Hugh B. Price
President
National Urban League

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First, a very brief primer on the Urban League movement. We were founded 86 years ago. Our original mission was to help blacks moving from the rural South to the big cities make the transition to the economic mainstream. We helped them obtain jobs and housing. To this day, people across the country sidle up to me and say they got their first job through the Urban League.

The journey for those we serve is shorter now, namely from the inner city to the mainstream. But our basic mission remains promoting social and economic equity for African Americans, who are our principal constituency, and for other disadvantaged Americans.

Within this broad mission, we of the National Urban League, along with our 114 affiliates in 34 states and the nation's capital, are concentrating on lifting the urban poor out of poverty by:

• ensuring the academic and social development of low-income children so that they have the skills to compete in the 21st century;
  
  
• fostering economic self-sufficiency for their families; and
  
  
• promoting racial harmony and inclusion so that the American opportunity structure is open and accessible to those we serve.
  
  

The historic role we play is more crucial than ever because of the seismic changes underway in American politics and domestic policy. As the millennium approaches, ours is a society in search of its soul, in search of itself.

The severe economic turbulence of the last decade, when coupled with the profound domestic policy upheavals of the past year, have left millions of Americans worried, wary, skeptical and disengaged. America must regain its bearings and restore broad confidence in "the system" before intractable cynicism sets in.

A society consists of economic institutions, to be sure. America's are the envy of the world. For their robustness and resilience. For their prowess in creating jobs and generating wealth. For their inventiveness, dexterity and productivity. You need only travel anywhere abroad to realize how blessed we are.

But our economy isn't all that defines America. A society also consists of the communities that comprise it and of the people who live in those communities. I really worry that we're losing sight of what community means, much less what it means to a civil society.

Communities aren't abstractions or statistics. They are neighborhoods in towns and cities where real people live and work. They are the building blocks of a civil society. As Christopher Lasch observed, informal community hang-outs like coffee houses, beauty shops and bars are crucial to democracy because they're the venues for conversation, the reinforcement of values, arguments about local issues and, of course, trading gossip.

I can testify to what he's talking about. Hard-pressed as I am for time these days, I decided a couple of months ago that it'd be most efficient for me to have my hair cut by appointment in my office.

After only one sitting, I gravitated back to the neighborhood barbershop I'd patronized for 17 years. Why? Because I sorely missed the conversation among plumbers, mechanics, ministers and such that keeps me in close touch with my reality as an African American. Most of us actually go there for haircuts, but some brothers just drift in and out for a dose of riotously funny and sometimes raunchy conversation. The black barbershop is the ultimate democratic institution. Every customer waits his turn regardless of his station in life; there're no advance appointments and no jumping the line.

What is community? It's much more than an aggregation of individuals and households whose only contact with one another is via Internet. Community is more than a place where the only time people venture out of doors is for the daily trek to work or for an evening stroll into cyberspace.

The more technology isolates us from one another, the hungrier we've become for human contact. Contrary to dire predictions, cinemas are thriving despite the VCR. Last summer my wife and I joined 15,000 other New Yorkers one lovely evening on a park lawn to watch "Casablanca", probably for the fifteenth time. It obviously wasn't the movie alone that lured us there.

Just as no man is an island, neither is a community. When you bundle communities together and surround them with a border, they become what we call cities.

Cities define civilizations. Think of a civilization, a nation, even a state. What's the next word that comes almost instantly to mind? Probably the name of its principal city or major cities. America – New York City, Chicago, LA, and Miami, of course. China – Beijing. England – London. Kenya – Nairobi. Jamaica – Kingston. Illinois – Chicago.

Jim Sleeper, author of The Closest of Strangers, calls cities and their neighborhoods the "crucibles of civic culture." With their parks, festivals and museums, they are endless sources of enlightenment or distraction, even for those of us with modest means. Vibrant, exciting cities boost the national psyche, not to mention America's tourism-related balance of payments. Decaying and dangerous cities depress us and scare off tourists.

Cities are the setting where commerce, culture, community institutions and communal experiences converge. In the summers my wife and I routinely attend festivals of African and Caribbean music in New York City's Central Park. Typically there are several thousand people in the crowd, of every complexion, culture and clothing style imaginable, standing shoulder to shoulder for three hours, sharing both space and experience.

It dawned on me during a concert last August that, given our country's evolving demographics, it's in parks, communities and cities like this across the country where the future of America will be sorted out.

Despite the reversals they've suffered, cities remain the hub of the American economy and of American life. Even suburbanites and suburban firms stay inside the orbit of cities by choice. They draw economic sustenance and cultural stimulation from them, unable to imagine existing entirely out of touch with cities and the urbanized suburbs that surround them.

According to the Urban Institute, 8 out of 10 Americans live in metropolitan areas with cities at the core. The U.S. metropolitan population actually grew between 1950 and 1990 to a total of 193 million Americans. The non-metropolitan population declined during the same period. Metropolitan areas account for 83 percent of our national income and almost all of the employment in advanced technical and service sectors.

