public facilitiessubstantial progress has been made. Blacks have registered enormous political gains if measured in terms of registered voters and Black elected officials. Blacks have general access to public facilities. There is more school desegregation in the South than in the North. It may he, however, as Lerone Bennett, Jr., senior editor of Ebony, cautions, “wrong to extrapolate from these surface changes to changes in social structures.”

Black Political Participation

The impressive gains in Black voter registration do not necessarily translate into social betterment for Blacks. Many Southern Blacks live in towns where the electoral domination of the White merchant class perpetuates racism. In Tupelo, Mississippi, for example, since the spring of 1978 Blacks have been boycotting downtown merchants in protest of alleged police brutality and job discrimination. The Ku Klux Klan held a rally on May 6, 1978, at a cityowned recreation center. According to Alfred Robinson, president of the United League of North Mississippi, the Klan rally was attended by “99 percent of the city’s cops, the chief of police and the mayor.” The mayor reportedly received a standing ovation for his speech before the Klan.

Even the election of a Black mayor can be but a pyrrhic victory. Tuskegee, Alabama, has had a Black mayor since 1972. Whites have responded by establishing a separate sub-society, with their own private school and even their own newspaper; many have moved to new homes in near-by suburban communities. However, Whites still own almost all the major businesses and both banks in the downtown area and totally dominate the economy of Tuskegee. As Professor Manning Marable of Tuskegee Institute concludes in his 1977 account, appropriately entitled “Tuskegee and the Politics of Illusion in the New South”: Dc Jure segregation has ended, but defacto segregation and an ongoing culture of White racism remain pervasive.”

Black mayors in large Southern cities confront the necessity of playing brokerage politics with the White economic establishment. In the spring of 1977, Atlanta’s Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, fired sanitation workers-most of whom were Black-who had struck for higher wages and then declared: “Before I take the city into a deficit financial position, elephants will roost in the trees.”

Another serious constraint on Black city mayors is the power of the state legislatures. As White voters are losing political control of cities to Blacks, they are increasingly dependent upon the state legislatures to protect their interests. The current Black mayor of New Orleans is desperately attempting to raise funds, but is hampered by a provision in the new state constitution which allows a

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home-owner of a residence assessed at under $50,000 to pay no property tax whatsoever. Chuck Stone, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, explains that “the sole benefit redounding to the Black community’s benefit of a Black statewide office … may lie in an aroused Black pride, but not necessarily any improvement in the quality of Black life.”

Public Education

This paradox of the New Southprogress contrasted with underlying stagnation-is perhaps most dramatically exhibited in the area ofpublic schools. The formal integration of schools masks a deeper and more significant pattern of “resegregation.” School integration has generally meant that White parents have pulled their children out of the public schools, leaving to Black (and some poor White) children school systems which invariably are underfunded. The remaining White children often are divided from Blacks by controversial tracking systems, a practice of assigning students to certain selfcontained curricula.

The New Orleans public school system well illustrates the problems confronting public education in the South. Most Whites living in New Orleans send their children to private or parochial schools and no longer want to give the public schools their tax support. Although middle-class Whites have little concern about the quality of public education, they control the educational system through both political and economic power. Whether or not this non-support of public education represents racism, the net effect is that Blacks have only inferior schools to attend.

Over 80 percent of the public school enrollment in New Orleans is Black. A 1975 survey revealed that the city’s students scored in the bottom fifth on standardized tests, compared with students in the 22 other largest United States cities. The dismal quality of the New Orleans public school system reflects the total lack of financial support for the schools. In 1974, New Orleans spent only $756 per pupil, compared to an average of $1,303 in other major cities.

Clearly, the public school system in New Orleans is offering Black students an inferior education. Dr. Mack J. Spears, the Black president of the Orleans Parish school board, said in 1975 that Black children in public education in New Orleans and the nation are deliberately structured into mediocrity: “[There is] a designed strategy to achieve a label of inferior schools because there are forces, social, political and economic, which do not want Black kids to survive.”

