(soft upbeat music) - Good evening and welcome to the second part of our interview with Dr. John Henry Clark on Harlem, the Cultural Capital of Black America.

In this segment, we asked Clark, who was director of the Black and Puerto Rican studies department at Hunter College in New York, how did Harlem change from the cultural mecca of Black America to what many people consider a burgeoning ghetto.

Taking exception to the word ghetto, Clark said... - Harlem is an ethnic community.

And there are many ethnic communities in this country, some are deteriorating, some are not.

There's an ethnic community out on Long Island, Great Neck and Little Neck where the average house costs $50,000, and yet it is basically a Jewish community.

Now, Harlem is a unique ethnic community.

And it has its good homes, its bad homes, it has its palatial homes, it has entire blocks where they're well kept homes owned by Blacks.

And it has more than its share of good housing in comparison to other neighborhoods in New York City.

Now, Harlem is obviously deteriorating, you can see that, but it is not deteriorating any faster, any more tragic than some other neighborhoods in New York City, like South Bronx, it's not only deteriorating, but it is falling down.

Now, none of this is justified, but my point is that the burden of being a ghetto and a ghetto in decline should not rest with Harlem alone because New York City is tragically in decline as a city.

- Why is it that Harlem seems unable to move ahead?

What's holding it back?

- The one thing that is holding Harlem back and that is frustrating its attempt to regain its former self, is the lack of a political cohesion that it once had, a kind of political leadership, a dynamic that we had once under a remarkable, colorful politician, called A. Clayton Powell, who... And his political organization was remarkably good in pulling things together and keeping issues very much alive, both nationally and locally.

And besides, we're into about the second generation after the so-called Harlem Renaissance period of 1925 and the flowering of the Harlem community.

So many of the responsible people we had at a previous generation, some have died out, some have moved out, and their children have not replaced them in being responsible to maintain the institutions that make a community a community worth living in.

- [Interviewer] How do people outside Harlem view Harlem?

- Mostly, I think they view it wrongly.

I think they view it as a community in transition and a community in decay.

They view it as a community that once had great potential that seemed to be lost right now.

And some view it as a kind of exotic community.

There was a period when Whites came to Harlem because it was a great tourist attraction.

They were looking for the mythological, noble savage, the exotic negro.

This period passed with the coming of the depression and the end of a period of patriotism when Whites would literally sponsor Black writers and artists and give them the means to sit down and do their work.

Well, with the coming of the depression and the stock market crash, many of these pseudo liberal Whites with money stop coming to the Harlem community.

And many of our writers who had some kind of sponsorship...

The good writers continued to write, because a good writer will write under any condition with or without a sponsor anyway.

The ponies fell by the wayside.

But we still managed to hold on to functioning writers of stature, such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, and Du Bois, not so much as a writer, as a fiction writer, but as a person who made Harlem his headquarters, his residency for a number of years.

But Harlem continued even in the period of transition, continued to attract people of caliber.

Paul Robeson for a number of years had a private home here in the Harlem community after living on Sugar Hill in a famous address for a number of years.

So a lot of Blacks of caliber have thought enough of this community to make it their home.

- [Interviewer] How would you describe the so-called average Harlemite today?

- Well, Harlemites probably no more or less average than people you meet in other parts of the country and other urban community.

But I think the average Harlemite is a worker and a worker who is generally employed downtown in factory or garment district or the massive food industry of of New York City, has a difficult time making ends meet with rapidly rising prices and inflation and food.

And I think that the average Harlemite, either goes to church or believes in church.

I think they come in many varieties, they come in some who drown their sorrow in beer and other forms of by alcohol, and some who drown their sorrow in religion.

- What does the Black parent in Harlem want for his or her child?

- I think the Black parent wants what every parent wants everywhere, a decent education and a decent way of life and a comparable marriage and a way of life that compliments the energy, the time and the love that the parent put into the raising of the child.

I think there were some specific values that the Black mother and the Black parent wants, and some universal values that every parent wants.

I don't think the parent in Harlem is much different, in its values and its desires for its children.

- [Interviewer] What does the future hold for Harlem?

- I think the future holds for Harlem what the people of Harlem are willing to organize and make it whole.

I think Harlem needs to put itself back together again.

We need to develop a new kind of political education and some shrewdness and some skill and dealing with the overall political machinery mostly run outside of Harlem.

