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Welcome to the Be the Bridge podcast.
Be the Bridge exists to empower people and culture toward racial healing, equity, and reconciliation.
Latasha Morrison founded Be the Bridge in 2016 to foster needed dialogue and brave spaces and to give people the tools to pursue racial justice.
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We provide resources and community to do just that, and this podcast is one of those resources.
You’ll hear interviews hosted by Latasha and our team, conversations about current events, and encouragement for your racial literacy journey.
Thank you for listening, subscribing and engaging in this important work.
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Hello, I’m Corrigan Brown with Be the Bridge and today I want to talk about the role of the public sector in the building of the black middle class and black wealth in the United States of America.
Why is the public sector something I would want to single out when I’m thinking about this?
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Why wouldn’t I look at the massive private sector?
One thing to note about the public sector is because it is under public scrutiny, wages are fixed for specific roles.
A postmaster in one office is going to make the same as a postmaster in another office.
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That public scrutiny and that public visibility means that black people who are employed by the public sector are not going to suffer from some of the wage disparities that we have seen in the private sector.
So let’s take a brief walk through American history and see the ways that Black citizens have interacted with the public sector.
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Of course, Black Americans have been here since colonial times and in early American history.
There are two primary areas in the public sector where we saw them serving.
The 1st is the military.
Both enslaved people who were given promises of freedom for service and free people were serving in the military.
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In addition, the Postal Service had a lot of opportunities and would take Black workers when other parts of the public and private sector would not.
And so we see people made clerks and eventually postmasters and having more senior administrative roles in the Postal Service.
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And through these opportunities, through the military, through military pensions, through Postal Service work, we see Black people starting to get opportunities to enter the middle class.
Fast forward to the Civil War.
The North.
We see a lot of black people serving in the military.
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It’s a common myth among Confederate apologists that the black enslaved people fought willingly for the Confederacy.
That was, in fact, most historians agree, a coercion.
They were forced to serve the Confederacy in the same way that they were forced to serve their masters on plantations.
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And in a lot of cases, they were not given opportunities to fight on the front lines.
Instead, they were relegated to menial roles, cooking, cleaning, that sort of thing to really just kind of almost serve as the regiment slaves.
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So after that Civil War, when the country reunites and there is reconstruction, Reconstruction is the first American attempt to have a society that does not discriminate on the basis of race.
And when those barriers are lifted by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, we see Black people entering all sectors from Hiram rebels and Blanche Bruce as senators, PBS Pinchback as a governor over in Louisiana, we see several Black people being elected to Congress.
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We see them serving in all sorts of roles throughout the public sector.
And in the 1880s and 1890s, we start to see some retrenchment.
This thing that I always find this amusing in the history books, it is actually called the redemption, where people who believed in white supremacy re grabbed the reins of power.
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They went back and they started taking away opportunities.
They threatened or murdered people and they pushed black people out of many of these jobs that were producing these wages that would allow them to be in the middle class.
That tension was going back and forth throughout the country.
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Of course, it was deeper in the South where Jim Crow was being established, but there was tension in the North as well.
When Woodrow Wilson became president, being a president, coming from that Southern tradition of segregation, he purged a lot of black workers from the public sector and he resegregated it.
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In the 1930s.
You see the Federal Housing Administration doing redlining, deciding where Black people could live, and also deciding that those property values should be lower.
Bear in mind that the American middle class, the number one way that the American middle class builds wealth is through homeownership so that redlining persists today.
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When you look at property values in different cities and why one part of town is much cheaper than another, if you lay a red line map from the 30s over that, the maps align perfectly.
The depression comes and there’s economic recovery efforts, but black people were excluded from a lot of those recovery efforts.
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Even the New Deal, which had some broader provisions that kind of lifted all boats, had some carve outs for agricultural and domestic work, which black people were disproportionately representing it.
So the New Deal did improve things, but you still see this massive outpouring of American treasure to really help people out of poverty being steered away from black people.
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Harry Truman formerly integrates the military in 1948.
It had been partially integrated in some places and not in others.
You’ve probably seen several films about that.
But with the full integration of the military and the expansion of government from both World War 2 and the post war boom, there were a lot of jobs.
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There were public sector jobs that didn’t exist before.
There were union jobs all over the place and those opportunities, the union jobs in the post war public sector jobs, really created an opportunity for a lot of black people to enter the middle class.
You see the formation of a lot of middle class communities as a result of that opportunity.
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The Civil Rights Act comes along in 1965.
We see even further expansion.
Again, this is the second attempt to build a society that completely does not discriminate on the basis of race.
There are some reparative measures like affirmative action, which essentially states, other things being equal, give the person who historically didn’t have a chance a chance.
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And in the 1980s and 1990s, a hundred years after the redemption, we see another backlash.
We see a backlash to affirmative action.
We see it categorized as quotas, questioning the qualifications of black people who had been working these jobs in adverse conditions for decades and rolling back of a lot of the funding of government and a lot of the protection for unions that created equality of opportunity for black people.
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So we are left with this question, Are we trying to build a country where we are ignorant to the history of race and where we assert race doesn’t matter but we live with the aftermath of the policies where race matters?
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Or are we trying to build a country that acknowledges where it’s been and is looking forward to create ever more equality of opportunity irrespective of race?
Thanks for listening to the Be the Bridge Podcast.
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To find out more about Be the Bridge and what we offer, visit bethebridge.com.
Partner with us in this work at bethebridge.com/give, Connect with us on social media, and remember, you are not alone in your pursuit of righteousness and justice.
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Latasha Morrison is the executive producer, Sarah Connatser is the producer, and transcripts are done by a wonderful team of volunteers.
Thanks for listening.
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