Economic Conditions

A 1978 study conducted by the Institute for Southern Studies reveals that despite the South’s rapid economic growth, the gap between the region’s rich and poor is almost exactly the same as it was nearly 25 years ago. According to the study, as of ‘1976, the richest one-fifth of all Southern families accounted for 42.3 percent of earned income, while the poorest fifth received only 5.0 percent of every income dollar. By contrast, in 1953, the poorest one-fifth earned 3.5 percent of total income compared to 43.3 percent for the richest fifth. The study suggests that the slight improvement at the bottom end of the income scale can largely be explained by the sizeable migration of poor families out of the South, especially Blacks moving to the Northeast. However, even with. the North absorbing many of the South’s poor, the number of people living below the poverty line in the South has declined only by five percent, from 11.3 million to 10.8 million between 1969 and 1975.

The reality of life for Blacks in particular is far from the picture offered in investment brochures promoting the New South. Most Blacks in the South live in rural, non-metropolitan areas. Typically, rural workers in the cotton or sugar farms live in houses with a single woodburning stove,often lacking toilet facilities. One cause of the poor housing is the plummeting since 1971 of federal housing loans to rural Black Southerners. An increased number of Blacks simply are too poor even to quality for the low-income programs. Another, factor for the decline in loans is pure discrimination. The supervisor of the Farmers Home Administration for Sumter County, Georgia (where Plains is located), explained in 1978 why loans to Blacks had dropped off so sharply:

Black people don’t know how to adjust …. White people, you can put them in a subdivision. But not Blacks. Nine out of ten will follow the worst example. They won’t do what they should do. They fuss and fight like animals, shacking with each other’s wives. It’s a mess.

A second major factor perpetuating Black poverty in the South is the fact that the widely heralded industrial development of the New South has mainly bypassed areas where most Blacks live. A report in 1977 by the Task Force on Southern Rural

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Development revealed that Blacks actually received a considerably greater number of new industrial jobs vis-avis Whites in the decade of 1956-1966 than they did in the past decade. A third disheartening factor is the rapid disappearance of the Black-owned farms in the South. At the present rate of Black land loss-300,000 acres a year-there will be no Black farmers left in 1990. (See Nick Katz, “The Other Side of the New South (II),” New Republic, April 1, 1978.) It is not surprising, then, that in the 244 Southern rural counties with the largest Black population, 56 percent of Blacks live in poverty, compared to 20 percent of Whites. Steve Suitts, executive director of the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Council explained: “It all relates back to the tradition of White folks using Black folks as cheap labor.”

In summary, since 1954 race relations between Blacks and Whites in the South have improved dramatically in some areas and remained unchanged in others. The bottom line is that the enormous progress made in the political arena has not been translated into economic advancement for the masses of Southern Blacks. As Samuel DuBois Cook, President of Dillard University, wrote in 1976:

The decade between the midfifties and the mid-sixties was one of remarkable and unprecedented gains for Blacks. For Blacks, it was the most creative, constructive, and humane period in their long experience with the American political system. In the latesixties, however, the cold winds of conservatism, reaction, and “benign neglect” began blowing again. They continue.

One is struck by the ominous possibility that this “Second Reconstruction” for the South may fail for the same reason which doomed the First Reconstruction: a lack of economic content and a failure to give Blacks economic resources commensurate with their political power.

Race Relations in the U.S

What inferences for race relations in the country as a whole can be drawn from our analysis of the New South? There is strong and mounting evidence that the Civil Rights Movement has stalled in the North as well as the South. Take school integration, for example. In 1972-the latest year for which complete details are available-43 percent of Black students in the South attended schools in which at least half the students were White, compared to only 29 percent in the rest of the country. In fact, psychologist Kenneth B. Clark reports that the percentage of Black students attending segregated public schools in such Northern urban centers as New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago is greater in 1978 than it was in 1954.

Two recent developments threaten the future of education for Blacks and poor Americans, respectively. The Supreme Court’s Bakke decision in June 1978, a judgment supported by an overwhelming 81 percent of the American people in a Gallup public opinion poll, appears to be the death knell to an era of “affirmative action.” In a similar vein, the measure passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on June 1, 1978 (H.R. 12050) granting tax credits for tuition paid to private elementary and secondary schools was rightly labeled in an article in The Atlanta Constitution by Hal Gulliver as “the most dangerous legislation affecting public education in a long while.” Referring to the tuition tax credit plan, Gulliver quotes Dr. Benjamin Mays, chairman of the Atlanta school board, as saying:

The passage of such legislation by the federal government puts money in the pockets of the rich and well-to-do to pay for their children to go to private schools and will leave the city schools to poor Whites and poor Blacks…I believe it will be the beginning of the destruction of public education in this country which is at the heart of a democracy like ours, in which the founding fathers were interested in providing at least a high school education for every American.

