* Missing Information and Bias // Requires Reserch to support (agree) or disagree

*How? Discuss several possible methods of investigation to take the issue a step further. What is the benefit to find updated information on this topic?

*How African Americans could have fought technology?

*How technology has helped the future Generation of African American?

* What possible conclusions can you make from this research

- Title End of W ork Author Jeremy Rifkin Publisher Putnam Books NYC Date 1995 . 5. Technology and the African-American Experience AT THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century more than go percent A of the black population of the United States still lived below the Mason-Dixon line.' The vast majority of blacks were tied to a form of agriculture that had changed little since the first slaves were brought to America. While the Civil War had given black Americans their political emancipation, they still remained yoked to an exploitative economic system that kept them in a state of near servitude. After the Civil War and a short period of reconstruction, in which blacks made significant political gains, the white plantation owners were able to reassert control over their former slaves by instituting the sharecropper system. Near starvation, landless, and desperate for work, black Americans became reluctant pawns in the new sharecrop- ping scheme. Under the new system, they were leased farmland and provided housing, seed, farm tools, and mules. In return, 40 percent of their harvest had to be given over to the landowner. Although in principle the remaining harvest was to go to the sharecropper, it seldom worked out that way. The monthly stipend, or "finish," pro- vided to the sharecroppers to cover monthly expenses was always too little, forcing tenants to borrow on credit from the plantation general store. Goods were often marked up, and interest rates on credit were generally exorbitant. As a result, by the time the harvest was in and counted, the sharecroppers inevitably found that they owed the land- lord more money than their share of the harvest was worth, forcing 69 70 THE THIRD INDESTRIAL REVOLUTION them into further debt and dependency. More often than not, planters fixed the bookkeeping records, cheating the sharecropper still further A system of rigid segregation laws backed up by a reign of terror ensured white supremacy and a docile workforce. Most black sharecroppers planted cotton, one of the most labor- intensive field crops. Picking cotton bolls at harvest was a grueling exercise. Laborers had to crawl on their knees or stoop over as they worked the cotton fields. The soft puff of cotton was surrounded by a tough stem that constantly pierced the hands. Cotton was picked and put into seventy-five-pound sacks that were dragged on a strap around the shoulder. Cotton picking lasted from sunup to sundown. In that time a seasoned picker could pick more than 200 pounds Plantation housing was primitive, lacking heating and plumbing Children were little schooled and generally helped out in the fields. The sharecropping system amounted to little more than slavery by another name A growing number of blacks began migrating to northern cities during and immediately after World War I, to escape the impoverish- ment of the rural South. With foreign immigration cut off during the war years, northern manufacturers desperately needed unskilled la- bor and began recruiting heavily among southern blacks. For many African-Americans, the prospects of earning a living wage in northern factories was sufficient to pick up stakes and leave families and friends behind in search of a better life. Most blacks, however, chose to stay, preferring not to risk the uncertainties of life in the northern cities. Then, in October 2944, an event took place in the rural Mississippi Delta that was to forever change the circumstances of African- Americans. On October 2 an estimated 3.000 people crowded onto a cotton field just outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi, to watch the first successful demonstration of a mechanical cotton picker. Nicholas Le- mann, in his book The Promised Land, describes what took place. "The pickers, painted bright-red, drove down the white rows of cotton Each one had mounted in front a row of spindles, looking like a wide mouth, full of metal teeth, that had been turned vertically. The spin- dles, about the size of human fingers, rotated in a way that stripped the cotton from the plants, then a vacuum pulled it up a tube and into the big wire basket that was mounted on top of the picker." The crowd of onlookers was awed by the sight. In an hour, a laborer could pick twenty pounds of cotton. The mechanical pickers could pick a thousand pounds of cotton in the same length of time. Each machine could do the work of fifty people. Technology and the African-American Experience 72 The arrival of the mechanical cotton picker in the South was timely. Many black servicemen, recently back from the war, were beginning to challenge Jim Crow laws and segregation statutes that had kept them in virtual servitude since Reconstruction. Having fought for their country and been exposed to places in the United States and overseas where segregation laws did not exist, many vet- erans were no longer willing to accept the status quo. Some began to question their circumstances; others began to act. In Greenville, Mis- sissippi, four black veterans walked to the country courthouse and asked to register to vote. After repeated rejections they filed a com- plaint with the FBI which in turn sent agents to Greenville to help register the four men to vote in the state of Mississippi. Whites in Mississippi, and elsewhere in the South, were worried. The rumblings of change were getting louder and threatened to undermine the precarious arrangement that had maintained the plan- tation economy for so long. A prominent planter in the Delta wrote to the local Cotton Association with a suggestion that was to be taken up, in short order, by white landowners all over the South. His name was Richard Hopson, the brother of Howard Hopson, whose land was used to demonstrate the marvels of the new mechanical cotton picker. In his letter, Hopson reflected on the growing racial tension in the Delta and wrote, "I am confident that you are aware of the serious racial problem which confronts us at this time and which may become more serious as time passes.... I strongly advocate the farmers of Mis- sissippi Delta changing as rapidly as possible from the old tenant or sharecropper system of farming, to complete mechanized farming ... Mechanized farming will require only a fraction of the amount of labor which is required by the sharecropper system thereby tending to equalize the white and negro population which would automatically make our racial problem easier to handle." In 1949 only 6 percent of the cotton in the South was harvested mechanically, by 1964, it was 78 percent. Eight years later, 100 percent of the cotton was picked by machines. For the first time since they had been brought over as slaves to work the agricultural fields in the South, black hands and backs were no longer needed. Overnight, the sharecropper system was made obsolete by technology. Planters evicted millions of tenants from the land, leaving them homeless and jobless. Other developments has- tened the process. Federal programs forced a 40 percent reduction in cotton acreage in the 1950s. Much of the land was converted to timber or pasture, which required little labor. Restrictions on tractor produc- 72 THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION tion were lifted after the war, greatly accelerating the substitution of tractors for manpower in the fields. The introduction of chemical defoliants to kill weeds reduced the workforce still further-black workers had traditionally been used to chop down weeds. When the federal government extended the minimum wage to farm laborers, most southern planters found it more economical to substitute chemi- cal defoliants for hand chopping, leaving blacks with no source of employment.