White People Must Change

Dr. Charles H. King is founder and president of the Urban Crisis Center in Atlanta, now in its twelfth year. Its main goal is to bring about racial understanding and equal opportunity by sensitizing white institutions to the reality of racism.

King is a Baptist pastor who served 10 years at Liberty Baptist Church in Evansville, Indiana. He now conducts seminars on race relations that bring whites and blacks together to confront their racial attitudes and encourage changes leading to racial reconciliation. The following interview was conducted for Sojourners in March, 1981, by Kathy Maxwell, an evaluation coordinator for the Atlanta Cities and Schools Project and a longtime friend of King.--The Editors

Kathy Maxwell: Dr. King, you have spoken before on black survival in the '80s. The topic of this interview is the future of blacks in America. This seems to be a different perspective.

Charles King: No. The future of blacks in America actually is a matter of survival. It's not just a matter of what blacks will do; the real question is what whites will do about the problems of blacks in the future. Our entire destiny is tied up with the nature of how white society reacts to those problems.

And I detect among most blacks a sense of despair, of anger--not outwardly expressed anger, but an inner hostility, particularly among young blacks in colleges and universities who are looking at the institutionalized operations of white systems that will not allow blacks to exist within them. These young blacks are turning again to black unity and seeking survival within the concept of blackness. And I consider that a one-way street--and suicidal.

My purpose is to convince white people to change. Because if they don't change, it actually spells the end of the future for many, many blacks. Now, some blacks will survive, maybe even the majority, in terms of acclimating and becoming a part of the system. What I fear for is the future of millions of black people who no longer want any part of white America, and that's where I see the trend going, particularly since we have separate secondary-school systems.

The blacks who now go to all-black schools will never grow up knowing white America. And when they find out about it, it will be too late; and that's when I think we could have a resurgence of riots as blacks try to survive in a world in which they can't see the end of the rainbow.

Maxwell: So you're predicting an upsurge in violence again unless something changes?

King: No. I don't think that it will be the type of violence that occurred in the past. And I'm not making predictions, because they tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. I'm saying what I fear might happen, unless immediate changes are made.

Some blacks like to use violence as a threat to whites to change, but what I want to do is face whole, hard, pragmatic realities: You cannot expect black despair, hostility, and frustration to stay canned up. It must have an outlet; where and when that will take place, I don't know. It may not be in out-and-out violence, but it might be catastrophic in that blacks all over the country might catch that despair.

The catastrophe might come in the form of more people being placed in penitentiaries; it might come in the form of a lot of black people being taken away to the old-time concentration camps in the name of national security. Most people don't realize that the McKarran Act, the law that allowed this country to place Japanese people in concentration camps because they were considered as a threat to national security during World War II, still exists. That law is still on the books.

The possibility does exist that blacks who will not conform, and who will be considered dangerous, may as a result of some movement on the part of the government or on the part of blacks come to the point of conflict and catastrophe. I pray this doesn't come, but when you look at the ghetto and the teeming, angry feelings of blacks now contained, you see an explosive mixture.

Maxwell: One of the lines of questioning that you hear all the time is, "What about the numbers of blacks who are doing better, the ones who are now part of the middle class? Is that not a bright spot for the future?" Could we not look at that and say, "This is a trend; things are going better for blacks"?

King: No. It is not a trend. As a matter of fact, it serves as a blinder to both blacks and whites to the real problems of the future. Whites see blacks having more jobs, shopping in the same supermarkets and department stores, holding jobs in large corporations. This allows white people to think that this is black progression. It is not. It is individual black progression.

One-third of all blacks still live on or beneath the poverty level. Thirty-five per cent of all black families are matriarchal. Most of these matriarchal families are on welfare.

Almost five million black children from welfare families are in segregated school systems; 75 per cent of all men in prison are black; 65 per cent of all women in prisons are black; 70 per cent of all the crime in urban areas is committed by blacks. We cannot allow the sight of middle-class blacks who have assimilated into white culture to blind us to the problems that lie beneath the horrifying statistics.

