WHAT THE NEGRO HAS-AND HAS NOT-GAINED

THE new factor in U.S. race relations and politics that has come to be known as backlash is more than merely the reaction of some white people to Negro rioting or cries of "black power." The attitude of many white Americans is influenced by the belief that the Negro has made great gains in a relatively short time, and that he now would do better to stop agitating and consolidate what he has won. At the same time, much of the new black militancy is a result of frustration over what many Negroes consider their snail's pace of progress. Beneath the passion and the rhetoric, these two opposing views pose a root question about the state of the Negro in the U.S. today: just what advances have--and have not--been made by the nation's 21 million Negroes?

The fact is that Negroes have progressed farther and faster than any minority in the history of the U.S., or almost any other nation. Considering that the drive for full equality did not really begin until after World War II and did not achieve the sanction of law until the Supreme Court struck down the old "separate but equal" doctrine in 1954, the gains have been nothing less than remarkable. Though whites still earn far more than Negroes ($7,170 per family compared with $3,971), Negro income has risen 24% since 1960 v. only 14% for whites. Today, just over one in five Negro families earns more than $7,000 yearly, a figure that puts them firmly in the middle class. The Negro has enthusiastically participated in the U.S.'s steadily increasing material prosperity: nine out of ten Negro families own one (or more) television sets, two-thirds have automatic washers and more than half own cars. Negroes own 50,000 businesses and, while most of them are small groceries, beauty parlors or mortuaries, the nation has about 40 Negro millionaires and many thousands who are more than comfortably affluent.

Practically all of the gains have been made by the growing Negro middle class, which still constitutes a minority of the Negro population. That is the heart of the problem, for it leaves behind the lower-income, semiliterate Negroes, notably the families that are below the Government's $3,000-a-year poverty line. This class contains 60% of all the nation's Negro youths, the very people who are in the vanguard of desire and disorder. While the income of the middle-class Negro rises, that of this great mass of Negroes is actually declining. During the 1960s, median family income for Negroes has dropped from $3,897 to $3,803 in Los Angeles' Watts, from $4,346 to $3,729 in Cleveland's Hough district.

This great disparity has created a profound hostility between the low-income Negro and his more affluent, well-educated, middle-class brother. Demoralized, alienated and apathetic, the slum Negro is bitterly jealous of those he scornfully calls "white niggers." The middle-class Negro, on the other hand, is troubled by the riots and the chants of "black power," which he knows hurt his cause. The gulf between the two is widened by the fact that the better-off Negro tends to demonstrate too little concern for those he has left behind. Almost alone among all U.S. ethnic groups, Negroes have no significant charity supported by their own people for their own people. The number of Negroes on the public-welfare rolls is increasing, and one-third of the nation's spending for public aid, education and housing (or an estimated $3.5 billion in all) goes to Negroes, who constitute only 11% of the U.S. population.

Most of the Government's new antipoverty programs are directed toward the 2,800,000 poor Negro families. In many ways, they get more attention than the 9,100,000 poor white families, which are tucked away in such areas as the Appalachians and the Ozarks, the southern Piedmont, the Upper Great Lakes region and the Louisiana coastal plain. Half the people in the Job Corps and most of the preschoolers in the Head Start program are Negroes. By the latest official measure, poverty has been declining with equal speed among both whites and Negroes--about 31% a year--but the Negro seems to have made more dramatic gains because he had greater ground to make up. The proportion of poor families among Negroes fell from 52.2% in 1959 to 43.1% in 1964, while that among whites declined from 20.7% to 17.1%. The Government figures that if all Negroes could be brought up to the average white American's level of affluence, employment and education, the U.S. economy's output would climb by $27 billion a year, equal to 4% of the gross national product.

It is almost academic to ask what the Negro wants. He wants what the white man has. To him, that means not only possessions but opportunity and options. It means a fair shot at the necessities of jobs, education and housing, as well as at the intangibles of political power, social acceptance and a sense of pride. How much of that has he gained? Here is a balance sheet of the Negro's recently acquired assets and his persistent liabilities, compiled from material gathered by 30 TIME correspondents throughout the U.S.:

JOBS. The employment situation has become incomparably better for the middle-class Negro and worse for the lower-class Negro. While unemployment among whites has been declining this year and is now 3.3%, Negro unemployment has been climbing and is now 7.8%. This is primarily because the jobless rate in many black slums has soared to 25% and automation has eliminated a lot of menial and manual jobs traditionally held by lower-income Negroes. The overall figure nonetheless conceals the fact that countless job opportunities have opened for skilled and semiskilled Negroes in the past few years.