The Tax Revolt expressed in the overwhelming passage of Proposition 13 in California in June 1978 and by the wholesale defeat of candidates “soft” on tax cuts in the November 1978 election is even more foreboding, as it portents a deterioration of social services for minorities. Parren Mitchell, leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, predicted in Time magazine that “every single human-resources program is going to be in danger, medicare and medicaid, welfare, the jobs programs.” Suggestive of the long-range effects of the California vote is a poll asking the state’s voters which services they felt could most usefully be curtailed. The largest number-69 percent-cited welfare payments to the poor, and 21 percent named mass transit-a service indispensable to Blacks and Chicanos. On the other hand, voters were reluctant to dispense with services most beneficial to middle-class property owners: only four percent favored cuts in the amount spent for police, and only one percent would accept reductions in funds for the fire department. In short, as Joseph Kraft of the Washington Post states, “the immediate victims of this populist hedonism, unfortunately, are the poor minorities.”

An extensive national opinion survey administered in 1978 by the Gallup Organization for Patomic Associates reveals additional gloomy news for the future progress of Blacks in the United States. The survey found that White Americans rank ‘the problems of Black Americans” as the very lowest-31st-of an array of 31 domestic and international issues, below even such concerns as “communism in France and Italy,” “mass transit,” and “Communist China.” Whites seem to believe that Blacks have made such substantial progress that their plight need no longer be a matter of major concern.

The Decline of Social Conscience

What is the deeper meaning of the new conservatism in America? Joseph Kraft describes the phenomenon as “middle-class greed. How to stop the rising wave of self-indulgence presents a genuine national problem.” Senator George McGovern terms it “degrading hedonism that tells them to ask what they can take from the needy.” I believe that the loss of guilt feelings is the key to explaining the prevailing American mood. “The middle-class is not feeling guilty anymore,” says Willie Woods, coordinator of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials. “They’re worried about their own survival.” In short, as Professor Irving Howe notes, “I think there’s a loss of social sympathy.”

The immediate precipitating cause of our decline of social conscience is inflation. Caught in an unaccustomed economic squeeze, the middle-class is discovering that its “real” take-home pay is not increasing. Columnist William Satire refers to these Americans as “The New Poor.” Frustrated by their stagnant resentment in demands for tax cuts, regardless of the concomitant curtailment in public services, especially needed by the poor.

The underlying cause of our decline of social conscience is the loss of guilt feelings. The enormous media coverage of the Civil Rights Movement brought into our living rooms graphic and almost daily reminders of the appalling conditions of America’s poor. We felt guilty about racial discrimination and the plight of the poor. Today, however, with the decline of the Civil Rights Movement, the immediate pressure upon our psyches to feel guilty is greatly diminished. The exemplary leadership role of the federal government in the mid-1960s virtually has ended. Two years before the Bakke decision, Hodding Carter, III, then editor of the Delta Democrat-Times, wrote:

It is ironic that at the very moment we most need continuing pressure and movement, both are being withdrawn by a nation which is uncertain of where it wants to go on matters of civil liberties and civil rights.

In my opinion, it is equally unlikely that a rejuvenated civil rights effort will emerge in the near future or that the present high rate of inflation will decline. In the meantime, the economic conditions of Blacks and the poor erode further. For decades, up to 1970, Blacks were slowly gaining on Whites, economically; however, inflation has reversed that progress. Specifically, the median income of Black families which was 61.3 percent of the White median income in 1970 fell to 58.5 percent in 1974, improved slightly in 1975, but has fallen since then. An August 1978 study of the National Urban League entitled “The Illusions of Black Progress” reported the equally dismal finding that the jobless gap between Whites and Blacks is the widest it has ever been. The study found that at the peak of the 1975 recession the Black jobless rate was 1.7 times the White rate, but that by the first half of 1978, the Black jobless rate was a record 2.3 times higher than the White jobless rate. The study also dispelled the widespread impression that the Black upper-class has expanded in recent years. From 1972 to 1976, for example, the proportion of Black families whose total income was above the government’s higher budget level ($24,000) dropped from 12 to 9 per cent.