* The push of mechanization in southern agriculture combined with the pull of higher wages in the industrial cities of the North to create what Nicholas Lemann called "One of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements of people in history." More than 5 mil- lion black men, women, and children migrated north in search of work between 1940 and 1970. The migration routes ran from Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia along the Atlantic Seaboard to New York City and Boston; from Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Alabama north to Chicago and Detroit; and from Texas and Louisiana west to California. By the time the migration was over, more than half of all black Americans had moved from South to North and from an en- trenched rural way of life to become an urban industrial proletariat. The mechanization of farming deeply affected the whole of agri- culture, forcing millions of farmers and farm laborers off the land. Its effect, however, on African-Americans was more dramatic and imme- diate because of their greater concentration in the cotton-growing region of the South, where mechanization spread more quickly and forcibly than was the case with other farm technology. Equally impor- tant, unlike most other farmers, the vast majority of blacks did not own the land they worked. Since most were sharecroppers at the mercy of the planters, and existed largely outside the money economy, they had no capital at their disposal and therefore no means by which to weather the technological storm that swept over their communities. The Rev. erend Martin Luther King tells of his surprise in visiting a plantation in Alabama in 1965, meeting sharecroppers who had never before seen U.S. currency.11 The mechanical cotton picker proved far more effective than the Emancipation Proclamation in freeing blacks from a plantation econ- omy. It did so, however, at a terrible price. The forced eviction from the land and subsequent migration of millions of destitute black Ameri- cans to the North would soon unleash social and political forces of unimaginable proportions-forces that would come to test the very Technology and the African-American Experience 73 soul of the American compact. Writing in 1947, southern lawyer and businessman David Cohn implored the nation to take heed of the storm clouds on the political horizon. He warned: The country is upon the brink of a process of change as great as any that has occurred since the industrial revolution.... Five million people will be removed from the land within the next few years. They must go somewhere. But where? They must do something But what? They must be housed. But where is the housing? Most of this group are farm negroes totally unprepared for urban industrial life. How will they be industrially absorbed? What will be the effect of throwing them upon the labor market? What will the effect be upon race relations in the United States? Will the victims of farm mechanization become the victims of race conflict? There is an enormous tragedy in the making unless the United States acts, and acts promptly, upon a problem that affects millions of people and the whole structure of the nation." CAUCHT BETWEEN TECHNOLOGIES Although African-Americans were unaware of it at the time of their trek north, a second technological revolution had already begun in the manufacturing industries of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and New York that once again would lock them out of gainful employment. This time the economic displacement created in its wake a new and perma- nent underclass in the inner cities and the conditions for widespread social unrest and violence for the remainder of the century. At first, blacks found limited access to unskilled jobs in the auto, steel, rubber, chemical, and meat-packing industries. Northern indus- trialists often used them as strikebreakers or to fill the vacuum left by the decline in immigrant workers from abroad. The fortunes of black workers in the North improved steadily until 1954 and then began a forty-year historical decline. In the mid-1950s, automation began taking its toll in the nation's manufacturing sector. Hardest hit were unskilled jobs in the very industries where black workers were concentrated. Between 1953 and 1962, 1.6 million blue collar jobs were lost in the manufacturing 74 THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION sector. Whereas the unemployment rate for black Americans had never exceeded 8.5 percent between 1947 and 1953, and the white rate of unemployment had never gone beyond 4.6 percent, by 1964 blacks were experiencing an unemployment rate of 12.4 percent while white unemployment was only 5.9 percent. Ever since 1954, black unem- ployment in the United States has remained twice that of whites." Writing on The Problem of the Negro Movement in 1964, civil rights activist Tom Kahn quipped, "It is as if racism, having put the Negro in his economic place, stepped aside to watch technology destroy that place." Beginning in the mid 1950s, companies started building more automated manufacturing plants in the newly emerging suburban industrial parks. Automation and suburban relocation created a crisis of tragic dimensions for unskilled black workers. The old multistoried factories of the central cities began to give way to new single-level plants that were more compatible with the new automation tech nologies. The limited availability of land and rising tax rates of the cities were a powerful disincentive, pushing manufacturing businesses into the newly emerging suburbs. The newly laid interstate highway system and the ring of metropolitan expressways being built around northern cities increasingly favored truck over train transport of goods, providing a further incentive to relocate plants to the suburbs.16 Finally, employers anxious to reduce labor costs and weaken the strength of unions saw relocation as a way to draw distance between plants and militant union concentrations. Eventually the same anti- union feelings pushed companies to locate plants in the South, Mexico, and overseas. The new corporate strategy of automation and suburbanization became immediately apparent in the