Of course, such trust between the races is often tentative. It can wither without a sustaining effort. It may last only so long as minorities remain quiescent, silent to injustice; it can be blown asunder by a few well-timed negative ads featuring white workers displaced by affirmative action, or the news of a police shooting of an unarmed black or Latino youth.
But I also believe that moments like the one in Cairo ripple from their immediate point: that people of all races carry these moments into their homes and places of worship; that such moments shade a conversation with their children or their coworkers and can wear down, in slow, steady waves, the hatred and suspicion that isolation breeds.
Recently, I was back in southern Illinois, driving with one of my downstate field directors, a young white man named Robert Stephan, after a long day of speeches and appearances in the area. It was a beautiful spring night, the broad waters and dusky banks of the Mississippi shimmering under a full, low-flung moon. The waters reminded me of Cairo and all the other towns up and down the river, the settlements that had risen and fallen with the barge traffic and the often sad, tough, cruel histories that had been deposited there at the confluence of the free and enslaved, the world of Huck and the world of Jim.
I mentioned to Robert the progress we’d made on tearing down the old hospital in Cairo — our office had started meeting with the state health department and local officials — and told him about my first visit to the town. Because Robert had grown up in the southern part of the state, we soon found ourselves talking about the racial attitudes of his friends and neighbors. Just the previous week, he said, a few local guys with some influence had invited him to join them at a small social club in Alton, a couple of blocks from the house where he’d been raised. Robert had never been to the place, but it seemed nice enough. The food had been served, the group was making some small talk, when Robert noticed that of the fifty or so people in the room not a single person was black. Since Alton’s population is about a quarter African American, Robert thought this odd, and asked the men about it.
It’s a private club, one of them said.
At first, Robert didn’t understand — had no blacks tried to join? When they said nothing, he said, It’s 2006, for God’s sake.
The men shrugged. It’s always been that way, they told him. No blacks allowed.
Which is when Robert dropped his napkin on his plate, said good night, and left.
I suppose I could spend time brooding over those men in the club, file it as evidence that white people still maintain a simmering hostility toward those who look like me. But I don’t want to confer on such bigotry a power it no longer possesses.
I choose to think about Robert instead, and the small but difficult gesture he made. If a young man like Robert can make the effort to cross the currents of habit and fear in order to do what he knows is right, then I want to be sure that I’m there to meet him on the other side and help him onto shore.
MY ELECTION WASN’T just aided by the evolving racial attitudes of Illinois’s white voters. It reflected changes in Illinois’s African American community as well.
One measure of these changes could be seen in the types of early support my campaign received. Of the first $500,000 that I raised during the primary, close to half came from black businesses and professionals. It was a black-owned radio station, WVON, that first began to mention my campaign on the Chicago airwaves, and a black-owned weekly newsmagazine, N’Digo, that first featured me on its cover. One of the first times I needed a corporate jet for the campaign, it was a black friend who lent me his.
Such capacity simply did not exist a generation ago. Although Chicago has always had one of the more vibrant black business communities in the country, in the sixties and seventies only a handful of self-made men — John Johnson, the founder of Ebony and Jet; George Johnson, the founder of Johnson Products; Ed Gardner, the founder of Soft Sheen; and Al Johnson, the first black in the country to own a GM franchise — would have been considered wealthy by the standards of white America.
Today not only is the city filled with black doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals, but blacks also occupy some of the highest management positions in corporate Chicago. Blacks own restaurant chains, investment banks, PR agencies, real estate investment trusts, and architectural firms. They can afford to live in neighborhoods of their choosing and send their children to the best private schools. They are actively recruited to join civic boards and generously support all manner of charities.
Statistically, the number of African Americans who occupy the top fifth of the income ladder remains relatively small. Moreover, every black professional and businessperson in Chicago can tell you stories of the roadblocks they still experience on account of race. Few African American entrepreneurs have either the inherited wealth or the angel investors to help launch their businesses or cushion them from a sudden economic downturn. Few doubt that if they were white they would be further along in reaching their goals.
And yet you won’t hear these men and women use race as a crutch or point to discrimination as an excuse for failure. In fact, what characterizes this new generation of black professionals is their rejection of any limits to what they can achieve. When a friend who had been the number one bond salesman at Merrill Lynch’s Chicago office decided to start his own investment bank, his goal wasn’t to grow it into the top black firm — he wanted it to become the top firm, period. When another friend decided to leave an executive position at General Motors to start his own parking service company in partnership with Hyatt, his mother thought he was crazy. “She couldn’t imagine anything better than having a management job at GM,” he told me, “because those jobs were unattainable for her generation. But I knew I wanted to build something of my own.”
That simple notion — that one isn’t confined in one’s dreams — is so central to our understanding of America that it seems almost commonplace. But in black America, the idea represents a radical break from the past, a severing of the psychological shackles of slavery and Jim Crow. It is perhaps the most important legacy of the civil rights movement, a gift from those leaders like John Lewis and Rosa Parks who marched, rallied, and endured threats, arrests, and beatings to widen the doors of freedom. And it is also a testament to that generation of African American mothers and fathers whose heroism was less dramatic but no less important: parents who worked all their lives in jobs that were too small for them, without complaint, scrimping and saving to buy a small home; parents who did without so that their children could take dance classes or the school-sponsored field trip; parents who coached Little League games and baked birthday cakes and badgered teachers to make sure that their children weren’t tracked into the less challenging programs; parents who dragged their children to church every Sunday, whupped their children’s behinds when they got out of line, and looked out for all the children on the block during long summer days and into the night. Parents who pushed their children to achieve and fortified them with a love that could withstand whatever the larger society might throw at them.