The title of this paper is meant to suggest that quality public education is the best means available to improve race relations in America. This hypothesis contains one basic assumption. Scholarly studies of racism conducted by social scientists in the past 25 years have found that in a step-like pattern the more education persons had, the greater their willingness to extend civil rights to minorities. Since the overwhelming majority of Americans attend public schools, a reduction in the quality of public education could be expected to result in a more racist citizenry. Conversely, public education, if properly structured, is an ethical enterprise to’ help clarify human values and direct human affairs “toward desirable and rationally justified patterns of action.”

Americans have always had sublime faith in the power of education. The eminent historian Henry Steele Commager wrote in 1950: “No other people ever demanded so much of education as have the American. None other was ever served so well by its schools and educators.” Americans quite properly have paid grateful homage to the success of the public schools in meeting the historic demands that society made upon them: to provide an enlightened citizenry, to create national unity, and to Americanize the millions of foreign-born. Since 1950, society has placed another “historic demand” upon public education: to combat racism. The future of race relations in America depends upon its success in this endeavor.

Monte Piliawsky is a professor at Dillard University in New Orleans.

A Few Proposals: From Black Agenda To National Policy

By Monte Piliawsky

Vol. 4, No. 4, 1982, pp. 11-16

Upon initial consideration, the offering of policy proposals which grow out of a “black agenda” might appear to be a futile exercise. Given the prevailing conservative mood in the United States, black political leaders currently exert insignificant influence in the formulation of national public policy. Congress, for instance, totally ignored the 1983 counter-budget offered by the Black Congressional Caucus.

New Right ideologues recently have attempted to hold

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on to the white lower middle and working classes, whose support was decisive in the election of both Carter and Reagan, through the elaboration of a full-blown conspiracy theory. This thesis posits an alliance between the “new class” of what William Rusher calls a “liberal verbalist elite”–leaders in the educational establishment, media and governmental bureaucracies, and “a semi-permanent, welfare constituency, all coexisting happily in a state of mutually sustaining symbiosis.” The argument is particularly persuasive, for, as David Edgar points out, it combines “in one acceptable construct the radical instincts of the vast middle layers of society (those instincts of hatred and resentment directed at the rich above them) with a rationale for retaining their superiority over the masses of the poor below them.”

Black leaders are clearly on the defensive in combating this appeal from the right. The white lower middle class, concerned that real take-home income is eroding, is inclined to accept the underlying premise of Reaganomics: that the only way to rescue the national economy is to reduce the federal budget by sacrificing social programs. Given this context, black spokespersons appear to be representing only a narrow-interest group.

However, an opportunity exists for blacks to press their public policy demands, if they can persuade their potential white allies that these policies are in the latter’s self-interest. Rightwing demagoguery can be countered with a populism of the left, in which blacks form coalitions with other minorities and with whites who are also feeling the pinch. As Vernon E. Jordan Jr. expresses it, “Reagan’s programs won’t work for us, but they also are not going to work for a lot of white people, and I think there will be a mutuality of interest, even absent brotherhood and love.” This coalition-building strategy is supported by Barbara Williams-Skinner, executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus:

The Caucus has got to come across as representing the interests of black Americans by showing white Americans how their interests coincide with those of black Americans, instead of winning over white Americans based on the concerns of black Americans. You’ve got to win people based on their interests, based on a common struggle.

The current prospect for coalition building is promising, given the falling relative incomes for the lower middle class. In the decade of the 1970’s, the share of total income going to the poorest twenty percent of American households remained essentially constant at 4.2 percent; however, the next lowest forty percent of households witnessed their share of total income decline from 28.5 to 27.2 percent. MIT economist Lester Thurow suggests that as the earnings of the lower middle class fall, relative to the groups above them, “what may also be canceled is the social tolerance of low- and middle-income groups for the large income gaps that have always marked the American distribution of income.”

Without doubt, Reaganomics has jeopardized much of the President’s initial support among the lower middle class. Duped in 1980 by candidate Reagan’s slogan, “Get the government off our back,” many working people have come to resent President Reagan’s favoritism to the wealthy. Black leaders must graphically point out to those four whites for every black who feel the impact of Reaganomics, exactly how they are being victimized. As Williams-Skinner puts it, “We’ve got to develop better research on the impact of the Reagan budget on non-black, non-poor small business people, which is the majority of what Nixon used to term the ‘silent majority’ voter.”

While the white lower middle class is the group most susceptible to the wooing calls for coalition, some support seems likely from disaffected portions of the middle class. A Newsweek poll in early 1982 revealed that by overwhelming three-to-one margins, Americans want federal spending to be increased in the following areas: aid to education/college loans, medical and health care, aid to states and cities, and job training. The same poll also showed that a fifty-two percent majority of Americans’ express fear that their own financial situations will decline because of Reagan’s supply-side economic policies.

