Black American Dream Comes True In Blossomfields

01/20/1998

Eric Ellis reports from Chicago on the new middle class growing there as the US economy reinvents itself.

The good burghers of Olympia Fields will today celebrate Martin Luther King Jnr Day in the United States, along, notionally, with 25 million African-Americans who comprise about a tenth of the US population.

Except that in Olympia Fields, about 40 minutes' drive south of Chicago, they'll be doing it in perhaps finer style than many of their fellow blacks. Olympia Fields, with its surrounding suburbs, is a heartland of the black middle class, an increasingly prosperous sector of the US economy that is at last being noticed by white-dominated corporate America.

It is here that the stereotypes of black urban blight that characterise south-central Los Angeles, East Palo Alto, much of Detroit and Marion Barry's Washington, DC, are shattered.

These streets are paved, not potholed, the lawns manicured and the flags proudly extended from the eaves of neat, modern brick homes are that of the Union rather than those of the Nation of Islam, or Malcolm X or Elijah Mohamed.

The housing estates are called Merry Lakes and Blossomfields, with houses that start at about $US150,000 and go on to $US1 mil-lion. The cars in the driveways are new, gleaming and often German.

About the only hint that this is not a prosperous white community is that the suburban estates do not have gates and the churches are often "Full Gospel Baptist".

Local police say the crime levels here are well under the Chicago average. Gangs? The officer laughs.

Olympia Fields and nearby Homewood are 70-80 per cent black and participating fully in the fabled American Dream, a phenomenon that could not always be said for their predecessors. And this at a time when "affirmative action", the legally sanctioned policy that extends advantages to US racial minorities, is most threatened by conservative-held States.

If Black America had a capital, it would probably be Chicago. The Windy City, the third largest in the US, is the home turf of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, his son Jesse Jnr, Louis Farrakhan and Elijah Mohamed. And of Michael Jordan and Oprah Winfrey, two other influential shapers of American life.

Chicago is also home to the US black media. Ebony and Jet are both based here in a grand building on Michigan Avenue, Chicago's best address. So too is the Chicago Defender, the newspaper that has championed the national black cause since its founding by a son of a slave in 1905 who became one of America's first black millionaires.

It was the Defender that did much to emancipate black thinking in the US, urging blacks to shake loose from the harsh South and its racism and move to Chicago, where today the population of eight million is equally proportioned African-American and Caucasian.

But the rise of the black middle class has, ironically, placed an institution such as the Defender, long an advocate of integration, at risk.

As the black communities prospered in recent years, they have filtered out of the areas where the Defender is best read. Distribution costs became higher. Simultaneously, the community group that supported integration into the mainstream found their advocacy less in demand. Support has waned and the Defender's daily circulation has fallen from 50,000 in the 1960s to 10,000-15,000 today.

Black prosperity is playing out in other ways. Where companies looked abroad for opportunity and got burnt in China and South-East Asia, they have found it closer to home.

In run-down inner cities, companies have discovered a well-populated, under-served and surprisingly receptive consumer culture.

National chains have begun to set up in blighted neighbourhoods and are tapping into an enormous market of unrealised potential, and imbuing the community with new life, jobs and hope.

"The suburbs are over-stored, profits are declining and retailers are looking for new opportunities," says Ann Habiby of the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City. Ms Habiby told USA Today that as much as 40 per cent of the national grocery market had been overlooked, a $20 billion opportunity.

The Chicago-based Target Market News says earnings of African-American households rose about 13 per cent in 1996 to $US367 billion. Due to higher wages and low national unemployment, African-Americans, traditionally the community most likely to hold back on spending, are splurging on big-ticket items -houses, cars, whitegoods - at higher rates than the white population.

The emergence of this powerful spending force was recently celebrated on the front cover of that bible of white corporate elite, Fortune, in a series entitled "The New Black Power", celebrating the eclectic rise of black tycoons, the top 100 black-owned companies . . . and their $US14.1 billion in sales.

The US Census Bureau reports a 42 per cent increase in black-owned businesses from 1987-1992, the most recent census information available. Business growth expanded nationally by an average 26 per cent in that period and anecdotal evidence, as well as a booming economy, suggest those figures have risen further since.

All of which is not to say that the still deeply divided US is suddenly spawning a new nation of Bill Cosby-style Huxtable families, or that Americans are about to elect a black president. The demographics are still grim.

Statistically, an African-American is more likely to be unemployed than a white, Hispanic or Asian- American. Black incomes remain about 60 per cent of the national average and black life expectancies about 75 per cent -ratios that have not changed in recent decades, as whites, too, have grown wealthier and healthier.

Blacks have even been displaced by Hispanics on the league ladder of prosperity. Latinos are getting richer faster than blacks.

The black poverty rate has remained the same for 30 years, 15 per cent higher than whites.

But there have been undoubted advances, as the prosperity of places like Olympia Fields suggest. A new book, America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible, by academics Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, claims the affirmative action policies of recent years have marginal influence.

"Racial preferences may have made a marginal difference, but the growth of the black middle class has been primarily the result of deep demographic and economic change, better schooling . . . and powerful anti-discrimination legislation that primarily affected black employment in the South.

And the transformation of white racial attitudes? "Preferential policies were not the secret to black economic and social advancement in the pre-affirmative action decades, and they are not today," the Thernstroms say.