automotive industry. Ford's River Rouge complex in Detroit was long the flagship plant of the company's far-flung operations. The Rouge plant was also the home of the UAW's most vocal and militant local union, whose membership was over 30 percent black. So powerful was Local 600 of the UAW, that it could cripple Ford's entire operation with a single strike action." Despite the fact that the Rouge complex had plenty of room for expansion, Ford management made the decision to move much of the production away from the site to new automated plants in the suburbs, in large part to weaken the union and regain control over its manufac- turing operations. In 1945 the Rouge plant housed 85,000 workers. Just fifteen years later the employment rolls had plummeted to less than Technology and the African-American Experience 75 30,000. Historian Thomas J. Sugrue notes that from the late 1940s through 1957, Ford spent more than $2.5 billion on automation and plant expansion. Ford initiatives were matched by General Motors and Chrysler. Together, the Big Three auto companies constructed twenty- five new, more automated plants in the suburbs surrounding De- troit."18 Satellite businesses that serviced the automotive industry also began to automate production in the 1950s-especially companies manufacturing machine tools, wire, car parts, and other metal prod- ucts. Many auto-parts manufacturers like Detroit's Briggs Manufactur- ing and Murray Auto Body were forced to close up their shops in the mid- to late 1950s as the giant automakers began to integrate their production processes, taking over more and more of the manufactur- ing of component parts in newly automated production lines. The number of manufacturing jobs in Detroit fell dramatically beginning in the mid-1950s as a result of the automation and suburba- nization of production. Black workers, who just a few years earlier were displaced by the mechanized cotton picker in the rural South, once again found themselves victims of mechanization. In the 1950s, 25-7 percent of Chrysler workers and 23 percent of General Motors workers were African-American. Equally important, because the black workers made up the bulk of the unskilled labor force, they were the first to be let go because of automation. In 1960 a mere twenty-four black workers were counted among the 7,425 skilled workers at Chrysler. At General Motors, only sixty-seven blacks were among the more than 11,000 skilled workers on the payroll. The productivity and unemployment figures tell the rest of the story. Between 1957 and 1964, manufacturing output doubled in the United States, while the number of blue collar workers fell by 3 percent. Again, many of the first casualties of the new automation drive were black workers, who were disproportionately represented in the unskilled jobs that were the first to be eliminated by the new machines. In manufacturing operations across the entire northern and western industrial belt, the forces of automation and suburbanization continued to take their toll on unskilled black workers, leaving tens of thousands of permanently unemployed men and women in their wake. The introduction of computers and numerical control technology on the factory floor in the 1960s accelerated the process of technology displacement. In the nation's four largest cities, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit, where blacks made up a large percentage of 76 TRE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION the unskilled blue collar workforce-more than a million manufactur- ing, wholesale, and retail jobs were lost, many the result of technology displacement Author James Boggs voiced the concern of many in the black community when he declared that "cybernation... is eliminat- ing the 'Negro jobs. ** As businesses fled to the suburbs, millions of white middle and working class families followed suit, relocating in new suburban sub- divisions. The central cities became increasingly black and poor in the 1960s and 1970s. Sociologist William Julius Wilson notes that "the proportion of blacks living inside central cities increased from 52 per cent in 1960 to 60 percent in 1973, while the proportion of whites residing inside central cities decreased from 31 percent to 26 percent." Wilson blames the exodus for a spiraling decline in the inner-city tax base, a precipitous drop in public services, and the entrapment of millions of black Americans in a self-perpetuating cycle of permanent unemployment and public assistance. In New York City in 1975, more than 15 percent of the residents were on some form of public assis- tance. In Chicago it was nearly 19 percent. In the 1980s many of the nation's northern cities partially revived by becoming hubs for the new information economy. Scores of down- town areas made the transition from "centers of production and distribution of material goods to centers of administration, informa- tion exchange and higher order service provision."*24 The emerging knowledge-based industries have meant increased jobs for high- skilled white collar and service workers. For large numbers of African Americans, however, the new urban renaissance has only served to accentuate the ever widening employment and income gap between highly educated whites and poor unskilled blacks. The only significant rise in employment among black Americans in the past twenty-five years has been in the public sector: more than 55 percent of the net increase in employment for blacks in the 1960s and 1970s occurred there. Many black professionals found jobs in the federal programs spawned by the Great Society initiatives of President Lyndon Johnson. Others found employment at the local and state levels, administering social service and welfare programs largely for the black community that was being displaced by the new forces of automation and suburbanization. In 1960, 13.3 percent of the total employed black labor force was working in the public sector. A decade later more than 21 percent of all black workers in America were on public payrolls. By 1970 government employed 57 percent of all black 9 of 12 Technology and the African-American Experience 77 male college graduates and 72 percent of all black female college graduates 17 AUTOMATION AND THE MAKING OF THE URBAN UNDERCLASS The corporate drive to automate and relocate manufacturing jobs split the black community into two separate and distinct economic groups. Millions of unskilled workers and their families became part of what social historians now call an underclass-a permanently unemployed part of the population whose unskilled labor is no longer required and who live hand-to-mouth, generation-to-generation, as wards of the state. A second smaller group of black middle-class professionals have been put on the public payroll to administer the many public- assistance programs designed to assist this new urban underclass. The system represents a kind of "welfare colonialism" say authors Michael Brown and Steven Eric, "where blacks were called upon to administer their own state of dependence. *** It is possible that the country might have taken greater notice of the impact that automation was having on black America in the 1960s and 1970s, had not a significant number of African-Americans been absorbed into public sector jobs. As early as 1970, sociologist Sidney Willhelm observed that "As the government becomes the foremost employer for the working force in general during the transition into automation, it becomes even more so for the black worker. Indeed, if it were not for the government, negroes who lost their jobs in the business world would swell the unemployment ratio to fantastic heights."