In the following few pages I offer several policy positions primarily for consideration in a national agenda. This agenda and its particular suggestions must be seen as complementary to strategies aimed at other levels of power. At every level, coalition-building faces substantial obstacles: entrenched interests and enmities of class, race and sex.

One limitation to my agenda is that it does not touch

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specifically on roles which black Americans must play in enhancing their own lives. Even as they direct attention to broad advocacies, blacks need to plan actions which stress self-sufficiency and independence. Blacks should organize to take control of local resources. In the rural South the focus should be on securing control of county governments and their spending authorities, as well as local institutions such as rural electrical cooperatives. In urban areas, blacks should seek to control neighborhood institutions by having some of the powers exercised by the city, such as in the areas of education, housing, employment and health, transferred to a neighborhood corporation. Also promising are current economic campaigns, backed by the potential of boycotts, which negotiate jobs, training and re-investment from corporations doing business with blacks. As we have learned, exclusive reliance on national remedy leaves blacks vulnerable to the vicissitudes of shifting popular majorities in American politics.

Increase Political Participation

Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, blacks have dramatically demonstrated their voting strength. The number of black elected officials in the U.S. has increased in that time from fewer than five hundred to 5,038 by July of 1981. In addition, when there is a high black voter turnout, coalitions of blacks and whites have elected progressive candidates in the South even in constituencies where blacks are a numerical minority.

In August 1981, a huge black turnout provided the razor-thin margin of victory (50.6 percent) for Democratic candidate Wayne Dowdy in Mississippi’s fourth congressional district, a seat held by Republicans since 1972. In March 1982, a black turnout of seventy-five percent–higher than the white turnout–re-elected New Orleans’ black mayor Ernest Morial. Referring to Virginia’s November 1981 gubernatorial election, New York Times columnist Tom Wicker wrote: “That an upsurge of black voting has so materially aided the gubernatorial victory of Charles Robb in what has been the South’s most solidly conservative state does argue that the elements of the old liberal coalition can be re-invigorated in the right circumstances.”

However, many barriers impede the forging of populist voting coalitions. For one thing, extralegal obstacles to full black political participation still exist in the South. In 1974, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission reported: “Acts of violence against blacks involved in the political process still occur often enough in Mississippi that the atmosphere of intimidation and fear has not cleared.” In the companion essay to this one, Alex Willingham has outlined the continuing practices of Southwide resistance at the local level through both direct and indirect intimidation. Although blacks comprise popular majorities in over one hundred counties in the South, they effectively control only ten, often because of ingenious gerrymandering. In addition, a factor such as low educational opportunity is generally associated with a high sense of political powerlessness.

Both the black and white poor have reacted to generations of politicians’ unkept promises by developing considerable alienation. Nor does the election of black mayors in Southern cities, such as Tuskegee, Alabama, and New Orleans–to cite two particularly revealing instances–necessarily translate into an improved quality of life. As Julian Bond notes, “these mayors and aldermen and commissioners often remain accessories beside the fact of actual governance of their towns counties and states.” Perhaps reflective of such cumulative reasons for disaffection, the percentage of eligible Southern blacks who were registered to vote declined from 63.1 percent in 1976 to 57.7 percent in 1980.

Although they do not directly address deeper patterns of disinterest, long habits of powerlessness and the corrupting influence of private money in campaigns, structural changes in voting laws coupled with intensive registration drives can increase voter turnout. Citizens are required to register before they can cast a vote. This aspect of the American electoral system is unusual, for in most democratic countries the government assumes responsibility for enrolling all citizens on the permanent nationwide electoral register. Indeed in this country, registration is often more difficult than voting, for as Steven Rosenstone and Raymond Wolfinger note, “it may require a longer journey, at a less convenient hour, to complete a more complicated procedure–and at a time when interest in the campaign is far from its peak.”

The weightiest structural impediments to voter turnout are early deadlines for registration and limited registration office hours. Allowing citizens to register up until the election day itself and adopting the practice of having the registration office open in the evenings after normal working hours and on weekends would raise voter turnout among working people considerably. An even more helpful change would be to permit citizens to vote without registering in advance. In 1976, the four states

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which utilized election-day registration showed presidential turnouts of nearly seventy percent, well above the national average of only fifty-four percent.

