Tragic Failure: Racial Integration in America

by Tom Wicker, Richard L. Aquan (Designed by)

For twenty-five years Tom Wicker wrote for The New York Times with passion and intelligence, educating a generation of readers on important social and political issues of the day. In Tragic Failure, this keen observer assesses the failure of racial integration in America. Thirty years after the landmark achievements of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, racial equality has made little progress and has, in fact, suffered setbacks as issues such as affirmative action, welfare reform, crime, and unemployment have made race the subtext for bitter political debate. Here, Mr. Wicker examines the current state of race relations and proposes some bold solutions-including major political realignment-to the disturbing and complex problems of race in America.

Genres: Race, History, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published June 5, 1996

About the author

Also wrote under the pseudonym Paul Connolly.

Thomas Grey Wicker’s respected talent as a journalist took him from his origins in Hamlet, North Carolina, to The New York Times. There he served as associate editor, former Washington bureau chief, as well as the author of the famous op-ed column “In the Nation” for thirty years. He was the author of a considerable number of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction books as well. Wicker earned his journalism degree from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill in 1948, and at first wrote for papers in Aberdeen and Lumberton. He wrote for the Winston-Salem Journal for eight years and The Nashville Tennessean for two years before heading up to the Times, where he eventually retired in 1991. Wicker’s famous report on the assassination of President Kennedy, written from the perspective of the motorcade following the president, has been praised as the most accurate firsthand account of the shooting.

Reviews

[Graham Seibert]

This is a comparison of two books with different points of view, one from the heart and one from the head. Tom Wicker's thesis in "Tragic Failure" subtitle "Racial Integration in America" is that racial integration simply has not worked. He would support the William O. Douglas / Thurgood Marshall line of thought that the job of integration will only be complete when most neighborhoods and schools are visibly multiracial and all races enjoy substantially equal prestige and incomes. He would argue that government, especially the courts, have much more work to do.

Wicker's apologia for persistent educational and economic underperformance he roots in two centuries of slavery and another of Jim Crow. He sees a vicious cycle of undereducation, low self esteem, illegitimacy and drug dependency that will apparently perpetuate itself until it is broken by the acceptance of minorities as equal citizens, that to be achieved by force of law.

Both authors observe that the courts went from one extreme, the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy vs. Ferguson. to a middle ground with "Brown vs. Board of Education," to the highly interventionist phase of forced busing in the 1970s, to return to a rather muddled middle ground in the 1990's, with mandatory busing being phased out and increased tolerance of de facto segregation resulting from residential patterns.

David J. Armor served as an expert witness in many school desegregation cases, including those involving forced busing. "Forced Justice" offers the legal history of school desegregation, an analysis of the "harm and benefits" theory behind integration, an assessment of the extent to which desegregation yielded the expected benefits, and a snapshot of the status quo as of his writing in 1995, forty some years after Brown vs. Board of Education.

Though court decisions drove the most divisive aspects of school desegregation, The Supreme Court chose to accept only a fraction of the cases presented for review and rendered opinions that were vague enough that lower courts were able to interpret them in many different ways. In some cases, such as Mecklenburg, North Carolina and Pasadena, California the courts came close to running the schools. Fear of extensive judicial involvement led many districts to institute some form of voluntary desegregation using devices such as magnet schools.

Armor is at pains to point out that human affairs are far too complex to permit controlled experimentation with ideas such as desegregation. The races are segregated by neighborhood. Is that a matter of race, class, or simple preference? Does it cause or result from school segregation? To what extent can school boards be held accountable for it?
Measurement is also difficult. What can be measured is that the schools' racial mixture changed rapidly and radically in many school districts undergoing desegregation. Student performance is also measured, though only by broad categories. It is difficult to know how to distinguish among the numerous factors that can student performance, among them the trauma of desegregation, racial prejudice and self esteem issues the stress of being bused, socioeconomic status and native ability.

Regression analysis is the statistician's tool for mathematically isolating the many variables in a complex set of data. Armor's before-and-after analyses of student performance in districts that desegregated yield two recurrent results: "No measurable different" and "We don't know." In particular: Black self esteem appears to be if anything higher than whites,' and it is highest in majority black schools, worst in those that are more evenly mixed, and better in schools in which blacks are a distinct minority.

Both black and white academic performance are worst in predominantly black schools. However, adjusting for socioeconomic status, blacks seem to do as well in urban schools as the suburban schools to which they are frequently bused.

Each race's estimation of the other is lowest in those situations in which they have a maximum of contact. In other words, less mixing actually led to better mutual relations.

