The Limits of Black Power

TOM BRADLEY BASED HIS FIRST campaign for mayor of Los Angeles on the idea that his election could make a difference in the lives of average blacks. "I want to provide a sense of hope for our young people," he said in 1969. "I want them to be able to look at city hall and know that the system can work. I want them to know that change is possible. I want them to know that we can reshape the structure, that it doesn't have to be destroyed. I want them to know that in city hall sits a man with whom they can identify, that if he made it, anybody can make it. That's what this election is all about."

As it turned out, Bradley lost that election. He won four years later using a similarly optimistic theme, and has been in city hall ever since. In the aftermath of the chaos that erupted in his city last week, Bradley's expansive view of what his election could accomplish seems hopelessly naive -- and not just in Los Angeles. The high expectations that greeted the election of thousands of African Americans to local, state and federal offices over the past three decades have been displaced by frustration. By every statistical measure from joblessness to out-of-wedlock births, the plight of the poorest blacks has deteriorated in nearly all the cities that blacks control politically. Black elected officials and black voters alike have discovered the harsh limits of their power. As the violence in L.A. showed, many of them remain as alienated from the political process as they were a generation ago.

There are many reasons for the depressing state of black politics. Most black mayors are trying to revive cities that were already in economic and social decline. Federal aid to urban areas has been drastically cut even as AIDS, drugs and homelessness strained social-welfare systems to the breaking point. The racial climate has worsened because of white fears of black criminals and disputes over affirmative action. Beyond that are large social and economic trends: the loss of the well-paid manufacturing jobs that gave many blacks their first step up the economic ladder, and the flight from the inner city to the suburbs of both black and white middle-class families, leaving behind ever more concentrated populations of the desperately poor.

These factors alone would have made it difficult for black politicians to fulfill the promise of the 1960s. But there are other dismaying reasons for the disappointment some African Americans feel about the political process. One is the lingering power of whites to devise new ways of preventing black officials from effectively exercising power. Another is that blacks have often failed to support institutions that are vital to the realization of their dreams. Perhaps most damaging is the tendency of many black officials, like former Washington Mayor Marion Barry and Chicago Congressman Gus Savage, to hide their failures in a cynical game of racial politics. Their slogan might be: Support me because I am black, whether or not I deliver. Until quite recently, the slogan worked.

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