*29 The public image of an affluent and growing black middle class was enough to partially deflect attention away from the growing plight of a large new black underclass that had become the first casualty of automation and the new displacement technologies Technological unemployment has fundamentally altered the so- ciology of America's black community. Permanent joblessness has led to an escalating crime wave in the streets of America's cities and the wholesale disintegration of black family life. The statistics are chilling, By the late 1980s one out of every four young African American males was either in prison or on probation. In the nation's capital, Washington DC, 42 percent of the black male population between eighteen and 10 of 12 78 THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION twenty-five years of age is either in jail, on parole, awaiting trial, or being sought by the police. The leading cause of death among young black males is now murder. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, now a US senator, published a controversial report on "Employment, Income, and the Ordeal of the Negro Family" in which he argued rather forcefully that "The under- employment of the negro father has led to the break-up of the Negro family:"si When that report was written, 25 percent of all black births were out of wedlock and nearly 25 percent of all black families were headed by women. Single-parent households headed by women are typically locked into a cycle of welfare dependency that is self- perpetuating generation after generation, with a high number of teenage pregnancies out of wedlock, a disproportionate school drop- out rate, and continued welfare dependency. Today, 62 percent of all black families are single-parent households. These statistics are likely to rise in the remainder of the decade, as an increasing number of unskilled black workers are let go in the current wave of re-engineering and downsizing According to a report issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, black wage earners made up nearly one third of the 180,000 manufacturing jobs lost in 1990 and 1991." Blacks also suffered disproportionately in the loss of white collar and service jobs in the early 1990s. The reason for the heavy losses in black employment, according to The Wall Street Journal, is that "blacks were concentrated in the most expendable jobs. More than half of all black workers held positions in the four job categories where companies made net employment cuts: office and clerical, skilled, semi-skilled and laborers." John Johnson, the direc tor of labor for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), says that "what the whites often dont realize is that while they are in a recession, blacks are in a depres- sion." More than forty years ago, at the dawn of the computer age, the father of cybernetics, Norbert Weiner, warned of the likely adverse consequences of the new automation technologies. "Let us remem- ber," he said, "that the automatic machine... is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor." Not sur- prisingly, the first community to be devastated by the cybernetics revolution was black America. With the introduction of automated machines, it was possible to substitute less costly, inanimate forms of Technology and the African-American Experience 79 labor for millions of African-Americans who had long toiled at the bottom of the economic pyramid, first as plantation slaves, then as sharecroppers, and finally as unskilled labor in northern factories and foundries For the first time in American history, the African-American was no longer needed in the economic system. Sidney Willhelm summed up the historical significance of what had taken place in his book Who Needs the Negro "With the onset of automation the Negro moves out of his historical state of oppression into one of uselessness. In- creasingly, he is not so much economically exploited as he is irrele- vant. ... The dominant whites no longer need to exploit the black minority: as automation proceeds, it will be easier for the former to disregard the latter. In short, White America, by a more perfect application of mechanization and a vigorous reliance upon automa- tion, disposes of the Negro; consequently, the Negro transforms from an exploited labor force into an outcast Writing from his prison cell in the Birmingham jail, the Reverend r King lamented the ever-worsening self-image of black Americans who were "forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'no- bodiness." Marx's reserve army of exploited labor had been reduced to Ralph Ellison's specter of the "invisible man." Automation had made large numbers of black workers obsolete. The economic con- straints that had traditionally kept black Americans "in line" and passively dependent on the white power structure for their liveli- hoods, disappeared. Vanquished and forgotten, thousands of urban black Americans vented their frustration and anger by taking to the streets in urban ghettos across the country. The rioting began in Watts in 1965 and spread east to Detroit and other northern industrial cities over the remainder of the decade. After the Watts riots, one of the local residents delivered a terse postmortem warning to the nation that spoke directly to the pent-up rage that had led to the outbreak. "The whites," he declared, "think they can just bottle people up in an area like Watts and then forget about them. It didn't work." It should be noted that not all civil rights leaders at the time accurately diagnosed the problem at hand. Many traditional leaders in more mainstream black organizations continued to perceive the black plight in strictly political terms, arguing that social discrimination was at the root of the crisis and that antidiscrimination laws were the appropriate cure. A few, however, saw what was taking place in the economy as a precursor of a more fundamental change in black-white SO THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION relations, with ominous consequences for the future of America. In the conclusion to his poignant book on the subject, Sidney Willhelm wrote, "An underestimation of the technological revolution can only lead to an underestimation of the concomitant racial revolution from exploitation to uselessness; to misjudge the present as but a continua tion of industrialization rather than the dawn of a new technological era, assures an inability to anticipate the vastly different system of race relations awaiting the displaced Negro 40 Willhelm's prediction proved correct. Today, millions of African- Americans find themselves hopelessly trapped in a permanent under class. Unskilled and unneeded, the commodity value of their labor has been rendered virtually useless by the automated technologies that have come to displace them in the new high-tech global economy. - Title End of W ork Author Jeremy Rifkin Publisher Putnam Books NYC Date 1995 . 