White academic performance appears to be largely unaffected by the addition of a substantial minority of black students. The fears driving white flight appear unfounded. White academic achievement has been static over the forty year period under study. Black academic achievement has risen, though it still remains a significant fraction of a standard deviation below that of whites.

Armor's bottom line is that desegregation was an immensely costly effort. The out-of-pocket expense involved in legal proceedings, busing, construction and other remedies could only have been justified by significant, measurable benefits. The actual benefits are at best mixed. One clear benefit is more intense focus on equalizing levels of spending on education, though there too, the correspondence between spending and results is hard to discern.

Wicker's bottom line is that African Americans have received pretty much as much help as they can expect from the political system. He advocates that "African-Americans themselves must take the lead, state the goal (economic advance and social leveling), and move boldly towards it." Armor would advocate something similar. Blacks need to decide what structure is best suited to provide them with "equity" and work within existing systems to achieve it. One despairs that judicial solutions are too much to hope for, the other that they have been tried and have not worked. Both agree that the onus for improvement of the lot of African-Americans falls primarily on them. Close to ten year later that is exactly what is happening through charter schools and vouchers programs.

[Steven H · Rating 4 out of 5]

SHOULD BLACKS FORM A NEW POLITICAL PARTY PROPOSING FULL EMPLOYMENT?

Thomas Grey Wicker (1926-2011) was an American journalist who was a political reporter and columnist for The New York Times, and a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government.

He wrote in the Introduction to this 1996 book, “neither civil war in the nineteenth century nor the civil rights movement in the twentieth has brought racial equality, much less racial amity, to America. I believe they can be reached only in the hearts of the people; wars will never achieve either, nor narrow legalities. Perhaps nothing can. Derrick Bell has written that African-Americans … continue to be ‘the faces at the bottom of the well,’ the faces upon which whites, no matter how deprived themselves, can look down in the sure and comforting knowledge that at least THEY aren’t black… I believe the problem is … that those black faces in the well are REASSURING to most whites and VITAL to the self-esteem of the many disadvantaged among us, few of whom really want those faces to disappear.” (Pg. ix)

He continues, “Thirty-five years of failing integration have convinced me that economic as well as political empowerment is needed if African-American disadvantages---particularly those of the underclass---are to be overcome. Only when the faces at the bottom of the well achieve generally higher economic status might they… reach genuine equality in the hearts of whites, and only through economic gains for all might the threatening underclass become a more constructive element in a more amicable American life.” (Pg. xii)

He suggests, “In their own interest, therefore, but also in that of a racially torn nation, blacks should turn away from the Democrats to form a new party dedicated to economic equality through economic growth for whites and blacks alike. Such a new party… might even win the support of those millions of despairing Americans who now take no part in the politics of a prosperous nation they believe rules by the affluent and for the affluent.” (Pg. xiii)

Later, he adds, “such a party… would promise OPPORTUNITYTO THE POOR… not the opportunity to get rich or even necessarily to rise to the middle class… A new party that offered such opportunity could have no greater mission and might find a passionate response. That mission could be defined and that response evoked by a pledge to work toward a policy of full employment at productive jobs for all Americans able and anxious to work.” (Pg. 55-56) He continues, “African-Americans, in short, must build a new political party… The common interest would be economic gain… Economic gain is the first requisite if these groups are to seize and hold a more nearly equal place in American life.” (Pg. 60)

He acknowledges, “a public works program on the necessary scale unquestionably would increase the deficit in the short run. But such projects... also would be an investment in the long run, leading to increased economic activity, expanded taxpayer rolls, lessened welfare expenditures, decreased costs of crime and punishment, even lower tax rates.” (Pg. 69)

He points out, “one in three black males in the age group 20 to 29 was under some form of criminal justice supervision on any given day… Yet African-Americans are only 12 percent of the population, and numerous studies show that middle-class African-Americans… are no more criminal or violent than their white contemporaries. Popular beliefs notwithstanding, crime and delinquency rates for whites and blacks in similar socioeconomic circumstances are virtually indistinguishable.” (Pg. 142)

He concludes, “In our society, with its dark racial history, its black faces at the bottom of the well, years of partisan political effort may be required to bring about such economic advance and the social leveling that would follow… African-Americans themselves must take the lead, state the goal, and move boldly toward it. They cannot achieve it by violence or by separation or by greater dependence, either on government or the Democrats. They May do it by leading and unifying disparate groups---with interests more common than they realize---into a new political force, dedicated to greater economic and social equality in America… such a force would have the potential to achieve real democracy, to change American life by attacking its inequities—perhaps to save us from ourselves.” (Pg. 194-195)

I have considerable doubts about Wicker’s proposal for a new political party (third parties have almost no influence; witness the Libertarian party). But his hopes for greater economic empowerment are certainly valid.