Yet America's commitment to community is fragile and fading as the elite, Robert Reich's information processors, withdraw inside their walled, hermetically sealed compounds. Libertarians and arch conservatives preach that we no longer need government, save to secure our borders from invasion. Let communities and the people who comprise them rule their own lives with minimal interference from government. Let businesses tax themselves to pay for their own safety and refuse removal services.

This appeal to community in the extreme is seductive. But it is extremist, because it denies the essence of community, which is shared awareness, respect and responsibility. For instance, reforming welfare as we know it by tossing mothers and children off public assistance after a fixed period of time tosses responsibility for the poor who cannot find room in the economy back on to states and ultimately localities. Congress would do this in the name of devolution, in the name of community.

But it actually would undermine community. Just remember how we reformed mental health treatment as we knew it a generation ago. The assumption back then was that the safety net comprised of state facilities would be replace by humane community-based services financed by private charity. The corrosive effects of this strategy on community is evident today on the streets of America's cities, where the mentally ill roam homeless and destitute. The same fate awaits poor children whose mothers cannot find jobs, which in many high unemployment communities will be the case with most of them.

If we aren't careful, ideological purists will apply the same devolutionist philosophy to the nation's roads and highways. Who needs a federal highway system, they might logically ask? Let each city and hamlet decide how wide its roads will be, how many off ramps there will be, and so forth. Interstate commerce be damned. The American economy be damned. If you haven't any doubts about the chaos this would cause, those of us of a certain age need only remember what it was like to drive from Washington, D.C. to Boston in the '40s.

Robert Putnam has done some fascinating work on social capital, which is a key ingredient of community. Our society urgently need more scholars and, especially philosophers, historians and anthropologists, writing about the meaning of community and what happens when we dismember the macro-community in the name of asserting the micro-community.

What has been the fate of other societies that have allowed this to happen? Is there anything profoundly different about modern technology and the approaching millennium that makes this prospect more appealing or more perilous? We need the help of the academy in reaching beyond the shrewdly marketed slogans to the hardnosed analysis.

Next, some thoughts about urban economies. For generations, the genius of the American economic and political system has been our collective determination to make it work for average Americans, not only for the elites. That's what has set us apart from other industrialized nations and made us the world leader.

Following World War II, when the economy was booming, most Americans were on the "up" economic escalator. The working man was the American hero. Not an American hero, mind you, but The Hero. We designed our tax and labor policies to make certain America worked for them.

When Jim Crow was defeated, we African Americans, having moved from the rural South to cities in search of opportunities, figured it was our chance at long last to jump on that "up" escalator.

But things soon turned sour for those of us who were destined to work in factories. For these blue collar workers of all complexions, the city-based manufacturing economy started moving to the suburbs and eventually overseas. According to Peter Drucker, the noted management guru, no class of people in history has ever risen faster than the American blue collar worker. Nor has any class ever fallen faster.

What's remarkable is that the steady decline in their fortunes has persisted alongside a strong economic recovery. After all, (1) inflation has flattened: (2) interest rates have fallen; (3) corporate bottom lines have brightened; (4) the federal deficit has dipped significantly; (5) the unemployment rate has declined; and (6) the stock market has soared, almost uninterruptedly, to record heights.

Yet the poor and working people of the nation's cities remain largely out of the economic loop. The steady recovery in recent years has done little to restore the chronically unemployed to the employment rolls. As the Economist noted recently, the proportion of people who have been out of work for a year or longer has more than doubled, from 5.6 percent to 12.2 percent, since 1990.

Conditions are so grim for some Americans that the Wall Street Journal has reported on an alarming phenomenon that it labeled the "working homeless." I recall reading in the Journal about 28 year-old Nancy Rogers, of Springfield Missouri. She works 10 hours a day scraping white meat off of turkey bones. She lives with her husband, a security guard who works the night shift, and their four sons in the Missouri Hotel. Don't be fooled. That's a homeless shelter by the railroad tracks. As her husband, John, said, "we're just a working family that can't afford our own place". Amazingly enough, Congress seems intent on rolling back the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-wage workers. The growing economic marginalization of millions of Americans simply isn't a socially healthy or politically sustainable situation. As their resentment simmers, we risk ignoring a history lesson noted by the late Christopher Lasch in his provocative book, The Revolt of the Elites:

In the first half of the 19th century, most people who gave any thought to the matter assumed that democracy had to rest on a broad distribution of property. They understood that extremes of wealth and poverty would be fatal to the democratic experiment.

If those who make the economic rules fail to reverse these socially corrosive economic trends, they will further divide the American people and gradually undermine public confidence in our way of life. America urgently needs to implement employment and income policies which put working people back on the "up" escalator.

What are the lessons of other societies that have experienced this widening economic schism? Have they survived and prospered with the consent and support of the governed? Will market capitalism provide adequately for everyone's needs? What's the evidence from history?