5. Technology and the African-American Experience AT THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century more than go percent A of the black population of the United States still lived below the Mason-Dixon line.' The vast majority of blacks were tied to a form of agriculture that had changed little since the first slaves were brought to America. While the Civil War had given black Americans their political emancipation, they still remained yoked to an exploitative economic system that kept them in a state of near servitude. After the Civil War and a short period of reconstruction, in which blacks made significant political gains, the white plantation owners were able to reassert control over their former slaves by instituting the sharecropper system. Near starvation, landless, and desperate for work, black Americans became reluctant pawns in the new sharecrop- ping scheme. Under the new system, they were leased farmland and provided housing, seed, farm tools, and mules. In return, 40 percent of their harvest had to be given over to the landowner. Although in principle the remaining harvest was to go to the sharecropper, it seldom worked out that way. The monthly stipend, or "finish," pro- vided to the sharecroppers to cover monthly expenses was always too little, forcing tenants to borrow on credit from the plantation general store. Goods were often marked up, and interest rates on credit were generally exorbitant. As a result, by the time the harvest was in and counted, the sharecroppers inevitably found that they owed the land- lord more money than their share of the harvest was worth, forcing 69 70 THE THIRD INDESTRIAL REVOLUTION them into further debt and dependency. More often than not, planters fixed the bookkeeping records, cheating the sharecropper still further A system of rigid segregation laws backed up by a reign of terror ensured white supremacy and a docile workforce. Most black sharecroppers planted cotton, one of the most labor- intensive field crops. Picking cotton bolls at harvest was a grueling exercise. Laborers had to crawl on their knees or stoop over as they worked the cotton fields. The soft puff of cotton was surrounded by a tough stem that constantly pierced the hands. Cotton was picked and put into seventy-five-pound sacks that were dragged on a strap around the shoulder. Cotton picking lasted from sunup to sundown. In that time a seasoned picker could pick more than 200 pounds Plantation housing was primitive, lacking heating and plumbing Children were little schooled and generally helped out in the fields. The sharecropping system amounted to little more than slavery by another name A growing number of blacks began migrating to northern cities during and immediately after World War I, to escape the impoverish- ment of the rural South. With foreign immigration cut off during the war years, northern manufacturers desperately needed unskilled la- bor and began recruiting heavily among southern blacks. For many African-Americans, the prospects of earning a living wage in northern factories was sufficient to pick up stakes and leave families and friends behind in search of a better life. Most blacks, however, chose to stay, preferring not to risk the uncertainties of life in the northern cities. Then, in October 2944, an event took place in the rural Mississippi Delta that was to forever change the circumstances of African- Americans. On October 2 an estimated 3.000 people crowded onto a cotton field just outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi, to watch the first successful demonstration of a mechanical cotton picker. Nicholas Le- mann, in his book The Promised Land, describes what took place. "The pickers, painted bright-red, drove down the white rows of cotton Each one had mounted in front a row of spindles, looking like a wide mouth, full of metal teeth, that had been turned vertically. The spin- dles, about the size of human fingers, rotated in a way that stripped the cotton from the plants, then a vacuum pulled it up a tube and into the big wire basket that was mounted on top of the picker." The crowd of onlookers was awed by the sight. In an hour, a laborer could pick twenty pounds of cotton. The mechanical pickers could pick a thousand pounds of cotton in the same length of time. Each machine could do the work of fifty people. Technology and the African-American Experience 72 The arrival of the mechanical cotton picker in the South was timely. Many black servicemen, recently back from the war, were beginning to challenge Jim Crow laws and segregation statutes that had kept them in virtual servitude since Reconstruction. Having fought for their country and been exposed to places in the United States and overseas where segregation laws did not exist, many vet- erans were no longer willing to accept the status quo. Some began to question their circumstances; others began to act. In Greenville, Mis- sissippi, four black veterans walked to the country courthouse and asked to register to vote. After repeated rejections they filed a com- plaint with the FBI which in turn sent agents to Greenville to help register the four men to vote in the state of Mississippi. Whites in Mississippi, and elsewhere in the South, were worried. The rumblings of change were getting louder and threatened to undermine the precarious arrangement that had maintained the plan- tation economy for so long. A prominent planter in the Delta wrote to the local Cotton Association with a suggestion that was to be taken up, in short order, by white landowners all over the South. His name was Richard Hopson, the brother of Howard Hopson, whose land was used to demonstrate the marvels of the new mechanical cotton picker. In his letter, Hopson reflected on the growing racial tension in the Delta and wrote, "I am confident that you are aware of the serious racial problem which confronts us at this time and which may become more serious as time passes.... I strongly advocate the farmers of Mis- sissippi Delta changing as rapidly as possible from the old tenant or sharecropper system of farming, to complete mechanized farming ... Mechanized farming will require only a fraction of the amount of labor which is required by the sharecropper system thereby tending to equalize the white and negro population which would automatically make our racial problem easier to handle." In 1949 only 6 percent of the cotton in the South was harvested mechanically, by 1964, it was 78 percent. Eight years later, 100 percent of the cotton was picked by machines. For the first time since they had been brought over as slaves to work the agricultural fields in the South, black hands and backs were no longer needed. Overnight, the sharecropper system was made obsolete by technology. Planters evicted millions of tenants from the land, leaving them homeless and jobless. Other developments has- tened the process. Federal programs forced a 40 percent reduction in cotton acreage in the 1950s. Much of the land was converted to timber or pasture, which required little labor. Restrictions on tractor produc- 72 THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION tion were lifted after the war, greatly accelerating the substitution of tractors for manpower in the fields. The introduction of chemical defoliants to kill weeds reduced the workforce still further-black workers had traditionally been used to chop down weeds. When the federal government extended the minimum wage to farm laborers, most southern planters found it more economical to substitute chemi- cal defoliants for hand chopping, leaving blacks with no source of employment.