Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 7, 1995 TAG: 9511070085
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
Urban blacks in the South are not the socially cohesive group today that they were during the era of segregation, says a study by two Virginia Commonwealth University professors.
John V. Moeser and Christopher Silver say the change has as much to do with the dismantling of oppressive segregationist policies in the mid-1960s as with economic changes of the 1970s and '80s.
Racial polarization grew from this economic and social upheaval, making solving the problems of the urban underclass increasingly difficult, the professors and other academics say.
``Many Americans, particularly whites, thought we were doing better on the race relations front,'' said Moeser, professor in the department of urban studies and planning at VCU.
But the different perceptions of reality that have emerged since the O.J. Simpson verdict and different reactions to the Million Man March show that whites and blacks see things very differently, Moeser said.
The segregated society placed blacks of all economic classes together in the same sections of the city and united them in the common cause of overturning the laws of racial oppression, according to the professors, both of whom are white.
``Segregation was a destructive and evil system. Never should we look back on those days with fondness,'' Moeser said. ``But when you look at the current situation, you find a black community that is not as stable and not as socially integrated as it was. The black community was stronger when the professional and business classes lived in closer proximity to the working class and the poor.''
Moeser's analysis is generally shared by a black colleague, Avon Drake, a VCU politics professor.
``In the old days, the black poor could look forward to improving their situation a little bit,'' Drake said. ``Today, the black underclass probably has the lowest self-esteem that blacks have had at any period in our history since the abolition of slavery. This explains why there is so much internal racial hatred, violence, crime and general discord in the black community.''
In the pre-civil rights era, Drake said, ``the moral fiber of the black community was much stronger. We had a strong value system.''
Silver said his and Moeser's research showed that ``within a segregated setting, there was a relatively healthy structure that supported a thriving community.'' The two studied black life in Richmond, Atlanta and Memphis, Tenn., from 1940 to 1968.
Blacks in the three cities in the postwar era had thriving business districts and new neighborhoods built by black developers where residents could move into new and better housing.
``There was a whole process of self-reliance based on the assumption that the whole system of legalized segregation was not going to go away very quickly,'' Silver said. Black business and social elites built a distinct black economy, and the separate political and social structure was actually strengthened by segregation, he said.
The concentration of black voting power in the separate cities enabled blacks to take political control and elect black mayors.
But the prize of urban political control turned out to be ``a cruel hoax,'' Moeser and Silver say. ``Just as African Americans acquired power to control their own destiny, the cities over which they preside are collapsing.''
As blacks were taking political power in the cities, federal civil rights legislation unlocked the doors to suburban housing, triggering an out-migration of the middle-class blacks who had given their inner-city society cohesion, Silver said.
``The change from apartheid to an open society undermined the social and economic integrity of the inner-city neighborhoods,'' Silver said, because the most economically stable residents left their old city neighborhoods for the suburbs.
Other public policies in the 1950s and '60s also worked a disruptive influence on the black community.
It was an age of highway projects, urban renewal programs, ``slum clearance'' and public housing projects.
Often, highways cut through black neighborhoods. Urban renewal and slum clearance projects wiped out black neighborhoods and public housing projects clustered the poor into apartment complexes within the already-established black sections of the city.
``While the doors were opening for the middle and professional classes, the doors were slamming shut on the unskilled and the people we now call the underclass,'' Drake said.
by CNB