We need to deal with our community and we need to deal with the apparatus of our city, in our state and within our nation.

But we need to totally start all over again and building the kind of political structure within the Harlem community that can keep the community viable and keep it growing.

- How long do you think Harlem can continue to remain pretty much stagnant without erupting?

- I don't think it's stagnant so much as kind of at the crossroads trying to decide its own definition, its own direction.

There's a great deal of movement in the Harlem community.

Too much movement to warrant the use of the word stagnant.

I think what we're trying to do is to work our way out of a let down and some political confusion, and that as a result of the passing of very able political leaders, principally A. Clayton Powell, and as a result of the decline in community activism after the end of the civil rights protest period, I think the upward mobility, the upward thrust of our young people and some of our older people too, began to deteriorate.

And all of this took its toll on how we need to build and maintain community organizations.

But I think it was Tom Wolf who said that "We are lost, but we should be found."

I don't think we're exactly lost, but if we are, we shall be found because there are still people in Harlem that cares about this community that if it's a little fragmented and scattered, there are people that tend to put it back together again.

- From a sweeping overview of what Harlem USA was and is, professor Clark took us on a provocative dialogue covering some of the major issues facing Black America.

American education play a role in the continued oppression of Black people.

- Yes, American education plays a role in the continuous oppression of Black people, maybe poor White people too, but more especially Black people because Black people are poorly educated and Black people themselves seem to have missed what education is all about.

Powerful people never educate powerless people in how to take that power away from them.

Education has but one honorable purpose, and that is to train people to be responsible handlers of power.

Everything else that goes for education is a waste of time.

Now, when I say a responsible handler of power, even if you have nothing but power over your own self, that's a degree of power.

If a child learns that when the light is red and the word says stop, the child, by virtue of this minimal learning, is exercising some power over himself, his movement, he knows how to keep himself out of danger, because that means stop and that is power.

So all knowledge is power.

Now, when I say power, I don't necessarily mean, although I don't rule it out, having power over somebody else, but using power to control yourself and using knowledge to extract from a society, those things which you have to have in order to live a decent life.

And these are part of the functions of education.

To let the human being know that there are certain human values, there are certain basic things that a human being is entitled to.

- What should Black parents look for when it comes to the kind of indoctrination their children receive in school?

- They should look for values.

To what extent are their children learning values, survival values, and to what extent are the images placed before the child stimulate and inspires the child to be something better than himself.

Better than himself, I don't mean different from himself, I don't mean he must change hair, texture or change color, but education supposed to teach you how to change yourself and to be an instrument for living together and on a better basis with other people.

And I think what the Black parent needs to look for is to what extent the school is preparing my child to face reality.

The child understand what kinda world the child live in and what he must do in that world.

Now, I do not mean train the child to accept the disabilities placed against the child, all the obstacles placed in the child's way.

True education is supposed to teach them how to remove those obstacles and to be his best self or her best self.

I think many times the parent with absolute sincerity does not get the best from the school, 'cause the parent does not know what to ask for.

So there must be some parents trained, and God knows, with all the things ordinary working people have to do, everybody can't understand what a curricular is, everybody can't understand how to evaluate a good teacher and when is the school giving to the child those educational tools that the child needs to survive in a highly technical and scientific world.

- What shouldn't Black parents expect schools to teach their children?

- It should not expect the school to teach the children those paramount basic lessons of conduct, of morality, of value that is supposed to come from the home.

The school can reinforce this, but the school cannot be the initial teachers of these very basic things that logically must come from the home.

- How much should Black parents expect to realistically flow from integrated education?

- I don't think we understand what we were talking about and when we say integrated, but if integrated means a better facility, a better teaching situation, then the parents have a right to expect this to reflect in the education of the child.

I do not accept integration as meaning something better, but giving Black children access to certain educational areas previously brought to them, his responsibility in education remains basically the same.

So if now under what we are calling integration, the child has better facilities and better teachers and he sits in a classroom that is more conducive to study, if integration means that, and I'm not too sure it does, then the parents have a right to expect a better educated child and a better caliber of child.

In cases that I have examined, this is not the case at all, because many of our children are bringing a lot of frustration out of an integrated school situation.

- One of the things that we hear Black parents say a lot to Black children, is do this or do that because it's a White man's world.

