African American History

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The Poor People’s Campaign

SCLC leaders focused on the issues of poverty and discrimination, continuing the Poor People's Campaign that Martin Luther King, Jr., had begun. The Poor People’s Campaign sought the passage of federal legislation that would provide full employment, establish a guaranteed income, and promote the construction of low-income housing.

In May 1968 Ralph Abernathy, who had been King’s lieutenant, established an encampment called Resurrection City on the Mall in Washington, D.C. It drew 2,500 mostly black and Native American temporary residents, nearly twice the number that organizers had planned on. Within a month, mud and unsanitary conditions produced by heavy rains reduced the encampment to fewer than 300 people. In June 1968 an interracial group of 50,000 marched in Washington, D.C., to demonstrate their support for the Poor People’s Campaign. They were ultimately unable to gain the sympathetic attention of Congress and the country. At the end of the month, the demonstrators were ordered to evacuate, and on June 24th the police evicted the 100 who refused to leave amid clouds of teargas.

Busing

As civil rights leaders turned their attention to de facto segregation in the North, they devised a different strategy for improving educational opportunities for black students. Since schools were supported by property taxes, there were great differences in resources available for education between poorer inner cities and wealthier white suburbs.

Integrationists in some metropolitan areas devised temporary plans to bus children to schools outside of their neighborhoods as a way to integrate urban schools. Busing had been used for many years to maintain segregated school systems in the South, but whites opposed this new form of busing vehemently. They challenged the legality of busing in the courts, but these challenges were unsuccessful. The Supreme Court declared busing for educational integration constitutional, and many state and local courts ordered cities to develop busing plans.

Conservative Backlash

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Antipoverty programs and civil rights gains had positive effects: The black middle class grew and black unemployment shrank to under 7 percent in 1968 and 1969. In the early 1970s, however, rising inflation and an economic downturn caused widespread economic uncertainty among African Americans. To deal with difficult economic issues, a new generation of black leaders established new organizations. In 1971 Jesse Jackson founded Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) in Chicago to work for the economic advancement of poor people, and in 1973 Marian Wright Edelman began the Children’s Defense Fund, an organization that lobbies for children’s rights and welfare.

The contracting economy also provoked white opposition to programs that had benefited African Americans. White reaction to expanded black economic and educational opportunities was often harsh; white protestors burned buses, harassed black school children, and supported local politicians who opposed black equality. A surprising number of Northern voters supported the independent presidential candidacy of segregationist George Wallace in 1968 and 1972.

In response the campaign and then the presidency of Republican Richard M. Nixon turned away from civil rights. Nixon nominated people opposed to busing as judges on the Supreme Court, thereby beginning a shift to conservatism on the court. Yet, the nation's ambivalence was apparent in 1977 when 'Roots,' the serialization of Alex Haley's story of generations of his African and African-American family, became the most popular television program in history and transfixed 130 million viewers.

The Carter Years

When Georgian Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976, he appointed more blacks to influential positions in the federal government than any president before him, and he seemed to have a deep personal commitment to racial equality. However, the economic situation deteriorated under his presidency. The Congressional Black Caucus labeled Carter's federal budget favoring military spending over domestic funding for social relief programs 'an unmitigated disaster' for black people. Black unemployment had remained in double digits since the mid-1970s, twice the rate for whites.

The Reagan Years

The hostile reaction among social and economic conservatives to black progress continued to grow during the 1980s. In the presidential election of 1980, most blacks saw little alternative to supporting Carter over the Republican Ronald Reagan. Reagan was a conservative whose tax cutting, antispending policies as governor of California had caused hardship among the state's poorest citizens.

Reagan spoke to the racial and gender stereotypes of many conservative white Americans when he criticized those on welfare as taking advantage of taxpayer's money. He was committed to a smaller federal government and fewer federal resources for the poor. On election day, 90 percent of the black vote went for Carter, but Reagan won by a comfortable margin, especially in the South, where only Carter's home state of Georgia went Democratic.

During the Reagan administration, defense spending increased, federal tax revenues declined, the national debt reached an all time high, and governmental support for social programs dwindled. For African Americans, the consequences of these changes were alarming. To protest Reagan’s policies, 300,000 members of labor and civil rights groups organized Solidarity Day in Washington, D.C., in 1981.

By the end of the decade, the after-tax income of the richest one percent of Americans had increased by 87 percent, while the income of those at the bottom of the economy diminished. Black unemployment also grew during the 1980s; by 1990, more than one in every four adult black men between the ages of 24 and 54 were out of work. The rate was much higher for young black men in the inner city, and overall black unemployment was two-and-a-half times higher than white unemployment. In 1983 black unemployment stood at a record high of almost 21 percent. Correspondingly, the overall black poverty rate rose so that by 1989 almost one-third of all black Americans were below the poverty line, more than three times the rate for whites.

Rising unemployment and increasing poverty had tragic consequences for many African Americans. The percentage of black families headed by single women increased, and single-parent black households were almost twice as likely to fall below the poverty line as those with two parents and thus two incomes. The crime rate in America rose, and the effect was magnified in poor black communities. One study calculated that on any given day during the 1980s, 23 percent of all black men in the United States were under some form of judicial supervision. Military-style weapons and powerfully addictive drugs made gang violence more deadly and swelled the numbers of young people killed in the inner city.