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by Jelani Cobb

The National Urban League released its annual State of Black America report this week. Among the highlights are the fact that African Americans remain six times more likely than whites to be incarcerated and three times more likely to live in poverty. I have my own views about the ways in which the “state” of black America is a much more complicated question than it appears to be on the surface - and the fact that most parties trying to answer it have a vested interest in a particular slant. But what remains clear is this: the work is not yet done.

None of us imagined that we would be seeing the Urban League send its report to an urban President, much less an African American one. But it gets at a bigger set of questions. Few of us recall that the Urban League was born out of the same philanthropic forces that produced and supported Booker T. Washington. At the turn of the last century Washington built a political empire with his philosophy of thrift, morality and, most significantly, pursuit of economic development rather than political power.

A good deal of the Urban League’s early program could be seen as an attempt to adapt Bookerism to a population that was rapidly shifting from Jim Crow serfdom into industrial city life. (Part of that Washingtonian legacy is seen in the division of labor in black leadership to this day -  while the NAACP and others devoted their efforts to fighting civil rights battles, the NUL has always been more concerned with the economic side of the equation.)

In the bloody context of disfranchisement, lynching and mob violence, Washington seemed to have a point in emphasizing quiet economic growth and self-sufficiency but his noted critic W.E.B. Du Bois saw this approach as virtual race treason. Economic accomplishments were meaningless, he argued, without the political power to protect them. There were always subtler shades to their positions but the higher decibels tend to kill nuance.

By any calculation, W.E.B. DuBois not only won that argument but used the 20th century to run up the score. There is a direct genealogy tying the Harvard-educated black historian to the Harvard-educated black President. You can, without turning history into calisthenics, see  Barack Obama’s entire life - from birth to inauguration - as a referendum on civil rights causes. Under any other circumstances, a biracial black lawyer who relied on millions of black voters to win the Presidency would be a heavy-handed metaphor for  the NAACP’s legal battles to end the “white primary” in the 1930s, its efforts to uproot restricted access to law schools in the 40s, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the Voting Rights Act and racial intermarriage victories of the 1960s. But here history is. As close as we can humanly come to containing multitudes. If we were still in need of a final punctuation on Du Bois’s argument it came around 10 p.m. on November 4, 2008.

A black President is the ultimate extension of Du Bois’s vision, not Washington’s; there is a kinship between Dreams from my Father and Souls of Black Folk but only a vague familiarity with Up From Slavery.

And yet…

If we take a look at the State of the Black Union report on lagging wealth, home-ownership and income within the black portion of America it would seem as if that dispute remains unsettled; that one side has piled up the points only to see the game head into overtime. We (wisely) recognize Du Bois as the godfather of the civil rights movement but Washington’s stillborn economic dream shadows us, a silent signpost of the road not taken.

Quite simply black America has waged a more effective civil rights movement than economic rights movement.

This doesn’t mean that we have paid no attention to the issue of economic development - it has been a primary concern of figures as diverse as Madame CJ Walker, Marcus Garvey, Earl Graves and Louis Farrakhan. But it simply has not had the same bandwidth as the struggles for civil rights. This might be because a “Whites Only” sign is a tangible totem of the tilted social order; poverty is diffuse and relative. And I’m inclined to think that economic development posed a kind of threat that even social equality might not have - there were generally speaking far more black men lynched for demanding wages than for the faulty specter of threatening white women.

However we slice it, the result is black America occupying a status more asymetrical than at any time since some of us were free and the rest were slaves. It is March 27, 2009. Some of live in the White House; some of us live on the street.

And this is essentially what Booker would tell Barack, or more precisely, what he would tell the rest of us because if you think that a President can save you - even one with a swagger, who lives on the South Side of town and ditches auxilary verbs, then you’ve been missing the whole point.

Jelani Cobb’s blog is www.americanexception.com

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