Can't Stop Won't Stop (35 page)

“Most white radical or liberal types came [to the anti-apartheid movement] out of empathy abroad and a feeling they'd like to do something to support,” says Pedro Noguera. “We had people from the Black fraternities and sororities, a real cross-section of students. We were trying to make links between issues facing people of color in United States and on the campus and the struggle in Africa. The white students didn't see those connections so clearly. With students of color, we made that connection real clear.”

Apartheid gave the young students of color a frame to understand the power of whiteness—not only in South Africa, but in the institution and in the movement. They also began to critique the failures of the baby boomer generation. While desegregation had given the new activists a place on the university campus, they still found few professors and administrators of color, under-resourced ethnic studies programs, and inhospitable campus environments. The civil rights and Black power movements had left many promises unfulfilled.

For the student activists of color, the anti-apartheid movement unlocked the connections between their campus struggles and those in their communities, and the South African shantytowns revealed the links between the global and the local. By the late 1980s, the activists had transformed the anti-apartheid movement into a broad antiracist movement, calling for ethnic studies departments and course requirements, culturally sensitive student programming and faculty, staff and graduate student diversity. The cry was for greater, truer representation that would remove the invisibility of nonwhites and counterbalance the Eurocentric bias of the university.

By 1988, Yale student organizer Matthew Countryman could say, “I don't think we will ever be in a situation again where divestment will be the sole focus, rather it will be part of a range of activities dealing with the university's involvement with racism.”
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The anti-apartheid movement provoked particularly violent reactions from the right. At Dartmouth, conservative students cheered a nighttime sledgehammer attack on the shanties and the shanty-dwellers. Stanford's shantytown was similarly destroyed, and at University of Utah and Johns Hopkins University, they were set ablaze.
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In April 1986, shantytown protests at Yale and Berkeley ended with police destroying the camps and beating peaceful demonstrators bloody. In an odd way, American university administrators, police and right-wingers were re-enacting the daily violence of the townships and strengthening public sympathy for the protestors.

But the tide of protests in South Africa, the United States and around the world were having an effect. Months after the “Mandela Hall” takeover, Columbia University trustees divested. On July 18, the University of California divested
its $3.1-billion South African portfolio, an amount more than portfolios of all the other 130-plus divested universities combined.
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In August, the state of California voted to divest $11 billion of stock, perhaps the single largest one-time global disinvestment ever. Emboldened, Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, which banned any new investment in South Africa, except to Black-owned firms, and ended arms sales and military aid. When an angered Reagan vetoed the bill, Congress successfully voted to override his veto. It was a stunning rebuke to Reagan and the apartheid-tolerant Cold War right.

In 1990, after nearly three decades behind bars, Nelson Mandela, the man that the Reaganites and right-wingers had once called a racial terrorist, was released from jail. Four years later, he stood as the first elected Black president of the country, and he paid tribute to American anti-apartheid activists by consciously evoking the memory of Dr. King: “Free at last! Free at last!”

But in America all the energy—young and old, white, Black, brown, yellow and red—that had been mustered over three decades to fight segregation would slowly disperse. The end of apartheid would be remembered as one of the century's last great victories in the American struggle for desegregation. Nothing would be so stark or clear after this.

During the last two decades of the millennium, neoconservatives—with the acquiescence of “moderates” in both parties—turned back a half-century of liberalism. Worker safety and environmental protections were undermined. The size and clout of labor unions atrophied to their weakest since the outbreak of World War II.
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Hundreds of billions were shifted from battling poverty into building the military. Responsibility was no longer preceded by the word “social,” but by the word “individual.”

It was not just about survival of the fittest, but
gratification
of the fittest. Republican Kevin Phillips opened his landmark critique of Reagan's ‘80s,
The Politics of the Rich and Poor
, with these lines: “The 1980s were the triumph of upper America—an ostentatious celebration of wealth, the political ascendancy of the richest third of the population and a glorification of capitalism, free markets and finance.”
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Reaganomists latched onto supply-side economics, better known as trickle-down
theory—the dubious idea that tax cuts for the wealthy and for big businesses would stimulate the economy. The corporate share of federal taxes plunged to a mere 15 percent, half of what it had been during the 1950s, a drop of $250 billion in annual tax revenues.
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Some American multinational corporations swelled bigger than most nations.

At the same time, Reagan and Bush asked for, and received from Congress, huge increases in the military budget to support Cold War adventurism around the globe. Despite coming into office vowing to rid the government of deficits and deliver “balanced budgets,” the deficit ballooned to its highest levels in history, leaving the big payback to the next generation. Most of the tax burden shifted to middle-class and working-class taxpayers, while low-inflation monetary policies kept unemployment rates high.

The gap between rich and poor was higher than at any time since the eve of the Great Depression. Between 1983 and 1989, the top 1 percent of households saw their net worth increase by 66 percent, while four of five households saw their net worth decline. Families of color were hit even harder. In 1983, the median white family owned eleven times the amount of wealth as a median family of color. By 1989, the gap had nearly doubled.
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The 1980s began a massive redistribution of wealth back to the wealthy. Everyone else could tune into Robin Leach's
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,
which from 1983 on, displayed the overripe fruits of Reagan's tax cuts. On October 19, 1987, the speculative bubble finally burst in a stunning stock market crash.

Small wonder that American faith in democracy soured into cynicism. Election turnout plunged. The center could not hold. Idealism fled from politics. A downward spiral of disillusionment accelerated.

People turned inward, giving up on the possibility of larger unity.