If not, is there an amalgam of robust market capitalism and compassion for those who don't quite fit in, either because their skills don't quite mesh with employers needs or because the private economy simply doesn't work all that well where they live? By doesn't work, I mean it doesn't provide enough jobs to go around or, as in the case of Nancy and John Rogers, that the jobs it does provide don't pay enough to provide for one's family. What are the lessons from Western Europe and other societies that have tried to strike a balance?

Is the American economic experience unique in history? I speak not of income equality or the existence of a really narrow income gap. Neither has ever been the case in this country to my knowledge. But my impression, as a non-historian, is that what sets us distinctly apart from other socieites is that we've managed to get most Americans on the "up" economic escalator most of the time.

We've made certain never to allow the working people of this country ride the "down" economic escalator but so long, lest they eventually lose all hope and, as Christopher Lasch warned, the democratic experiment fail.

Society has provided this fail-safe for our people, even if it meant taking extraordinary action, like the New Deal, and driving us somewhat deeper into debt. By tolerating the sharply divergent incomes and widespread economic insecurity today, are we placing our precious social experiment, indeed our very way of life, at risk?

Can economists devise a system of work-based self-reliance that assures decent jobs and adequate livelihoods for all who are expected to work? How much of need can be met by the private economy? What's the best way of filling any hole left in the labor market, especially the urban labor market? With public jobs, with public works, with powerful incentives for private employers?

What are the lessons from the New Deal, the Economic Development Administration? Would the domestic equivalent of defense spending, focused in this instance on rebuilding, modernizing and maintaining the nation's outdated and crumbling infrastructure, do the trick?

What would a universal work-based system of self-reliance cost society? Would it trigger runaway inflation, drive up the deficit impossibly? Can we afford it? Can we afford not to afford it?

Let me offer a final thought before I close. I'm persuaded that economic adversity and vulnerability help explain the souring of race relations in our society. Wedge politicians are pandering shamelessly to anxious whites, while scapegoating minorities and immigrants. This provokes rhetorical counteroffensives by those representing the "oppressed", thus escalating racial and class hostilities on all sides.

As Dennis MacShane, a British Minister of Parliament, once said of his society which applies equally to ours: "A rising (economic) tide does lift all boats while a sinking one exposes some very nasty things on the beach."

There is urgent work we must all do to promote racial healing and harmony. Much of it must be done in the communities where we live, work and worship. In the case of many of you, that community is the college or university campus. Back in the early '60s when I was in college, higher education officials were fond of touting the nation's colleges and universities as laboratories for American democracy. They mirrored society's values and equipped graduates to go forth to carry the torch for our way of life.

I can only pose several questions, but I wouldn't presume to answer them because I'm even farther out of my element on this issue. Is there any way to move beyond the strident yet stale debate over Western values versus multiculturalism? Can anyone come up with what Lyndon Johnson called an "American" values curriculum?

Can we imagine a core course of study which focuses on the contributions that all who comprise America have made to the formation, the culture and the values of our society? Of course, students should study the origins and nature of values, like free expression, rational discourse and market competition, that we should espouse. But let us also study the values non-Westerners have brought that are worth emulating. For instance, respect for the lasting sustainability of the space we occupy only temporarily.

By the way, perhaps there should also be required courses on those values that have been a blight on civilized societies so that we don't embrace them. Racial supremacy and subjugation, anti-Semistism, anti-anything, are obvious candidates in this category.

If we mainstreamed the contributions of all who make up America, then maybe we'll cease calling courses on 19th century white male American writers "American literature", while courses on 20th century black, Latino or female writers are called "multicultural courses". Maybe both will simply be construed as opportunities for further by students interesting in diving deeper into the era or that genre.

With their captive constituency of young people and adults, students and teachers, intellectuals and ordinary folk, colleges and universities are perfect settings for practicing and modeling how we ought to get along in a vibrant multi-ethnic society that, ideally, is competitive, compassionate and inclusive.

Colleges and universities can also teach their students and then the rest of us how to discuss and disagree respectfully, how to collaborate and how to live together. Indeed, given the changing demographics, universities could also use their ethnic themes dorms – provided they aren't totally segregated, which they shouldn't be – to teach whites what it's like to be in the minority.

My basic point is this: colleges and universities have a unique opportunity to model what ought to be, instead merely of mirroring what is. I call upon the higher education community to rise to this challenge.

My professors at Amherst delighted in larding on homework assignments. I've been waiting 33 years to return the favor. My take-home exam for you and for your colleagues who are enrolled along with the rest of us in this interdisciplinary course on the future of community and society, is to come up with the answers to the questions I've posed today. You have until the year 2000 to complete the assignment. After that, it may well be too late for all of us.

Seriously, I implore you not to stand on the sidelines. There is too much at stake and too much hard work for all of us ahead. We must each contribute what we can in the realms we inhabit, personally and professionally.

If our society and our cities are to prosper instead of splinter apart, then the 21st century must be the century when, once and for all, we make America work for all Americans.

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