Congress ought to pass legislation providing for nationwide election-day registration. Bills to this effect were introduced five times since 1971, culminating with President Carter’s unsuccessful 1977 attempt. All of these bills foundered on opposition by Republicans and Southern Democrats, who argue that liberalizing the registration laws would increase proportionately the turnout of low-income and less educated citizens, resulting in a windfall of votes for the Democratic party.

Also, Presidential and Congressional election days should be declared national holidays. State and local elections should be moved from Tuesdays to weekends. Based upon available empirical evidence, these electoral reforms would result in a significantly enlarged electorate, more representative of the entire American population. For example, 85.9 percent of those registered cast ballots in the 1981 runoff French presidential election which was held on Sunday, an enormous turnout by American standards. Voter turnouts of over seventy percent are routine in those U.S. elections, such as the Democratic party primaries in Louisiana, which are conducted on Saturdays.

Combat the Assault on Public Education

The United States has always considered public education to be the primary means of achieving its commitment to equal opportunity. The critical function of education was forcefully articulated in the Brown v. Board of Education decision:

In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.

Perhaps the greatest social calamity being perpetuated by the Reagan Administration on black and working class white youth is the federal government’s abandonment of its commitment to adequate, free and equal public education. Simply put, school systems are going broke due to drastic reductions in federal aid. Secretary of Education Terrel H. Bell has openly declared that the federal government intends to totally withdraw support of public education, stating that “education should be to state governments what defense is to the national government.”

The federal government’s retrenchment from education is especially painful in light of the encouraging progress made by black public school children during the past decade. The gap between blacks and whites in educational achievement test scores narrowed from an eighteen percent differential in 1970 to only thirteen percent in 1980. Many experts credit the improvement to Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, designed to support compensatory education programs. Nevertheless, the Reagan Administration cut Title I’s funds in 1982 by six hundred million dollars; his 1983 budget proposes an additional reduction of four hundred million dollars, or forty-five percent.

Equally devastating is the President’s proposal to provide tuition tax credits to private schools, a scheme which would cost $1.5 billion by 1987. Senator Ernest Hollings’s critique of the plan is on the mark:

The tuition tax cut proposal would turn our nation’s educational policy on its head, benefit the few at the expense of the many, proliferate substandard segregationist academies, add a sea of red ink to the federal deficit, violate the clear meaning of the First Amendment of the Constitution, and destroy the genius and diversity of our system of public education.

The drastic reductions in federal financial aid for college students proposed in the Reagan Administration’s 1983 budget, which include a forty percent cut in the Basic Equal Opportunity Grant, imperil the future of U.S. higher education. The students who stand to suffer the worst, of course, are low-income students, who are disproportionately black. It is estimated that enrollment in the traditionally black private colleges will be halved if the administration’s plans are fully implemented.

Blacks and the poor must demand that education regain is rightful place on the national policy agenda. A critical legal struggle should be made to reverse the Supreme Court’s five to four decision in 1973 (San Antanio School District v. Rodriguez) which permits school districts to spend widely discrepant sums for public education. Indeed, the inequitable system of financing public education makes a mockery of the intent of the Brown decision: to assure equal expenditures for educational purposes for all pupils regardless of race.

Implement Work Program

In mid-1982, eighteen percent of adult blacks and fifty-three percent of black teenagers are unemployed, more than double the percentage for their white counterparts. According to the National Urban League’s total unemployment index, which includes the discouraged unemployed who have stopped their job seeking, black unemployment equals the highest national unemployment level during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, when one-quarter of all Americans were out of work. To address this crisis, two government programs should be implemented immediately: a public works program and employment vouchers.

During the Depression, the national government put three million people to work building roads and public buildings that are still in use. The present depressed condition requires a comparable solution. Ideally, a public works program to provide jobs for the unemployed would be structured to rebuild the decaying sections of cities. Program costs could be offset by the savings of ten billion dollars in federal services now spent for every percentage point of unemployment. One component of the public works program should be a public service work corps offering a more socially constructive alternative to military service.

Public works should be supplemented with a long-term system of employment vouchers. As envisioned by Harvard economist Robert B. Reich, unemployed (and low-skilled) workers would receive federal vouchers that they could cash in for on-the-job training. The companies that accept the vouchers would have half their training costs paid by the government, for up to three years. Workers who develop skills as machinists, computer pro-

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grammers and operators would obtain permanent jobs, while industries would secure workers with needed skills. However, any system of providing industry with government subsidized workers would have to be accompanied by requirements that companies remain in present locations and maintain present work forces, rather than write off their old plant and equipment and move.