Most white people typically comment, "Well, you have to admit that there's progress." And my reply to that is, "If a knife is in a man's back four inches, and you take it out two inches, why should you ask the man who still has it two inches in his back to acknowledge that there has been progress?" We have to deal with the unsolved problems of black people, not the handful of blacks who have acclimated beyond the point of the masses.

Secondly, no matter what kind of success a black person has, no matter how high that black person goes in the white social or economic institutional structure, he or she still faces racism. That makes it impossible for black people to reach back and heip their brothers and sisters who are less fortunate.

Black people in America suffer discrimination on all levels, whether in the middle class or on welfare. They are still subjected to the slings and arrows of outrageous racism that prevent them from ever achieving a full sense of dignity or even hope that the future holds something better.

Successful blacks are actually motivated to make the next step upward. But they never expect to become presidents of companies, or be on the board of directors, or be directors of banks; high positions are denied to blacks in deference to the seniority of the whites above them, and as a result of traditional discriminatory methods by which blacks are kept on levels beneath the masses of whites.

Maxwell: Do you see the same thing going on in politics?

King: Yes. The fallacious assumption was that once the black had the vote and was able to elect black people to city hall, particularly in urban areas, a solution had been found. But that is misleading, because all black mayors are powerless to help black people, because their concerns are in raising money, collecting taxes, and ruling both blacks and whites alike. A black mayor must maintain the image of being the mayor of all people; therefore he or she cannot devote full time, as black leadership used to do in the '50s and '60s, to erasing inequities.

Now, these blacks who are in positions of what I call "futile power" must exercise a public image of being fair to all people. And the problem is that you cannot treat blacks and whites in a balanced way. There has been an imbalance, and once you institute a balanced approach, as if color made no difference, blacks end up with the short end of the stick. The first priority is to remove inequities, not to treat everybody alike.

Maxwell: It seems that your message to white people is one of getting them to acknowledge the fact that this imbalance does exist. But the response usually is that in the '80s things have changed. And whites don't like it when blacks are given opportunities over them.

King: Precisely. You know, many white people are victims of what I call institutional thinking. And I can fully understand why. You see, most white people grow up believing the American ideal that this nation is a melting pot, that this is the land of the free and the home of the brave. No matter what your background is, every person can, if they work at it, become president one day.

But they are talking about white people when they say these things, although most whites grow up thinking that this also applies to black people. So when they see blacks responding to inequities they feel that blacks are complaining, because in this land everybody has an equal opportunity. They believe that America's idealism holds true for everyone because it holds true for them.

They have never been taught that color indeed makes a difference. They have never been told that white people on the whole discriminate against black people. They have never come in contact with or struggled to understand the problems of being a minority person in a majority society. So they think in terms of the majority, how they themselves act, and they think this also is true of black people.

Racism actually is not just prejudice alone; it's prejudice that is institutionalized to such an extent that the patterns and traditions of the majority group will have an adverse effect upon a minority. You cannot expect a minority people to have the same motivations, skills, and hopes as people in the majority race, because the whole system is built for, and conducive to, white people. Society's benefits are geared toward the majority, which in this country is white.

Another factor which makes it difficult for whites to understand the problems of blacks is that most whites operate under the old Christian concept that love is the answer. They take a religious, idealistic concept and apply it to pragmatic realities. They say, "Love is the answer. Prayer changes things. Christ is the answer." They point to something we cannot see, feel, or touch, and say it is the answer. That frees them from doing anything at all about it. They make love into an idealistic, theological concept that refuses to deal with the garbage, the welfare system, police brutality, poverty. They say, "Christ is the answer," but what they don't understand is that Christ has no hands but our hands and that we are to do what we do in the name of Christ.

They go to their churches every Sunday--all-white churches, incidentally; if a black person tried to join an all-white church, most of them would have a heart attack--and they consign the problems of blacks and other minorities into the hands of the gods. And they call themselves worshipers.