* The push of mechanization in southern agriculture combined with the pull of higher wages in the industrial cities of the North to create what Nicholas Lemann called "One of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements of people in history." More than 5 mil- lion black men, women, and children migrated north in search of work between 1940 and 1970. The migration routes ran from Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia along the Atlantic Seaboard to New York City and Boston; from Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Alabama north to Chicago and Detroit; and from Texas and Louisiana west to California. By the time the migration was over, more than half of all black Americans had moved from South to North and from an en- trenched rural way of life to become an urban industrial proletariat. The mechanization of farming deeply affected the whole of agri- culture, forcing millions of farmers and farm laborers off the land. Its effect, however, on African-Americans was more dramatic and imme- diate because of their greater concentration in the cotton-growing region of the South, where mechanization spread more quickly and forcibly than was the case with other farm technology. Equally impor- tant, unlike most other farmers, the vast majority of blacks did not own the land they worked. Since most were sharecroppers at the mercy of the planters, and existed largely outside the money economy, they had no capital at their disposal and therefore no means by which to weather the technological storm that swept over their communities. The Rev. erend Martin Luther King tells of his surprise in visiting a plantation in Alabama in 1965, meeting sharecroppers who had never before seen U.S. currency.11 The mechanical cotton picker proved far more effective than the Emancipation Proclamation in freeing blacks from a plantation econ- omy. It did so, however, at a terrible price. The forced eviction from the land and subsequent migration of millions of destitute black Ameri- cans to the North would soon unleash social and political forces of unimaginable proportions-forces that would come to test the very Technology and the African-American Experience 73 soul of the American compact. Writing in 1947, southern lawyer and businessman David Cohn implored the nation to take heed of the storm clouds on the political horizon. He warned: The country is upon the brink of a process of change as great as any that has occurred since the industrial revolution.... Five million people will be removed from the land within the next few years. They must go somewhere. But where? They must do something But what? They must be housed. But where is the housing? Most of this group are farm negroes totally unprepared for urban industrial life. How will they be industrially absorbed? What will be the effect of throwing them upon the labor market? What will the effect be upon race relations in the United States? Will the victims of farm mechanization become the victims of race conflict? There is an enormous tragedy in the making unless the United States acts, and acts promptly, upon a problem that affects millions of people and the whole structure of the nation." CAUCHT BETWEEN TECHNOLOGIES Although African-Americans were unaware of it at the time of their trek north, a second technological revolution had already begun in the manufacturing industries of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and New York that once again would lock them out of gainful employment. This time the economic displacement created in its wake a new and perma- nent underclass in the inner cities and the conditions for widespread social unrest and violence for the remainder of the century. At first, blacks found limited access to unskilled jobs in the auto, steel, rubber, chemical, and meat-packing industries. Northern indus- trialists often used them as strikebreakers or to fill the vacuum left by the decline in immigrant workers from abroad. The fortunes of black workers in the North improved steadily until 1954 and then began a forty-year historical decline. In the mid-1950s, automation began taking its toll in the nation's manufacturing sector. Hardest hit were unskilled jobs in the very industries where black workers were concentrated. Between 1953 and 1962, 1.6 million blue collar jobs were lost in the manufacturing 74 THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION sector. Whereas the unemployment rate for black Americans had never exceeded 8.5 percent between 1947 and 1953, and the white rate of unemployment had never gone beyond 4.6 percent, by 1964 blacks were experiencing an unemployment rate of 12.4 percent while white unemployment was only 5.9 percent. Ever since 1954, black unem- ployment in the United States has remained twice that of whites." Writing on The Problem of the Negro Movement in 1964, civil rights activist Tom Kahn quipped, "It is as if racism, having put the Negro in his economic place, stepped aside to watch technology destroy that place." Beginning in the mid 1950s, companies started building more automated manufacturing plants in the newly emerging suburban industrial parks. Automation and suburban relocation created a crisis of tragic dimensions for unskilled black workers. The old multistoried factories of the central cities began to give way to new single-level plants that were more compatible with the new automation tech nologies. The limited availability of land and rising tax rates of the cities were a powerful disincentive, pushing manufacturing businesses into the newly emerging suburbs. The newly laid interstate highway system and the ring of metropolitan expressways being built around northern cities increasingly favored truck over train transport of goods, providing a further incentive to relocate plants to the suburbs.16 Finally, employers anxious to reduce labor costs and weaken the strength of unions saw relocation as a way to draw distance between plants and militant union concentrations. Eventually the same anti- union feelings pushed companies to locate plants in the South, Mexico, and overseas. The new corporate strategy of automation and suburbanization became immediately apparent in the automotive industry. Ford's River Rouge complex in Detroit was long the flagship plant of the company's far-flung operations. The Rouge plant was also the home of the UAW's most vocal and militant local union, whose