Getting It Together: The Young Blacks

OF all the common interests that black and white Americans share, perhaps the strongest is a mutual faith in education as salvation. In the TIME-Louis Harris poll, 97% of the young blacks interviewed planned to finish high school, and 67% expect to go to college. "Get an education," an elderly black woman tells her grandson. "That's the one thing they can never take away from you."

Despite that faith, the U.S. has patently failed to provide millions of young blacks with anything approaching equal education. Much of the white South still defends de jure segregation, which the Supreme Court outlawed 16 years ago as "inherently unequal." Much of the North perpetuates de facto segregation, which, as President Nixon pointed out in his school desegregation statement last week, the court has not yet taken up. Meantime, scores of urban public schools have become black disaster areas. Invaded by crime and drugs, run by frightened teachers who regard most of their students as enemies, more and more black city schools have degenerated into daytime detention camps where armed guards patrol the corridors.

Many social scientists believe that ghetto children are often mislabeled by the white world's IQ tests, which reflect the values of white middle-class culture. As they see it, black children are academically crippled not for lack of intelligence but because ghetto families are, at least by white standards, "culturally deprived."

Even more acutely, a number of experts suggest that many black children fail in school because that is precisely what their teachers expect of them. When teachers view students as uneducable, they say, the children eventually conform to that negative expectation. Those taught to feel worthless soon act worthless.

New-Style Schooling. According to Sociologist James Coleman, principal author of the famous Coleman report of 1966, the key to equalizing black education is school integration. In this view, integration is the most effective way to infuse ghetto children with the positive spirit of middle-class teachers and students who expect the best from life and learning. Yet the principle of integration is now being questioned. The vast majority of blacks want it for the realistic reason that white schools get more money and better facilities than black schools. At the same time, many young blacks question integration if it means that white norms and values must necessarily be imposed on blacks. Young blacks are just as eager as whites for the skills that ensure economic survival in a technological society. Yet often enough when they acquire those skills, they confront prejudice at the hiring level (see BUSINESS).

Amid such ironies, blacks have conceived a fondness for a new style of schooling--one especially geared to black needs. Hundreds now prefer to learn the skills at black-run private academies such as Manhattan's Harlem Prep. Thousands also yearn to learn what U.S. schools have ignored: black history and culture, the sometimes elusive content of black studies programs, which are now emerging at hundreds of U.S. colleges. Some courses emphasize a traditional, scholarly approach to such subjects as Africa in world politics. Others are action-oriented, designed to train young blacks for work in the ghettos. Although the results vary widely, the general idea is to foster a sense of black pride and roots that young blacks now consider essential to other kinds of learning.

Racial Communion. The crucial problem is not technique or curriculum but pupils. Thus the true subject in considering black education is today's black youth: the most assertive and independent generation of young blacks that America has seen. Almost half of all black Americans are now under the age of 20.

The significant trend in young black America is a new racial communion that is breaking down class barriers and spurring middle-class youths to help their brothers in the ghetto. The most visible signs of the new black consciousness are Afro hairstyles, dashikis and geles (women's African headdresses). But the new psychology goes much deeper than costume. Today many of the young black generation are openly determined to confront American society as men--black men. They are, as they say, "getting it together."

For all the developing sense of community, the range of black youth is enormously diverse. The black young, after all, number almost 11 million. There are Black Panthers, black nationalists and separatists, scions of the bourgeoisie, sharecroppers' sons throughout the rural South, ghetto hustlers in candy-blue trousers and lizard shoes ("fly vines"). There are students at white colleges who are bent less on integrating than on helping their own people, students at black colleges who differ radically with their parents' conceptions of blackness.

Some portraits:

John ("Reds") Young, 19, and Dennis ("Dino") Thompson, 18, the New Thing

Both sons of auto mechanics, Reds and Dino are high-school dropouts who long ago learned to hustle in the streets of Washington, D.C. Two years ago, they were snorting or shooting heroin, snatching purses and breaking into parked cars. They gave up drugs and street crime when they discovered the New Thing, founded by Colin ("Topper") Carew, 27, a former Boston gang leader who will soon earn a bachelor's degree from Yale. Financed mainly by foundation grants, the New Thing is, according to Carew, "a black arts high school in Washington for kids who have rejected public high school." He has about 250 of them studying graphics, black history, design, photography, African music and dance. As part of their learning, they fulfill professional contracts for a local magazine and other organizations.

At the New Thing, Dino has become a dancer and Reds a drummer--both hope for show-business careers. They are also working on a film about hustling in the streets. "I want everything to be real," says Dino, "so that people can see what's really going down. When I look at TV, ain't nothing in there I've seen before. Like in all the pictures with black people, they got to be some white guy who's his best friend. It ain't always that way. And that show Julia--she's just a nurse, and she's got all this fantastic furniture. Ain't that way."

Politically, Reds and Dino are pragmatically nonviolent. "The Panthers want a revolutionary war," says Dino, "but that ain't hip. The white man got over the black man by politics, and that's the only way we'll get back at them. Why commit suicide?" But the black-pride movement has given them and many other young blacks an assertive sense of their own worth. "If I walked into a building with white people three years ago," says Dino, "I hung my head down. No more! Now people sense that and don't mess with you."

