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Source: Changes in Perception 101

administration and the beginning of the Kennedy presidency, had pre-
dicted the gains the American black would make in the next ten or fif-
teen years, he would have been dismissed as an unrealistic visionary, if
not insane. Even predicting half the gains that those ten or fifteen years
actually registered for the American black would have been considered
hopelessly optimistic. Never in recorded history has there been a
greater change in the status of a social group within a shorter time. At
the beginning of those years, black participation in higher education
beyond high school was around one-fifth that of whites. By the early
seventies, it was equal to that of whites and ahead of that of a good
many white ethnic groups. The same rate of advance occurred in
employment, in incomes, and especially in entrance to professional and
managerial occupations. Anyone granted twelve or fifteen years ago an
advance look would have considered the “negro problem” in America
to be solved, or at least pretty far along the way toward solution.
But what a large part of the American black population actually
sees today in the mid-eighties is not that the glass has become “half
full” but that it is still “half empty.” In fact, frustration, anger, and
alienation have increased rather than decreased for a substantial frac-
tion of the American blacks. They do not see the achievements of
two-thirds of the blacks who have moved into the middle class, eco-
nomically and socially, but the failure of the remaining one-third to
advance. What they see is not how fast things have been moving, but
how much still remains to be done—how slow and how difficult the
going still is. The old allies of the American blacks, the white liber-
als—the labor unions, the Jewish community, or academia—see the
advances. They see that the glass has become “half full.” This then
has led to a basic split between the blacks and the liberal groups
which, of course, only makes the blacks feel even more certain that
the glass is “half empty.”
The white liberal, however, has come to feel that the blacks increas-
ingly are no longer “deprived,” no longer entitled to special treatment
such as reverse discrimination, no longer in need of special allowances
and priority in employment, in promotion, and so on. This became the
opportunity for a new kind of black leader, the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Historically, for almost a hundred years—from Booker T. Washington
around the turn of the century through Walter White in the New Deal
days until Martin Luther King, Jr., during the presidencies of John
Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson—a black could become leader of his
community only by proving his ability to get the support of white