Please read the Speaking Out excerpt found in your book. I have put it below in case you have trouble finding it in your book. Please provide a one paragraph reflection on your thoughts and observations from the reading.

Speaking Out

Black Picket Fences

Mary Pattillo

On a tour of Chicagos neighborhoods, our jumbo coach bus drove through a predominantly African American neighborhood not too far from Groveland. And just as middle class. It was a cold autumn morning, and the tree-lined streets were completely empty. Yet there were conspicuous clues that somebody cared deeply about this neighborhood. Matching lampposts stood like sentries at the edge of each homes neat lot. Welcoming block-club placards on the cornersPlease Drive Slowlyconveyed a concern for children who might be too engrossed in play to mind the traffic. The occasional candy wrapper or grocery bag on a few lawns did not ruin the overall tidiness. The homes with fresh paint, edged grasses, and decorative screen doors outnumbered the properties of loafers who had ceded victory to the weeds, or refused to sweep the sidewalk.

Mary Pattillo

Use with the permission of Mary Pattillo.

As we took in the pleasant sights, our learned Chicago tour guide, who was white, reported to our group of sightseers, most of whom were also white. From looking at it, some you might think this is a predominantly white neighborhood, but actually this neighborhood is all black. He spoke as if he let us in on a little secret.

The guides comment, dressed in its disclosing tone, initially struck me as narrow-minded, since I had, after all, grown up in a like neighborhood, and was not at all surprised by this find in Chicago. Yet with the near completeness of racial segregation in many large American cities, it would indeed be difficult for many whites to just happen upon a place like Groveland. For the most partand especially in cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Newark, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and so onAfrican Americans live on the black side of town, and whites on the white side of town. To a somewhat lesser extent and depending on the city, Hispanic and Asian American groups each year have their side of town, too.

Peoples routine patterns ensure that they have little reason or opportunity to see Groveland and neighborhoods like it. The average nonblack citizens ignorance of these enclaves is bolstered by the common belief in academia that the black middle class actually moved away from black neighborhoods after the 1960s, leaving behind their poorer former neighbors. Recognizing all this, perhaps black middle-class neighborhoods are a secret. And the black middle class, while far from a secret, is shrouded in misperception.

Grovelands first generation of residents who entered adulthood in the immediate postWorld War II era remember a time of largesse. With their stable jobs and in search of better housing, African American college-educated professionals moved to Groveland. Along with them came customer service representatives, hairdressers, transit employees, and railroad workers. All earned enough to buy a home and perhaps send the children to Catholic school, or take a yearly trip back Down South. They replaced the white residents who were also benefiting from postwar prosperity, and were looking to move to the growing suburbs. Far from integration, the change in Groveland was complete racial turnover. As Grovelands African American residents established their stake in the neighborhood, the statues of Jesus in the old neighborhood churches were painted darker, the restaurants started serving soul food, and the drugstores stocked black hair-care products. In their new, attractive neighborhood, Grovelands first generation began to reap the benefits of the civil rights movement.

The expansion of the black middle class in the 1950s, 1960s, and very early 1970s came to a halt in the last two-and-a-half decades of the twentieth century. The generations that followed Grovelands African American pioneer settlers have found it progressively more difficult to match what their parents amassed in those days of plenty. Executive profit-hoarding, corporate and government downsizing, and global labor markets have pillaged the wallets of the American middle class, both white and black. But with lower incomes and a flimsier financial cushion, African Americans are more susceptible than whites to slipping back down the class ladder.

A contemporary profile of the black middle class reveals that higher-paid professionals and executives do not predominate as they do among the white middle class. Instead, office workers, salespeople, and technical consultantsall lower-middle-class jobsmake up the majority of black middle-class workers. Working-class African Americans, who have been even harder hit by production shifts, are also an integral part of neighborhoods like Groveland.

Linda Brewer, a Groveland resident in her mid-thirties, listed the jobs that anchored her parents generation. A lot of these people around here, you know, post office workers, steel mills. They father had two jobs, she reflected. But them jobs are no longer here. So now they kids are poor. The second generation, of which Linda is a member, struggles to buy homes, or maintain the homes their parents purchased. Along with the third generation of teenagers and young adults, they are somewhat bewildered by the fact that without a college degree, they often have to live with their parents in order to get full consumption and leisure mileage out of their lower-middle-class paychecks. The black middle class is particularly fragile. As Anna Morris [born in Groveland and now raising her own family there] summarized, I get enough to get by. I dont get any more. I take care of my children. I think were sort of well-to-do, but who could say. You could go any way any day.