White Racism Ignites Dynamite in Black Ghettos
In 1967, Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton wrote an article in The Atlantic that traced the root of the frustration present in African-American ghettos to decades of systemic injustice. Today, over 65 percent of black people live in urban America, and that discontent has far from subsided.
“In order to understand the black ghetto—both its great problems and its capacity to become a key political force in urban America—we should take a brief look at the history of black migration to the North,” wrote Carmichael and Hamilton. An excerpt of their article has been animated in the video below.
Black people now hold the balance of electoral power in some of the nation’s largest cities, while population experts predict that in the next ten to twenty years, black Americans will constitute the majority in a dozen or more cities. In Washington, D.C., and Newark, New Jersey, they already are in the majority; in Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, and St. Louis, they represent one third or slightly more of the population; in such places as Oakland, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati, they constitute well over one fourth. Even at the height of European immigration, no ethnic group has ever multiplied so rapidly in the United States. In order to understand the black ghetto—both its great problems and its capacity to become a key political force in urban America—we should take a brief look at the history of black migration to the North.