Maxwell: Most Christian people, when speaking about love for their own families, are talking about loving action; but when it comes to racism, love becomes philosophical or a matter of prayer.

King: Very few people understand agape, or act out of it. Agape says, "I love you not because of what you do for me, but because I am compelled to do this for you despite what you feel about me." That's a sacrificial love, not the hypocritical concept that most people have.

If you had real love for me and I was angry, you would take time to find out the cause of my anger and try to distill it, not run away from it, which is what whites do to blacks. They look upon black feelings, black shortcomings, as an excuse not to deal with the problem. Well the fact of the matter is that out of the mouth of an angry black person basically comes the truth.

White people refuse to recognize that black protest has as its roots negative white attitudes. Blacks would not waste their time protesting anything unless there was a cause to protest.

Maxwell: We look at the '60s and the money that came in to urban areas for programs which didn't work.

King: Well, what that money really did was buy off black leadership; it killed the militancy of black leadership, who began to be directors of this or that program. The money took the cutting edge off black frustrations temporarily. The money that came to the ghetto did nothing more than stifle black progression by successfully locking in black leadership as administrators of programs that were designed to fail. Too little, too late.

Maxwell: So what is the answer?

King: The answer is in the hands of white Americans. The solution cannot come from black people, because asking them is just like the lion looking at the lamb and saying, "What is the answer to your fear and frustration, little lamb?" The problem is well-outlined statistically and historically--we know what the problem is. The problem is white racism. The problem is discrimination. The problem is prejudice.

Now, what is the answer to the problems of black people? The answer is in the will and in the power of white society and white institutions to change. They must change.

Maxwell: If white Americans wanted to address the problems of blacks, what would we do?

King: In the first place you would insure that every child in America would have a decent education. The public school system is divided geographically, and black schools are inferior not only in material resources but in attitudes. In an all-white system, the white child will grow up with a superior attitude; in a black school system, the black will grow up with an inferior attitude.

I keep urging the necessity for desegregation of school systems, because I believe it would cut in half the hopelessness that I see for the future. There is hope if we can catch children while they're still young and place them together in decent surroundings, doing away with ghettoization. The school system remains the only institution in America where togetherness is possible, because children must go to school by law.

Unless people are brought together in the next decade, we will have a twin society: one white and one black. If we're having trouble now between blacks and whites, think of what will happen in the future when the white suburban children who will one day have the power will face a hostile group that they know nothing at all about.

Maxwell: Say we address the education problem. What would be the next step?

King: I do not want to imply that everything will stand still until we desegregate the school systems. I would take a simultaneous step, rather than a next step. That would be to work for a reordering of the system's priorities.

You know it costs $13,000 a year to keep a man in prison. Rather than work on the causative factors of crime, we subsidize him in prison. In this state alone, $60 million is going into building new prisons. Well, what could $60 million dollars do in terms of a job program for unemployed black people? We could create new lives with meaning, dignity, and hope. Our priorities are reversed.

What really frightens me is that the same day the government sent $2 million to Atlanta for the investigation of the child murders, the Reagan administration cut the AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) staff program by $635 million, $525 million was taken away from the food-stamp program, and the CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) program was cut entirely. More than 117,000 poor blacks and whites are out of work.

After these hundreds of millions of dollars were taken away, the administration saw fit to give two million of it back to one city, disregarding the fact that the same environmental circumstances out of which the murdered and missing children of Atlanta came are present in every major city in this country: Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, San Francisco, Houston, Newark, Gary, New York.

The Reagan administration now says that the priority should be to relieve the stress upon "the private sector, to give them tax incentives and tax breaks so that the economy might grow and eventually employ poor people. That will never happen. It's completely insensitive to ask poor people to wait until big business is ready to beat their economic problem. The point is that even if big business does prosper, black people will still face discrimination.

Maxwell: Why can't the institutionalized church take some leadership?