Expose the “New Federalism”

The program of “New Federalism” outlined by President Reagan in his 1982 State of the Union message is hoax. It is little more than an ideological veneer to package an assault on social programs, as well as a callous abandonment of the practice of the federal government, since the New Deal, of providing grants-in-aid to equalize resources among the states. These budget cuts hit the needy hardest; and the needy are disproportionately black.

Blacks and the poor are victimized by both the taxing and spending policies associated with New Federalism. The Administration’s twenty-five percent cut in federal taxes for fiscal 1982 was exclusively a reduction in corporate and personal income taxes, the only progressive taxes in the entire governmental taxing schedule. These shower-the-rich tax cuts are projected at $442 billion over three years.

As state and local governments now decide whether they will assume some of the axed federal programs, they must also decide whether to increase their taxes to offset the loss in federal revenue. With property owners resisting increases in property taxes, any new local taxes will likely be higher sales taxes. For example, in May 1982, New Orleans’ voters, with blacks providing the margin of victory, chose to raise the city sales tax to a whopping eight percent in order to keep the transit service in operation.

Whether by the curtailment of services or by the burden of replacing progressive federal taxes with regressive local ones, blacks and the poor suffer. In mobilizing public support against New Federalism, black leaders should expose the reality of this seemingly benign concept. As Nick Kotz puts it, “The new federalism represents an extension of the strategy of the budget cuts: shrink federal social welfare and then place responsibility with the states, where it is certain to shrink further.”

Unionize the Unorganized

In the anti-union South where the majority of blacks live, union members make significantly higher wages than their nonunion counterparts. In New Orleans, for instance, black (union) bus drivers have higher incomes than white (nonunion) police officers. One of the most dramatic examples of the benefits of union representation is found among clerical workers in Atlanta. In 1981, Southern Bell Telephone’s unionized clerical workers earned from $7.57 to $9.39 an hour after forty-eight months on the job; their counterparts in Atlanta’s nonunionized firms brought home $4.18 to $6.67 per hour–forty-five percent less.

Significantly, black workers benefit from union representation even more than whites. In 1974, the last year for which such information is available, all groups of workers–black, white, male and female–gained financially as union members. In the South, black men profited the most, earning thirty to fifty percent more, while black women earned seventeen to twenty-four percent more than nonunion workers of the same race and sex; white men gained fifteen to nineteen percent, with white women slightly higher at sixteen to twenty percent.

Labor unions presently protect many middle class workers. In addition to higher wages, union members receive job security, a grievance procedure, seniority rights, health insurance, and generally improved respect and personal dignity. According to Leslie W. Dunbar:

The case for unions that could bring self-defense, and self-reliance, to the poor and powerless is overwhelming. . . There is simply no other expectable way in our economy for these bottom-rung workers to become self-sustaining except through collective bargaining.

Especially in the South where business and government conspire to oppose and obstruct organization, we need laws which encourage unionization. In addition, we must support Southern black and white workers’ efforts to organize their own hospital, food service and clerical unions. Here again, endemic racism looms as one of the basic obstacles to organizing the un-organized. A recent study by Herbert Hill, former director of the NAACP Legal Defense Education Fund, concludes that the AFLCIO leadership has “refused to accept the perspective of interracial unionism,” a factor which has contributed significantly to the nationwide decline in workforce unionization from thirty-six percent in 1955 to only twenty-one percent today.

Question Pentagon Spending

While the Reagan Administration has drastically reduced the federal government’s commitment to social services, it has concomitantly reversed a twenty-year trend of gradual decline in the military proportion of the budget. For fiscal 1982, military spending was increased by $28 billion, to $199 billion, the largest peacetime one-year increase in absolute dollars in U.S. history. Reagan’s program for an accelerated military buildup calls for a total of $ 1.6 trillion over the next five years! Black leaders must question the dire economic consequences of military spending of this magnitude.