Negro employment in the professional and technical fields has soared 130% in the past decade; the number of Negro lawyers has increased 50% since 1950. In the South, well-educated Negroes are being hired for the first time as clerks, policemen, nurses in white hospitals and teachers in white schools. Boston's Negro newspaper has six pages of want ads for everybody from laboratory technicians to plasma physicists. In Milwaukee, Chicago and Providence, corporations have joined together to seek ways of finding more Negro workers and executive trainees; in Minneapolis, Omaha and San Francisco, corporate recruiters flock to interview thousands of Negroes at "job fairs." A dozen recently created personnel agencies specialize in Negroes, and almost every Negro graduate with a good college record can count on from three to twelve job offers.

Of course, discrimination is still far from eliminated. Some employment agencies, for example, use codes to alert prospective employers that the applicant is a Negro. The most unyielding barriers to the Negro's advancement are put up not by corporations but by the craft unions, which are so biased that it is easier for a Negro to become a physician or junior manager than an electrician or a plumber. A recent Labor Department survey showed that in Baltimore there were no Negro apprentices among the steam fitters, sheet-metal workers or plumbers; in Newark, none among the stonemasons, structural ironworkers or steam fitters; in Pittsburgh, none among the operating engineers, painters or lathers; in Washington, none among the glaziers, sheet-metal workers or asbestos workers.

Largely because of union bars, the incredible fact is that since 1957 the number of Negroes at work in the U.S. private economy has scarcely increased at all. The number of Negro jobholders has risen from 6,721,000 to 7,747,000 during that period, but the gains have been primarily in Government jobs. Negroes hold 23% of the city jobs in New York, 30% in Cleveland, 40% in Philadelphia. At the federal level, 13.2% of the nation's civil service employees are Negroes. Negroes sit in the U.S. Cabinet and on the Federal Reserve Board, act as postmasters of two major cities (Los Angeles and Chicago); six are U.S. ambassadors, 16 federal judges. In the armed forces, the number of Negro field-grade officers (major through colonel) has jumped since 1962 from 769 to 1,319.

EDUCATION. While still appreciably behind the whites, Negroes have made impressive gains in education, particularly at the college level. Outnumbered by white students 30 to 1, they have raised their numbers in colleges and universities to 225,000--far greater than the total enrollments of the universities of Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Switzerland put together. Almost all the Southern universities now have some Negroes. Admissions officers at such universities as California and Stanford give preference to Negroes; like many other schools, Harvard often chooses Negroes over whites with equivalent academic records. So many scholarships are being offered that almost any talented, energetic Negro youngster can get into college.

For the Negro who never gets to the college level, things are considerably bleaker. In a recent study of 650,000 children, the U.S. Office of Education reported that, compared with whites, the average Negro child actually attends newer schools and has newer textbooks but is less likely to have modern scientific equipment or competent teachers. The Negro needs good teachers even more than whites because of greater deprivation in his family background. Eighth-graders in Negro slum schools, for example, commonly read at sixth-grade levels. The IQ of the average Harlem pupil drops from 90.6 in the third grade to 87.7 in the eighth grade. An extraordinary 67.5% of all Negroes fail the armed forces' pre-induction mental tests (v. 18.8% of the whites).

Four out of five U.S. students attend schools that are practically all black or all white. School segregation is rising in the North because an increasing number of neighborhoods are becoming wholly black. Ironically, integration has progressed far more rapidly in the South. Only 10% of the South's 3,500,000 Negro schoolchildren attend integrated classes, but that is twice as many as a year ago. Federal education officials say that 4,200 of the 4,600 Southern school districts have sent in "acceptable" plans for integration. But the increase is slowing down because Congress--itself reacting to the reaction against Negro demonstrations and gains--has softened the penalties for noncompliance.

HOUSING. Getting good housing is perhaps the most difficult hurdle of all for most Negroes. One tragedy is that urban renewal often means Negro removal--replacing shacks with vertical ghettos for middle-income Negroes and forcing lower-income Negroes to move to even meaner slums. Because the Negro urban population has almost doubled since 1950, the ghettos are spreading. Negroes now constitute 27% of the population in Chicago, 37% in St. Louis, 39% in Detroit, 40% in Birmingham, 41% in New Orleans and Baltimore, 24% in Norfolk and 63% in Washington. Worried about being surrounded by Negroes, most whites flee to the suburbs when Negroes move into an urban neighborhood; there, barely 4% of all residents are Negro.