Like many other young blacks. Reds and Dino are vastly suspicious of the police. Recently, when they were leaving the apartment of a friend who lives in a predominantly white suburban building, they were surrounded by three police cars, thrown against one of the cars and searched. Says Reds: "This been happening so long you can't hardly get mad about it any more. Except that now we know it's something wrong with them, not with us."

Laura Calhoun, 18, University of Illinois

Laura is the daughter of a lawyer and a magazine writer. When the Calhouns first moved into the wealthy Chicago suburb of Kenilworth, they were greeted by crank calls and a cross burned on their lawn. Since last June, Laura has been wearing her hair Afro. "My God, yes, black is beautiful," says Laura. "The psychological tragedy of this country is that people have not come to grips with blackness. The black woman has got to realize that black is beautiful."

Laura reflects the growing tendency of middle-class blacks to feel self-conscious about their own success and concerned about their brothers and sisters in the ghettos. "I'm not really black," she says, "until I know what's happening on every level of being black. For all that's happened in this country, we are still American citizens. Salvation for the black kids will come through education and then beating the white man at his own thing." Laura works in Operation Breadbasket's voter registration campaign. Her heroes are Martin Luther King, Julian Bond and Jesse Jackson.

Earline Williams, 18, Gateway House

Earline inhabits a very different world from Laura Calhoun's. Born in Memphis to a Negro mother and Puerto Rican father, she has been on drugs for nine years, heroin for five. She has been raped twice; the second time she shot her attacker to death. A week before Christmas in 1968, she stabbed her mother, who had abandoned her years before. Earline has been arrested repeatedly--for forgery, robbery, manslaughter. Now she is in Chicago's Gateway House, a treatment center for drug addicts, trying to kick heroin.

Earline's life has been nightmarish, but the new black awareness is penetrating even her much abused psyche. "I knew a lot of Black Panthers in New York," she says. "They were trying to help black people with their food and clothing. They are really decent people." Other than Panther Leaders Bobby Rush and Bobby Scale, she has no living heroes--she liked Martin Luther King, John and Robert Kennedy. "But I hope to see a lot of black people become heroes, famous people. I hope to see a black person make it at least halfway up to the top, so that the black race will have something to be really proud of."

Jennye Guy, 17, Central High, Little Rock, Ark.

Jennye is the student editor of Labyrinth, the literary magazine at the school where 13 years ago paratroopers had to escort black children through white mobs into class. Today about 20% of the student body of 1,700 is black. Around the pond in front of Central High, blacks and whites chatter amiably, with little outward sign of the turmoil that stunned the nation in 1957.

There is still occasional friction, such as organized racial rumbles after ball games. But there are signs of mutual acceptance. A black girl is one of the school's most popular cheerleaders. Mike Price, a black junior, is given a good chance to be elected student body president this spring. Four racially mixed couples are dating at Central and draw criticism not from fellow students but from middle-aged faculty members.

Says Jennye Guy: "It's a complete change from ten years ago." Jennye, who wants to pursue a stage career, works in theater at the Arkansas Art Center. Jennye understands black separatists, but personally is in favor of racial integration: "If somehow we could stop looking at color so much and just see people. Ideally, integration should be an exchange of cultures. But no matter how conservative Nixon is, the black man can't be stopped now. We would be denying America. Things look bad sometimes, but I still feel optimistic about the whole deal."

Bruce Dalton, 18, Harlem Prep

Bruce has lived in Harlem all of his life. He nearly lost his life there too on several dozen occasions during his five-year career dealing drugs in the schools and streets. Shy, slim, hip and extremely intelligent, Bruce kicked his three-year-old drug habit at the Addicts Rehabilitation Center in Harlem last summer. He will soon graduate from Harlem Prep and will enter Northwestern University in September, hoping eventually for a Ph.D. in psychology; when he gets it, he plans to return to the ghetto to help rehabilitate drug addicts.

"I started selling drugs--oh, at about 13," says Bruce. "It wasn't dangerous selling drugs at Theodore Roosevelt High School--like all day long, like the people would just be sprawled all over the auditorium, sniffing drugs and smoking reefers. I started getting high on scag [heroin] at 14 or 15. I was making nearly $500-$750 a week selling drugs. But I was using just about that much worth of drugs too."

When Bruce's father discovered his habit, he sent him to live for a time with relatives in rural Virginia ("Even there I managed to get dope"). A year ago, Bruce's father brought him back to Harlem and placed him immediately in the Addicts Rehabilitation Center, an overcrowded, financially squeezed but markedly successful operation run by an ex-addict named James Allen. After nine months at A.R.C., Bruce enrolled at Harlem Prep.