How wise is it for Black parents to say it's a White man's world to their children?

- It is very unwise and it's not even true.

The majority of mankind is not White.

Actually among nations, White people actually a minority.

Because of their power and because of their control over communications and textbooks and so much printed matter, they can give the illusion of being bigger than they are.

But it's no more, it's not a White man's world, or black man's world or Brown man's world.

It is a world that belongs to the people who live in it.

I would say that all of Africa, including North-Africa, rightfully belong to Black people.

I would say all of Europe, including Mediterranean in Europe that is mixed rightfully belong to White people.

And I could go from country to a country and the country belongs to the people that have labored to make it.

Now, coming back to America, we in the labor we gave against our will, helped to lay the basis for American capitalism and it's a modern way of life.

Now, that seed money from all that labor, labor that we gave though against our will, laid the basis for the economic system that we enjoy in America.

So we have as much acclaim to it, if not more so, than others.

Than in as much as 10 or 12 generations of our people have labored in this country, pushed the forests aside and tilted the field and contributed hell of a lot other than raw unskilled labor, Black inventiveness improve the industry in America might hope we do not forget Blacks influence this country technically, so much that we enjoy so much of the basic comfort that we enjoy came out of the inventive mind of Black people.

The stop line created by a Black man named Morgan Garrett, who only died a few years ago, the lawnmower, so many labor saving devices, the paper bag, the hat rack and the lubrication system that on modern train was created by Elijah McCoy.

And so many White inventors stole from Elijah McCoy.

Until when the patent office got a new lubrication system, they generally asked, "Did you steal it directly or indirectly from McCoy?"

And is this the real McCoy or an imitation McCoy?

Granville Woods and his inventions and electrical discoveries, the communication system between trains is his invention.

Now, Carver is well known, too well known to discuss in a great detail because that's the one Black inventor and scientist that we know a great deal about.

Thanks to him.

We have homogenization, we have different products from the peanuts and pecans, but we have sprays that literally save the cotton crop of the south.

Every time you put on a pair of shoes, you are benefiting by an invention of a Black man, Matzelinger, who started the automatic lays, made mass production of shoes possible.

And every time you look at a clock, you must remember that the first American made clock was made by Benjamin Banneker.

And we could just go on and on, but there's so many labor devices that we use day by day with no knowledge there that these were inventions of talented Blacks.

- Let us talk about Africa for a minute.

What do you think the future holds for Africa and so-called third world countries?

First, let me get your idea as to what third world means.

- It ain't nothing to me because so far as I'm concerned it's invalid, because I asked who was in the first and who's in the second, and who put the people in the first and who put the people in the second.

And how did I get into the one that is numerically lies?

Actually the coin...

The phrase was really coined by a Black man, French Fanon from the French West Indies.

Now it's being poorly used.

Now they said that, "Well, Africa, the developing nations, third world and South America, so therefore when they want to put Whites into the third world also, so in as much as they're so confused, let's see if we can put this into order.

Every time they dig in Africa, they find stones and bones and evidence of a society older than the existence of Asia or Europe.

They find the evidence of the oldest known man.

So therefore my people belong to the first world.

Now anybody wanna scramble for the second and the third, they can just go and and be my guest and they can have either one.

But now let's come to the question and get real serious because the answer to the question's a little more important than my exception with semantics.

What we are dealing with is an emergent world of people formerly dominated by Europe, who are now claiming the mastery of their own destiny.

This is going to upset the political, cultural and economic equilibrium of the world because now you must buy from them what you fondly stole from them.

This is what the whole OPEC thing is about.

Now that these people have control of their nations, they've got roads to build, they've got schools to build, they've got government houses to maintain.

You once got their products dirt cheap or scot free because they must charge you, so that means the big corporations and the cartels are making less money because they have to pay for the raw material that they once got either cheaply or took altogether from a helpless victim.

So the massive change in what you refer to is the third world, is the change in how people look at them and how they look at themselves now that they are the administrators of their destiny, then they have to control those items in their country that makes for the economy of the country.

So coffee companies who once got coffee very cheap because they're practically paying the laborer next to nothing, now that the labor lives in a house that don't leak, so the labor has to have more money, and therefore the corporations which once got rich overnight because they paid so little for the labor and so little for the material must readjust their ledger.

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