Even the political aims of military policy require a sound and healthy domestic economy. A report released in 1982 by Employment Research Associates of Lansing, Michigan, shows the contrary to long-held and popular belief, military spending is not good for the economy, for it

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inhibits economic growth and actually generates unemployment. According to the study, defense spending–because it produces no socially useful goods or services, and because it is peculiarly capital intensive–leads to more loss of employment and more inflation than any other category of government spending. The net loss of jobs disproportionately affects black Americans, because they are overwhelmingly involved in the production of durable goods, services and state and local government–three of the hardest-hit categories of the economy when military spending is high. Specifically, the study finds that every one billion dollars spent in the Pentagon budget results in fourteen thousand fewer jobs than if the money had been spent in the private sector, and a net loss of thirty-thousand jobs as compared with spending the money in the state and local government sector. The report concludes:

The deep problems of the American economy cannot be ameliorated until the military budget is cut and the money either is left in the hands of citizens through tax cuts or spent on economically productive activities by the government–federal, state or local.

A significant and growing constituency does not believe that the rapidly escalating military budget buys extra security for the U.S. Already the grass-roots movement for arms control and nuclear disarmament has forced even the bellicose Reagan Administration to consider negotiations on strategic weapons. The political climate in now ripe for blacks and the poor to take the lead in integrating anti-nuclear sentiment into a unified opposition to the buildup of military weapons. In challenging the Pentagon’s budget, we must deal with specific items by always raising the question: Does spending for this particular weapon advance a valid concept of national security, or does it represent, like the B-1 bomber, waste and “overkill”?

Extend Democracy

Present supply-side economic policies have enabled the wealthy to luxuriate in tax cuts or stash them in shelters, while corporations have used their windfalls to bid against and buy up one another. Instead, the national government should be encouraging private investment in new and modernized production capacity and placing public investment into the rebuilding of cities and the development of skills. Long-term gains can accrue through government investment in education and job training to both revitalize basic industries and pursue high technologies.

Finally, however, a fairer distribution of social wealth is essential. The major problem is that of controlling the arrogance and ruthlessness of trans-national corporations. Recent proposals for economic democracy and for greater worker control include the requiring of public shareholders in major corporations, encouraging employee-owned businesses, using union pension funds to achieve labor influence in corporate decisions and restricting corporate mergers.

To date, the most comprehensive working class alternative program to the current climate of accommodation and “givebacks” by labor unions in which workers sacrifice wages and benefits for so-called job protection, is the “Campaign for Corporate Concessions” spearheaded by former Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union vice president Tony Mazzocchi. The underlying assumption of the Mazzocchi plan is that workers must assume responsibility for the management of the national wealth themselves by having unions demand bargaining power over corporate investment, plant location, supervisory staffing, etc. Specifically, Mazzocchi’s program calls for a three-year freeze on the following: overseas corporate investment; unilateral investment decisions by management; further reductions in workers” incomes; increases in management compensation; the hiring of more supervisors; and a freeze on unnecessary mergers and on speculations.

As Mark Green, former head of Ralph Nader’s Congress-watch, states, the fundamental issue of the 1980’s is “how to generate and distribute wealth in a new era.” The other face of the continued growth of corporate wealth and power is the significant growth in poverty rates. A minimum of fourteen percent, or thirty-two million people, are now impoverished in the United States. More than sixty percent of the poor are black or Hispanic and more than half are children. There is no more compelling agenda for the politics of the coming years than to reduce the upward trend in misery.

Suggested Bibliography

Ackerman, Frank. Reaganomics: Rhetoric vs. Reality. Boston South End Press, 1982.

Auletta, Ken. The Underclass. New York: Random House, 1982.

Ferguson, Thomas, and Rogers, Joel (eds.). Hidden Election: Politics Economics in the 1980 Presidential Election. New York: Pantheon, 1981.

Gill, Gerald R. Meanness Mania, The Changed Mood. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980.

Green, Mark J. Winning Back America: Alternatives to Reaganomics. New York: Bantam, 1982.

Hayden, Tom. The American Future: New Visions Beyond the Reagan Administration. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc., 1982.

Lekachman, Robert. Greed Is Not Enough: Reaganomics. New York: Pantheon, 1982.

Piven, Frances Fox, and Cloward, Richard A. The New Class War. New York: Pantheon, 1982.

Preston, Michael B., et al. (eds.). The New Black Politics, The Search for Political Power. New York: Longman, Inc., 1982.

Wolfe, Alan. America’s Impasse. New York: Pantheon, 1982.

Monte Piliawsky is an associate professor of political science at Dillard University. He is author of Exit 13: Oppression and Racism in Academia.