King: The institutionalized church deals with hymns, sermons, choir rehearsals, and altar guilds. It deals with quiescent, peaceful attention to Sunday morning at 11 o'clock.

It is within those churches--those white churches--that most of your major racists live and survive. In the white Christian church is the realtor and the chairman of the bank. And all that happens when they go to church is that they get a sense of well being, and a false sense of who they really are.

The church has to come outside those four walls. It must inspire people to start doing things as Christ would do them, going among the sick and healing—healing the wounds of unemployment--and raising the dead--the dead hopes of black people.

White religion has not yet accepted the thesis that God wants Christians to do something about the problems of people. He said, "I was hungry, and you fed me; I was sick and in jail, and you visited me." And the disciples said to Jesus, "When did I do all this for you?" And Jesus said, "In as much as ye have done it unto the least of these my little ones"--in the ghetto, in the prisons--"in as much as ye have done it to them, ye have also done it to me."

He identified with the helpless, the frustrated, the cast-aways, the poor, the despised, the rejected; and all of that identifies blackness. If Christ does identify with the problems of black people, of poor people, then the Christ that white people worship indeed is black, because he identifies with the oppressed people, not with the oppressors.

Maxwell: But the message of loving your brother has not turned white America around.

King: Because Americans consider their brothers to be white.

Maxwell: But whites give lip service to equality.

King: They will love their brother if their brother either acts white or doesn't protest; yes, they will love such a black as that. But those are not black people. Those are colored people. And there's a difference.

Maxwell: Which is...

King: Colored people are those blacks who understand that they can't be themselves. They have to be and act like white people so they'll be accepted by white people. White people "love" them. They do not constitute a problem. Nor do they bring any problems with them to whites. Then whites turn to other blacks who protest and ask, "Why can't those blacks act like those that we know?"

Maxwell: It doesn't seem that economic realities change white people's minds either, even though they know how much it costs to keep somebody in prison, they know how much is spent on unemployment, and on and on.

King: That's why I say the answer to the problems of black people is in the hands of the white masses, because they have the power.

Maxwell: Are blacks powerless?

King: Yes. Period. Powerless. Blacks own less than two per cent of all the national wealth. There are 42 black banks in the United States and every one of them has rich, powerful whites on its board of directors. The Chase Manhattan Bank tomorrow night can buy out every black bank in town.

If a black mayor did something that the white community thought was detrimental to its interests, the governor and the state legislature would meet in a call session and take away the city's charter. There is no place in this country where any black can do anything that would wholly benefit blacks without having the power sweep down upon him or her.

Blacks must still operate within that unjust balance and cannot apply power directly on their own behalf. In the face of these conditions, blacks are powerless financially, politically, and even spiritually—you can't pray down the white man.

Maxwell: How are blacks going to survive emotionally?

King: We're used to surviving. A suffering people has the capacity to develop long patience and endurance and look upon the fact of being black as a cross we bear. And we bear it quite well.

But the point is, in this generation, we have been unable to transmit to our young people the need to bear crosses. They refuse to bear the cross. And that's why I say I fear for the future.

The Real Killers of Atlanta

These victims are the dead children [of Atlanta], but millions of young blacks who are not missing, who have not been murdered, are being slaughtered psychologically, emotionally, educationally. And there seems to be no intense concern for them....

The tragedy is...that when and if the murderer or murderers are caught, the status quo will be maintained....

We hand our children to society without the proper undergirding, economically or educationally, that would give them a chance in life. This, my friend, is murder before they die. We slay them before they have a chance.

And if you really want to know who the real killers are, they are not just the one or two people for whom we are searching. The real killers are the whites who condone it, black politicians who don't give a damn anymore about what happens to black people because they're fighting each other to get in office. And even if they want to do something about it, and are still sensitive to the problems of black people, they are powerless to change the situations that white institutions initially set into motion that created ghetto conditions. It's almost cast in concrete....

The real killers are us.

Charles King

CBS News Special Report: The Agony of Atlanta, March 5, 1981