https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/11/if-reparations-are-due-the-great-society-crowd-should-pony-up/
Nationwide, it is estimated that more than five out of every six black children lived with both parents in 1950, a figure that had been fairly stable since Reconstruction. Then everything changed.
In no sane part of this great country are reparations really due, but no one has ever accused California of undue sanity. Last week, as Kurtis Lee of the New York Times reported with a straight face, a California panel approved recommendations “that could mean hundreds of billions of dollars in payments to Black residents to address past injustices.”
By “injustices,” Lee means things like slavery, Ku Klux Klan violence, and Jim Crow. As unjust as they were, these Democratic institutions did not cause the wealth disparities between blacks and whites that reparations boosters like to cite. No, the real damage was done much later by still another Democratic invention, the so-called “Great Society.”
Growing up in Newark, New Jersey, I had a ringside seat on the change the Great Society wrought. In my forthcoming book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, I describe what I and others saw.
Among the more instructive stories I tell is that of the late black radical Amiri Baraka, the father of current Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. In 1951, Baraka graduated from my integrated neighborhood high school, Barringer. He was one of four blacks in a homeroom of 29 students.
“His carefree and jovial manner has lighted many of our classrooms,” wrote the editors of Baraka in his senior yearbook. At Barringer, Baraka ran track and cross country and belonged to the science club and the Latin Honor Society. Upon graduation, he was offered a four-year scholarship to Seton Hall University and lesser scholarships to Holy Cross and Rutgers University-Newark.
In mid-century urban America, Baraka’s success was not unusual. In his 1987 memoir, The Autobiography of Leroi Jones, Baraka unwittingly made the case against reparations. Despite slavery and Jim Crow, his friends from the neighborhood were doing just fine—“auto plants, utilities, electronic tube factories, mechanics, white-collar paper shuffling, teachers, small businessmen, security guards, commercial artists.”
His classmates at the historically black Howard University were doing even better. “At least five of us became generals,” he wrote, “and many more at lower levels. An admiral or two. [Ronald] Reagan’s top Negro. [Spiro] Agnew’s top Negro. Negroes at all levels of state bureaucracy and madness.”
