‘For most Black Americans, the American dream is a nightmare’
“In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
Booker T. Washington, Atlanta Exposition Speech, 1896
In the May 17, 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that “separate education facilities are inherently unequal.” This decision set the nation on a path toward legal integration as a solution to the racial apartheid system that had become the practice in America, particularly in the former Confederate states since the end of Reconstruction in 1877.
Racial apartheid, aka “Jim Crow,” was the law of the land that legally separated Black Americans from white Americans in almost every aspect of life — social, political and personal. Jim Crow was also the primary reason for the economic underdevelopment of Black Americans and their communities.
Now, after 70 years of attempted integration, I must objectively conclude that while integration has worked for many Black Americans who have acquired higher education and professional success, for most Black Americans, the American dream is a nightmare. The fundamental question facing Black Americans is: “What should our goals be in the American experiment?” The dominant view of the Black American goal since the Brown decision has been integration: integration of schools, neighborhoods, job opportunities, political office, business opportunities, and families.
Integration became the dominant goal for moral and practical reasons. Martin Luther King articulated the moral damage segregation and racial discrimination have on American society, on its victims and its victimizers. Integration also won the philosophical debate between integration and separation. As much as I admire Marcus Garvey, who was a fervent proponent of repatriation, 46 million Black Americans are not going to return to Africa. Moreover, the United States is not going to cede territory to Black Americans. Realistically, separation is not what most Black Americans want. Integration makes sense given these realities. The problem is White America does not want integration.
While it borders on sacrilege to claim that integration has not achieved its objectives for the overwhelming majority of Black Americans, the facts are the facts. Despite gentrification, Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, N.Y.,Harlem in Manhattan, Anacostia in Washington, D.C., Compton in Los Angeles, Bronzeville in Chicago, Roxbury in Boston, the Third Ward in Houston, Treme in New Orleans, Dixwell in New Haven, and the North End in Hartford are just a few of the still largely segregated communities across the United States. After 70 years of integration, these and other similar communities are still Black and brown, and largely remain low-income, high crime, and under-resourced communities.
Integration has worked well for Black Americans who left these communities and found homes in higher income, predominantly white communities. But this formula for Black American advancement has demonstrated its limits; it is inapplicable to the majority of Black Americans who remain stuck in our nation’s ghettos.
I think it is time to reconsider racial integration as the strategy for economic development of Black communities.
The choice today is not Washington, Garvey, or Dubois. The strategy must synthesize aspects from the visions of these great Black philosophers.
This strategy would promote high-income Black Americans moving to where most Black people live: the Black communities like those listed above. Traditional integration has failed because as high-income Black Americans have moved out of traditional Black communities into white communities, those higher-income Blacks took their resources with them.
This is not an appeal to return to the days of Jim Crow. Nobody in the Black community wants that. But what we do want that happened during the Jim Crow era was the income, wealth, and educational diversity that these communities do not have today. In the 1950s, Black physicians, civil servants, teachers, policemen, entrepreneurs, artists and other professionals lived in the same communities as low-wage workers, the uneducated, and welfare recipients. However, when given the opportunity, higher income Blacks migrated from these communities to communities that socially resembled their own economic status.
Economic diversity in Black communities would improve the public schools and services. An economically diverse Black community would provide the resources to support Black businesses that are terribly lacking. In my community in the greater Bridgeport area, the largest city in Connecticut, there is not one licensed Black-owned plumbing company. Most Black cities and communities do not have any Black-owned grocery stores. That would change if there was economic diversity within Black communities. According to the University of Michigan, in 2022 Black Americans had $1.6 trillion in spending power. That is six times the GDP of the country of Portugal. The problem for Black communities is that this spending is dispersed and does not circulate where most Black Americans live.
This is easier said than done. The obvious question is why affluent Black Americans would return to the economically disadvantaged Black communities they left. The reasons are racial pride and common sense. Seventy years since the Brown decision, most Black Americans are still in segregated schools and crime-ridden neighborhoods. Racial integration is not working. If we want to change the economic life trajectory of all Black Americans, Black Americans like me must move back into the places where most Black Americans live.
Fred McKinney is the co-founder of BJM Solutions, an economic consulting firm that conducts public and private research since 1999, and is the emeritus director of the Peoples Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Quinnipiac University.