Even that historical wellspring of hope and faith in unity, the civil rights movement, was foundering. Nowhere was this more evident than in the collapse of the Black-Jewish coalition.

The story of the Civil Rights Movement often begins in 1909 when Black and Jewish lawyers come together to found the NAACP in an effort to end racist lynchings. It moves through Black singer and activist Paul Robeson's
denunciations of anti-Semitism, Nazism and racism, which prompts FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover to list him as a subversive. And it climaxes in 1964, as Bob Dylan's “The Times They Are A-Changin' ” sets the scene for the discovery of three murdered Freedom Summer activists—two Jewish, one Black—at Old Jolly Farm in Mississippi.

To be sure, questions of racial interest had always plagued the NAACP. During the early 1960s, as young Jewish activists went south to become the targets of white racists, Jewish shopkeepers and slumlords in the northern ghettos were becoming targets of Black leaders. Malcolm X famously extended this local dissatisfaction to a critique of Zionism, especially Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

New York, the city where Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey and Louis Farrakhan had found their voices, never experienced the civil rights movement the same way the south did. Just two weeks after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, protests in Harlem and Bed-Stuy, spawned by a police killing of a Black teen, turned to days of rioting, catalyzing similar uprisings from Philadelphia to Rochester. Jewish businesses were often the first to burn. There was an almost physical militancy to the northern front, a kind that seemed to preclude -coalition-building.

This kind of militancy crested in 1968 in Brooklyn's Ocean Hill/Brownsville school district, a conflict that Black and Jewish activists, leaders and writers still bitterly bemoan today, and which, in retrospect, looks like one of the inaugurating events of America's post–civil rights era.

At its root, the battle in Ocean Hill/Brownsville pitted a poor, 95 percent African-American and Puerto Rican community against a mostly Jewish-American, liberal teachers union. In 1967, under the cry of “community control,” a newly elected, mainly Black activist school board installed a new superintendent and five new principals, all Black. Separately, the United Federation of Teachers, whose citywide contract was up, began the school year by going on strike. The board moved to replace the union teachers with teachers of color from the community, and the conditions were set for a massive confrontation.

Over the next two years, the school district was in constant disruption as Black community activists and Jewish teachers union leaders clashed. In the end, the teachers union won, the board was dismantled, the black superintendent was forced to report to a state trustee and UFT teachers were reinstated. The
“community control” movement disintegrated, and Black-Jewish relations in the city would never be the same again.

With each going its own way, efforts turned to securing more narrow forms of power. The northern Black civil rights leadership came together to vault a number of Blacks into elected office but steadily lost ground with their urban youth constituencies. They abandoned popular base-building and leaned increasingly on electoral politics and media advocacy. Youths of color, considered marginal to the elections process and invisible in the pop culture mainstream, were abandoned. By the mid-1980s, there was barely any continuity between youth organizers and activists, who were emerging of necessity to address their own issues, and the civil rights establishment, who had long given up on developing young leaders.

And yet Reagan's America had become perilous to youths of color in ways that had never been seen before. The well-organized and well-financed right-wing backlash foreclosed opportunities for urban youths of color. Trickle-down economics and local taxpayer revolts starved local governments and encouraged suburban sprawl, which in turn speeded white flight and racial
resegregation
. These trends were occurring as demographers projected the most racially diverse generation of youths the United States had ever seen.

In northern cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and New York, almost all African Americans lived under conditions of increasing racial and economic isolation.
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Sociologists, following William Julius Wilson, now spoke of an “underclass”, a segment of communities of color permanently locked into poverty and joblessness. Yet even in the suburbs, more than 60 percent of Black and Latino students attended predominantly minority schools.
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Two decades of progress in integration suddenly and dramatically reversed course. Young whites remained the most segregated group of all. The average white student attended schools that were well over 80 percent white.
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Nationally, hate incidents spiked.

While Black politicians and civil rights organizations seemed to move slowly and ineffectually amidst these new conditions, the Nation of Islam's minister
Louis Farrakhan fired the imaginations of enraged and disengaged Black youths. He stood on the podium and waved his fist, shouting, “I stand boldly in America without an army, with no guns, and I speak against the wickedness of the United States Government.”
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At a time when the right-wing and its coterie of well-funded Black conservatives had absorbed the language of civil rights to claim that Blacks were no longer oppressed, Farrakhan would say, “We don't have to waste time discussing whether racism exists. Racism is so pervasive it has corrupted religion, politics, education, science and economics, and every vital function of life.”
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Yet Farrakhan was not beholden to liberal pieties either. He called for slavery reparations, exhorted Black men to save the race, and constantly reminded his followers what Elijah Muhammad had preached: “Separation is the solution.”

Where police corruption or incompetence left the streets to drugs and violence, the Nation of Islam's ministries moved in to forcibly close crack houses and take control of drug-torn blocks. The brio of the Nation's “Islamic patrols” and its Dopebusters programs impressed besieged ghetto residents. At the same time, Farrakhan's message of self-reliance and self-improvement as the foundation for community development struck a chord with the relatively privileged middle-class sons and daughters of civil rights and Black power.

When the hip-hop generation began to come of age, the Black left was a shadow of its former self. Instead, Black leadership was returning to an era of what progressive scholar Manning Marable once termed “the messiah complex.” In African-American history, time and again, Marable argued, people turned to male religious figures to deliver them. Social movements were left in the hands of a Moses.
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Minister Louis Farrakhan was the latest in this mold. The Black left took Farrakhan's emergence as a troubling sign of their own weakness and a serious threat to the advancement of the freedom struggle.