membership was over 30 percent black. So powerful was Local 600 of the UAW, that it could cripple Ford's entire operation with a single strike action." Despite the fact that the Rouge complex had plenty of room for expansion, Ford management made the decision to move much of the production away from the site to new automated plants in the suburbs, in large part to weaken the union and regain control over its manufac- turing operations. In 1945 the Rouge plant housed 85,000 workers. Just fifteen years later the employment rolls had plummeted to less than Technology and the African-American Experience 75 30,000. Historian Thomas J. Sugrue notes that from the late 1940s through 1957, Ford spent more than $2.5 billion on automation and plant expansion. Ford initiatives were matched by General Motors and Chrysler. Together, the Big Three auto companies constructed twenty- five new, more automated plants in the suburbs surrounding De- troit."18 Satellite businesses that serviced the automotive industry also began to automate production in the 1950s-especially companies manufacturing machine tools, wire, car parts, and other metal prod- ucts. Many auto-parts manufacturers like Detroit's Briggs Manufactur- ing and Murray Auto Body were forced to close up their shops in the mid- to late 1950s as the giant automakers began to integrate their production processes, taking over more and more of the manufactur- ing of component parts in newly automated production lines. The number of manufacturing jobs in Detroit fell dramatically beginning in the mid-1950s as a result of the automation and suburba- nization of production. Black workers, who just a few years earlier were displaced by the mechanized cotton picker in the rural South, once again found themselves victims of mechanization. In the 1950s, 25-7 percent of Chrysler workers and 23 percent of General Motors workers were African-American. Equally important, because the black workers made up the bulk of the unskilled labor force, they were the first to be let go because of automation. In 1960 a mere twenty-four black workers were counted among the 7,425 skilled workers at Chrysler. At General Motors, only sixty-seven blacks were among the more than 11,000 skilled workers on the payroll. The productivity and unemployment figures tell the rest of the story. Between 1957 and 1964, manufacturing output doubled in the United States, while the number of blue collar workers fell by 3 percent. Again, many of the first casualties of the new automation drive were black workers, who were disproportionately represented in the unskilled jobs that were the first to be eliminated by the new machines. In manufacturing operations across the entire northern and western industrial belt, the forces of automation and suburbanization continued to take their toll on unskilled black workers, leaving tens of thousands of permanently unemployed men and women in their wake. The introduction of computers and numerical control technology on the factory floor in the 1960s accelerated the process of technology displacement. In the nation's four largest cities, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit, where blacks made up a large percentage of 76 TRE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION the unskilled blue collar workforce-more than a million manufactur- ing, wholesale, and retail jobs were lost, many the result of technology displacement Author James Boggs voiced the concern of many in the black community when he declared that "cybernation... is eliminat- ing the 'Negro jobs. ** As businesses fled to the suburbs, millions of white middle and working class families followed suit, relocating in new suburban sub- divisions. The central cities became increasingly black and poor in the 1960s and 1970s. Sociologist William Julius Wilson notes that "the proportion of blacks living inside central cities increased from 52 per cent in 1960 to 60 percent in 1973, while the proportion of whites residing inside central cities decreased from 31 percent to 26 percent." Wilson blames the exodus for a spiraling decline in the inner-city tax base, a precipitous drop in public services, and the entrapment of millions of black Americans in a self-perpetuating cycle of permanent unemployment and public assistance. In New York City in 1975, more than 15 percent of the residents were on some form of public assis- tance. In Chicago it was nearly 19 percent. In the 1980s many of the nation's northern cities partially revived by becoming hubs for the new information economy. Scores of down- town areas made the transition from "centers of production and distribution of material goods to centers of administration, informa- tion exchange and higher order service provision."*24 The emerging knowledge-based industries have meant increased jobs for high- skilled white collar and service workers. For large numbers of African Americans, however, the new urban renaissance has only served to accentuate the ever widening employment and income gap between highly educated whites and poor unskilled blacks. The only significant rise in employment among black Americans in the past twenty-five years has been in the public sector: more than 55 percent of the net increase in employment for blacks in the 1960s and 1970s occurred there. Many black professionals found jobs in the federal programs spawned by the Great Society initiatives of President Lyndon Johnson. Others found employment at the local and state levels, administering social service and welfare programs largely for the black community that was being displaced by the new forces of automation and suburbanization. In 1960, 13.3 percent of the total employed black labor force was working in the public sector. A decade later more than 21 percent of all black workers in America were on public payrolls. By 1970 government employed 57 percent of all black 9 of 12 Technology and the African-American Experience 77 male college graduates and 72 percent of all black female college graduates 17 AUTOMATION AND THE MAKING OF THE URBAN UNDERCLASS The corporate drive to automate and relocate manufacturing jobs split the black community into two separate and distinct economic groups. Millions of unskilled workers and their families became part of what social historians now call an underclass-a permanently unemployed part of the population whose unskilled labor is no longer required and who live hand-to-mouth, generation-to-generation, as wards of the state. A second smaller group of black middle-class professionals have been put on the public payroll to administer the many public- assistance programs designed to assist this new urban underclass. The system represents a kind of "welfare colonialism" say authors Michael Brown and Steven Eric, "where blacks were called upon to administer their own state of dependence. *** It is possible that the country might have taken greater notice of the impact that automation was having on black America in the 1960s and 1970s, had not a significant number of African-Americans been absorbed into public sector jobs. As early as 1970, sociologist Sidney Willhelm observed that "As the government becomes the foremost employer for the working force in general during the transition into automation, it becomes even more so for the black worker. Indeed, if it were not for the government, negroes who lost their jobs in the business world would swell the unemployment ratio to fantastic heights."