Housed in a renovated supermarket, Harlem Prep was established in 1967 by New York's Urban League to salvage dropouts (or "pushouts," as ghetto youths say bitterly). Thus far, Harlem Prep has sent 105 of its graduates on to such colleges as Antioch, Cornell, Howard and Harvard. Says Bruce: "At Harlem Prep, we're all here to learn. I got hung up on the whole public-school system. It was so formal. But here the students and teachers are on a first-name basis; there are no classrooms, no walls. For a class, they just pull chairs around together. It's just so beautiful." It is significant that what salvaged Bruce were three narrowly focused black institutions--his own family, A.R.C. and Harlem Prep.

Michael Johnson, 16, and Rose Marie Edwards, 21, Ludowici High, Georgia

The school is "integrated" much like those in about 100 other rural districts in Georgia. Under a 1967 freedom-of-choice plan, the modern all-black Walker High School had to send all its eleventh and twelfth graders to the all-white Ludowici High School, where 65 blacks and 621 whites are now enrolled. Blacks can also enter Ludowici's ninth and tenth grades--but dare not to. Conversely, whites can enter those grades at Walker--but refuse to. Result: Walker has lost two grades and remained all black.

Both Mike and Rose Marie find the integrated school rather dreary. "We should have freedom of choice," says Mike Johnson. "This new school is a new environment. Most of the teachers are white, and white teachers are always telling you what to do. We had school spirit at Walker, with a basketball team and a baseball team. All we're trying to do now is finish school."

Rose Marie complains: "There isn't a chorus, a dramatics society--nothing--at Ludowici. It was fine at Walker, and we couldn't wait to go to school. Now we sit separately in the classroom and in the cafeteria." Adds Mike: 'The whites act like they are scared of us."

Both are well aware that the North is no promised land. But Mike, at least, wants to get out of Ludowici (population about 2,000), where his father runs a shoe-repair shop in a roadside shack. Mike disdains separatist ideology, but sees his future in terms of heightened black identity: "Whites used to say, 'Respect us because we are beautiful.' Now we are saying: 'O.K., and you respect us because we are black and we are beautiful too.' " Says Rose Marie: "This is a new day and a new time, and they know we are not going to stand for it."

Chezzie Jordan, 16, and Michael Clepper, 18, Farragut Outpost

Chezzie and Michael live in the violence of Chicago's Lawndale ghetto on the West Side. "Around here," drawls Chezzie, "you can get all shot up and killed. I watched a friend of mine get stabbed to death during the summer." Michael agrees: "I saw a friend of mine shoot a girl." Chicago's ghettos are dominated by gangs. Some, like the Blackstone Rangers and the Black Disciples, are virtual nations of the young, with their own hierarchies, territories and protocols. There are also the Deuces Wild, Satan's Lovers, the Imperial Clybourne Corruptors and the Suicide Cobras.

Chezzie has stayed out of the gangs: "It's the only way to avoid trouble." But he and Michael can hardly escape trouble. "If you take all of the violence out of the black ghetto and move it into the white neighborhoods and suburbs," says Chezzie, "man, I'm all for that, because it ain't doing no good here."

Ball on a Toothpick. Chezzie and Michael were nearly dropouts from Farragut High School. But then they enrolled at Farragut Outpost, a school for potential dropouts run by the Better Boys Foundation, a kind of settlement house on the West Side. Says Chezzie: "At Farragut, you ain't learning nothing. You go out and walk around the hallways, and they catch you and bar you from school. Up here at Outpost, you come here because you want to learn. Instead of failing you, if you do work and it's not passing, you do it again until you pass."

One of eight children, Chezzie describes how he applied for a job as messenger with a white bank. He was told he would be called within a week, and he is still waiting. "No, man," says Chezzie, "they ain't sincere. I came back to the school all popping my fingers and telling everybody I'm going to be working in a bank and with a suit on. Everybody comes and says 'What happened, man? They were going to call you,' and I say 'I don't know, they just don't call.' It's just like trying to put a basketball up on top of a toothpick. You don't depend too much on it."

Heroes? "Malcolm X, that's the man, that's the man," says Chezzie. "He can tell you just how you feel." As for Roy Wilkins and the N.A.A.C.P.: "Too polite, too quiet. This ain't going to get it, man. We need a major change, like getting black people into high office: we need Vice Presidents. We need Presidents. And separatism isn't the answer. You got to be together before you can get along."

In his own way, Chezzie seems' to speak for many young blacks. According to Harvard Psychiatrist Robert Coles, a close student of black children, "Black youth want what white youth want, what every American wants: a better home, a higher income, more respect from others as well as self-respect. The fact is that many of them are intensely loyal to the American consumer tradition." Insisting upon the right of black men to preserve their uniqueness while participating in the national wealth, they are claiming a distinct place in a pluralistic American society.

Something else is new in the mood of the young. Coming to manhood in the era of Viet Nam and the assassinations of the leaders in whom they might have placed their hopes, they see violence as a condition of their lives and a possibility in their futures. But they are not alone; to a large extent, young blacks merely share the larger society's apocalyptic visions. What is more important is the new and insistent image of self. Says the Rev. Edward Rodman, a young black Episcopal minister in New Haven: "The black kids want to define their relationship to white society themselves. As Sartre puts it: 'We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.' "

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