Black History Month-which used to mean little more than patronising publicity about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King-has taken on new life in America this year. Part of this is due to a reinvigorated sense of potential in the African American community, and part to a new kind of success. Thirty years ago, when Negro History Week was extended into Black History Month, extreme racial prejudice still forced too many black Americans to chase success in the relatively marginal lives of professional athletes, musicians and entertainers. That is no longer the case. Contemporary African American achievement has moved firmly into the mainstream and this shift is finally making headlines.
A good example is the National Football League. Although 70 per cent of the players are black, it was only a few weeks ago that Lovie Smith, head coach of the Chicago Bears, became the first African-American to take an NFL team to the Super Bowl. A few hours later, Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts became the second. Dungy has since become the first to win. The simultaneous breakthrough of these coaches cannot but galvanize a generation of black men in the same way as Worrell’s captaincy of the West Indies. Smith and Dungy have now gotten rid of any unspoken doubts about black coaches and managers, forever.
On the political front, the news is even more encouraging. The Black Caucus for the 110th Congress contains 43 members, five are committee chairmen, at least a dozen others will head subcommittees. New York’s Charlie Rangel will chair the Ways and Means committee and South Carolina’s James Clyburn, the new majority whip, is the third-ranking Democrat in the chamber. On the other side of the aisle, Condoleezza Rice, the current Secretary of State and the first African-American female to hold such high office, is also the successor to Colin Powell, the first black Secretary of State. And, of course, standing quietly on the sidelines is Barack Obama, arguably the most exciting politician in the country. Obama can easily raise the vast sums of money needed for a presidential campaign, and his intelligence, fluency and charm have already begun to dispel the racist myth that a black American could never attract enough mainstream support to become the ‘leader of the free world’. (Strangely, Hillary Clinton is currently polling higher than Obama with black voters, but this will surely change the moment he announces his candidacy.)
In other areas there is also evidence of a steady advance. Four Fortune Five Hundred companies have black CEOs. Clarence Thomas is a Supreme Court judge. A third of the NBA’s coaches are black. Black actors and actresses have won three of the most coveted Oscars in recent years. A black manager took a baseball team to the World Series five years ago. Furthermore, when the New York Times asked hundreds of writers and editors to name “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years” the top spot on the list went to Toni Morrsion’s Beloved. (A similar poll in 1965 had chosen Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.)
And yet, in the wider context, life in black America is much more problematic than any of this suggests. On average, black men die seven years younger than their white counterparts, they are twice as likely to die of cardiovascular disease, eight times more likely to be imprisoned, and they are murdered at a rate of 85 per 100,000 compared with a national average of six per 100,000. In the December issue of Salon magazine, Jill Leovy, a homicide reporter for the Los Angeles Times noted: “Black men over 18 are only 4 percent of this country’s population. Yet more are hospitalized for assault injuries each year than women and girls of all races combined. More black men died from homicide in 2004 alone than all the children aged 10 and under in the previous five years. Even domestic violence, which accounts for a fraction of homicides nationally, appears to have resulted in higher death rates for black men than for white women in recent years.” The Bureau of Justice also warns that “[b]ased on current rates of first incarceration, an estimated 32% of black males will enter State or Federal prison during their lifetime, compared to 17% of Hispanic males and 5.9% of white males.” This is simply scandalous.
The poverty and squalor that creates much of this violence and crime was well publicised in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, and the government made all the right noises at the time. But the sad truth is that New Orleans is still missing up to 40 percent of its pre-Katrina population and the current administration is unlikely to make good on its commitments to help the city recover. This casual neglect would have been unthinkable in a predominantly white city. Sadly, nobody with a strong sense of black history would have expected anything else. From Frederick Douglass and W.E. Du Bois to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, black success in America has always come about in the face of fearful odds. What makes this year’s Black History Month so special, is the knowledge that there are still, in all walks of life, black Americans who are worthy of being placed alongside these great pioneers.