*29 The public image of an affluent and growing black middle class was enough to partially deflect attention away from the growing plight of a large new black underclass that had become the first casualty of automation and the new displacement technologies Technological unemployment has fundamentally altered the so- ciology of America's black community. Permanent joblessness has led to an escalating crime wave in the streets of America's cities and the wholesale disintegration of black family life. The statistics are chilling, By the late 1980s one out of every four young African American males was either in prison or on probation. In the nation's capital, Washington DC, 42 percent of the black male population between eighteen and 10 of 12 78 THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION twenty-five years of age is either in jail, on parole, awaiting trial, or being sought by the police. The leading cause of death among young black males is now murder. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, now a US senator, published a controversial report on "Employment, Income, and the Ordeal of the Negro Family" in which he argued rather forcefully that "The under- employment of the negro father has led to the break-up of the Negro family:"si When that report was written, 25 percent of all black births were out of wedlock and nearly 25 percent of all black families were headed by women. Single-parent households headed by women are typically locked into a cycle of welfare dependency that is self- perpetuating generation after generation, with a high number of teenage pregnancies out of wedlock, a disproportionate school drop- out rate, and continued welfare dependency. Today, 62 percent of all black families are single-parent households. These statistics are likely to rise in the remainder of the decade, as an increasing number of unskilled black workers are let go in the current wave of re-engineering and downsizing According to a report issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, black wage earners made up nearly one third of the 180,000 manufacturing jobs lost in 1990 and 1991." Blacks also suffered disproportionately in the loss of white collar and service jobs in the early 1990s. The reason for the heavy losses in black employment, according to The Wall Street Journal, is that "blacks were concentrated in the most expendable jobs. More than half of all black workers held positions in the four job categories where companies made net employment cuts: office and clerical, skilled, semi-skilled and laborers." John Johnson, the direc tor of labor for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), says that "what the whites often dont realize is that while they are in a recession, blacks are in a depres- sion." More than forty years ago, at the dawn of the computer age, the father of cybernetics, Norbert Weiner, warned of the likely adverse consequences of the new automation technologies. "Let us remem- ber," he said, "that the automatic machine... is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor." Not sur- prisingly, the first community to be devastated by the cybernetics revolution was black America. With the introduction of automated machines, it was possible to substitute less costly, inanimate forms of Technology and the African-American Experience 79 labor for millions of African-Americans who had long toiled at the bottom of the economic pyramid, first as plantation slaves, then as sharecroppers, and finally as unskilled labor in northern factories and foundries For the first time in American history, the African-American was no longer needed in the economic system. Sidney Willhelm summed up the historical significance of what had taken place in his book Who Needs the Negro "With the onset of automation the Negro moves out of his historical state of oppression into one of uselessness. In- creasingly, he is not so much economically exploited as he is irrele- vant. ... The dominant whites no longer need to exploit the black minority: as automation proceeds, it will be easier for the former to disregard the latter. In short, White America, by a more perfect application of mechanization and a vigorous reliance upon automa- tion, disposes of the Negro; consequently, the Negro transforms from an exploited labor force into an outcast Writing from his prison cell in the Birmingham jail, the Reverend r King lamented the ever-worsening self-image of black Americans who were "forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'no- bodiness." Marx's reserve army of exploited labor had been reduced to Ralph Ellison's specter of the "invisible man." Automation had made large numbers of black workers obsolete. The economic con- straints that had traditionally kept black Americans "in line" and passively dependent on the white power structure for their liveli- hoods, disappeared. Vanquished and forgotten, thousands of urban black Americans vented their frustration and anger by taking to the streets in urban ghettos across the country. The rioting began in Watts in 1965 and spread east to Detroit and other northern industrial cities over the remainder of the decade. After the Watts riots, one of the local residents delivered a terse postmortem warning to the nation that spoke directly to the pent-up rage that had led to the outbreak. "The whites," he declared, "think they can just bottle people up in an area like Watts and then forget about them. It didn't work." It should be noted that not all civil rights leaders at the time accurately diagnosed the problem at hand. Many traditional leaders in more mainstream black organizations continued to perceive the black plight in strictly political terms, arguing that social discrimination was at the root of the crisis and that antidiscrimination laws were the appropriate cure. A few, however, saw what was taking place in the economy as a precursor of a more fundamental change in black-white SO THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION relations, with ominous consequences for the future of America. In the conclusion to his poignant book on the subject, Sidney Willhelm wrote, "An underestimation of the technological revolution can only lead to an underestimation of the concomitant racial revolution from exploitation to uselessness; to misjudge the present as but a continua tion of industrialization rather than the dawn of a new technological era, assures an inability to anticipate the vastly different system of race relations awaiting the displaced Negro 40 Willhelm's prediction proved correct. Today, millions of African- Americans find themselves hopelessly trapped in a permanent under class. Unskilled and unneeded, the commodity value of their labor has been rendered virtually useless by the automated technologies that have come to displace them in the new high-tech global economy