When given the choice, most Negroes are not terribly eager to live next door to the white man. Even in the 17 states and 31 cities that have enacted fair-housing codes since 1958, thousands of huge, moderately priced apartment towers are pure white. Despite a fairly large supply of open housing, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission estimates that, since 1958, fewer than 60 Negro families have moved into white areas. The Negro's desire to enjoy the superior schooling and housing of a white neighborhood is very much tempered by his fear of striking out alone. He has a long way to go before he will live side by side with the white man even in moderate numbers.

POLITICS. The advances have been enormous: the potential is even bigger. The number of Negroes running for elective office has risen 25% to 30% in the Democratic Party over the past two years alone. This autumn, a record 210 Negroes of both parties are trying for seats in state legislatures, and hundreds more for other local offices. The number of Negroes in the U.S. Congress has risen from two in 1954 to six now; altogether, 17 are running for Congress this fall (eleven Republicans and six Democrats). Massachusetts' Republican Attorney General Edward Brooke is the first Negro since Reconstruction to campaign for the U.S. Senate on a major party ticket. Last November, Cleveland's Carl Stokes, a Negro state legislator, came within 2,000 votes of unseating Mayor Ralph Locher, and Houston recently became the first Southern city to appoint a Negro assistant district attorney, Clark Gable Ward.

Negroes will not live up to their full potential in politics until they become more diligent at the polls. While the number of registered Negro voters in the South has risen from 1,900,000 to 2,300,000 in the past ten years, scarcely 35% of the eligible Negroes bother to vote in local elections up North; by contrast, 85% of the Jews vote, and get commensurate rewards when politicians pass out patronage or nominations. New York's 16% Negro population elects only one of the city's 19 U.S. Congressmen, two of the 37 city councilmen.

SOCIAL ACCEPTANCE. The most obvious and humiliating forms of discrimination have become illegal or unfashionable (at least in the North), but there are subtler problems. The Negroes, like the Catholics and Jews before them, want to be welcomed in the private clubs, on the golf courses and at weekend parties with their co-workers and customers. As it is, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission estimates that 90% of its state's whites have no contact with nonwhites, and the situation is much the same elsewhere.

The Negro thus has to look inward and, in so doing, is slowly beginning to discover a long-submerged sense of pride. That sense is essential to remedying the lower-class Negro's other social and economic ills, since only pride can overcome the defeatist attitude that has contributed so much to his high rates of unemployment, illegitimacy, delinquency and crime. In Rochester, St. Louis and a dozen other cities, Negroes in the past two years have organized to clean up their neighborhoods, finance small businesses, pressure for school improvements and get police action to chase out the "white hunters," white men who crash the ghetto in search of black prostitutes. There is a trend among Negro coeds and career girls to wear their hair "natural" instead of attempting to unkink it by "conking"--rinsing it with lye and binding it with handkerchiefs. Yet for every Negro who flaunts his identity, a hundred try to camouflage it. Advertisements in the Negro magazines still hymn Nadinola skin bleach: "Lightens and brightens skin."

If not all Negroes covet white skin, all of them without exception seek after the white man's freedom of choice. The Rev. James Jones, the white Episcopal Urban Vicar of Chicago, who moved into a Negro ghetto, argues that Negroes will not live up to their full responsibilities and potentials as citizens until the white majority grants them that freedom. "In the ghetto," he says, "there are no choices, no power, no ability to make responses. Therefore there is no responsibility." Considering that the U.S. is the first society in history to adopt as its national goal the full economic integration and social equality of different races, the Negro's choices are widening with fair rapidity. The U.S. has certainly come an incredibly long way since Abraham Lincoln, shortly before the end of the Civil War, asked his logistics experts to determine whether the U.S. could muster enough transportation to export the Negroes--only to be told that Negro babies were being born faster than all the nation's ships could carry them from the country.

The Negro has been a permanent part of America ever since then, and perhaps the greatest advance of recent years is the realization by white people that his problems cannot be ignored. The Negro's recent progress, far from making him content, has greatly intensified his aspirations. The job of helping him to meet his legitimate needs may well continue to be the nation's most urgent piece of domestic business for decades to come.

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