The big guns of mainstream black leadership from the Congressional
Black Caucus to the NAACP have royally beat up on President
Bush for his bumbled, and bungled response to Katrina. Bush
deserves their fury for his terrible stumble. But black leaders
also deserve blame for their abysmal failure to be an active
voice for the black poor. Their failure to loudly speak out
on their behalf happened long before Katrina struck, and it
tells much about the glaring disconnect between mainstream
black leaders and New Orleans and the nation's black poor.
The first warning of that disconnect came in the 1950s. Sociologist
E. Franklin Frazier complained that many blacks were becoming
what he contemptuously branded a black bourgeoisie that controlled
the wealth and power within the black community. Even then,
many members of Frazier's black bourgeoisie had begun to distance
themselves from the black poor.
The expansion of federal entitlement programs, civil rights
legislation, equal opportunity statutes and affirmative action
programs initiated during Lyndon Johnson's administration
during the 1960s broke the last barriers of legal segregation.
The path to universities and corporations for some blacks
was now wide open. More blacks than ever did what their parents
only dreamed of: They fled big city blighted inner-city areas
in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Atlanta, and,
of course, New Orleans in droves. By the end of the 1980's,
a significant percentage of blacks were affluent enough to
move to the suburbs. They now owned more and better businesses,
marched into more corporations, and universities, spread out
into more of the professions, won more political offices,
bought bigger and more expensive homes, cars, clothes, and
jewelry, took more luxury vacations, and joined more country
clubs than ever before in their history.
Mainstream
civil rights organizations, and black Democrats became
the political voice for this fast emergent black middle-class.
They fought hard to get more blacks in corporate management,
in elite universities, in front of and behind TV cameras,
elect more black Democrats, secure more business loans,
and, waged symbolic fights against antique icons such
as the Confederate flag. This grabbed media, and public
attention, and corporate support, but their symbolic
victories also sped their retreat from visible cutting
edge activism on the thorny problem of black poverty.
Civil rights leaders and black politicians were trapped
in the middle by the twisting political trends and shifting
fortunes upward of the black middle-class, and downward
of the black poor. A tilt by them toward a hard-edged
activist agenda carried the fearful risk of alienating
the corporate donors and the Democratic politicians
that the civil rights leaders have carefully cultivated
in past years. They depend on them to gain even more
jobs, promotions, and contracts for black professionals
and businesspersons, to bag contributions for their
fundraising campaigns, dinners, banquets, scholarship
funds and programs, and increased political patronage.
This left the millions of blacks that wallowed below
the official poverty level with no one to cajole, browbeat,
and prod business leaders and public officials to deal
with their increasingly dire plight. Lacking education,
competitive skills and training, the black have-nots
were further hurtled to the outer fringes of society.
New Orleans is a near textbook example that neglect
and leadership disconnect. In the months before New
Orleans' current black mayor Richard Nagin, a former
corporate communications executive, slammed Bush and
the feds for their glacial response to Katrina, he drew
fire from anti-poverty activists and some black residents
for being snuggling up to close to business interests,
while ignoring the poor.
Nagin was hardly the first black official to take heat
for the plight of the city's poor. For the past three
decades, blacks have had near unbroken control of city
government in New Orleans. They've controlled city hall,
and had black majorities on the school board, and the
city council. The police chief, and the District Attorney
are black. During their tenure, Bourbon Street, the
French Quarter, the Casinos, and tourism, have boomed.
Large parts of the city have become gentrified, downtown
business interests have grown richer, and black businesspersons
and professionals especially those with close ties to
the black establishment at City Hall have done well.
City officials have been hammered with accusations of
cronyism, patronage, and influence peddling.
Before he left office in 2002, two-term mayor Marc Morial,
who now heads the National Urban League, got credit
for cleaning up the police department, and creating
a friendly climate for business. Yet, the city's poverty
rate by then had soared to triple the national average,
and had become a national disgrace. Black leaders did
not ignore the poor in New Orleans or anywhere else
for that matter out of indifference, callousness, or
insensitivity. It was simply another case of black political
and economic shot callers protecting their class turf;
a turf that the poor could never inhabit.
Now thousands of New Orleans' poor, and displaced have
no turf at all to call theirs. While the Bush administration
deserves much blame for that, so do those black leaders
that ignored their plight and their numbers for so long.
(This is a continuing series on the devastation of New
Orleans and America's Black Poor.)
Earl
Ofari Hutchinson is a columnist for BlackNews.com,
an author and political analyst. He is the author of
The Crisis in Black and Black (Middle Passage Press).
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