did they want? Dr. King offered, in answer to that question, a vision of total relatedness. Religious scholars Kenneth L. Smith and Ira Zepp have pointed out, “Behind King’s conception of the Beloved Community lay his assertion that human existence is social in nature. ‘The solidarity of the human family’ is a phrase he frequently used to express this idea. ‘We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,’ he said in one of his addresses. This was a way of affirming that reality is made up of structures that form an interrelated whole; in other words, that human beings are dependent upon each other. Whatever a person is or possesses he owed to others who have preceded him. As King wrote, ‘Whether we realize it or not, each of us lives eternally “in the red.”’ Recognition of one’s indebtedness to past generations should inhibit the sense of self-sufficiency and promote awareness that personal growth cannot take place apart from meaningful relationships with other persons, that the ‘I’ cannot attain fulfillment with the ‘Thou.’”21
During the Montgomery bus boycott, the people of that place used the linkages they had forged to create a better place. They gained, and passed on, a vision of an even better place: one in which the color of one’s skin did not matter, in which all people were invested in the well-being of other people, and, one might hope, all living beings on the planet.
Jo Ann Robinson explained, “At the beginning, black bus boycotters had learned to hate, and they had hated ‘with a vengeance.’ But they learned one thing: hate does more harm to the hater than to the hated. The body, the state of mind of the one hating responds to the hate, and, like an illness, the hate begins a deterioration of that body, that mind. Illness, even death, can result.
“All boycotters learned this lesson. Dr. King had taught them that love is redemptive. That is why, though they had continued to boycott, they had dismissed the bus drivers from their thinking. They learned to guide their thoughts to pleasant things. This was why they stopped ‘hating whitey,’ why they laughed so much as they walked, why they could boycott for thirteen months while still working at their jobs and keeping their children in school, their bills paid, and their bodies well. Hate destroys, but love revitalizes!”22
Jo Ann Robinson pointed out that, prior to the boycott, the stress of riding the buses had contributed to violence in Montgomery families. The boycott was so effective in changing people’s state of being that hospitals reported many fewer injuries related to family anger. King’s fundamental thesis was that racism hurt whites as much as it hurt blacks. Though blacks were the ones fighting to make Montgomery a better place, the victory was not for themselves alone, but for all of the city.
This is the nature of neighborhood: the way of life evolves over time, as each effort at problem resolution becomes part of the collective memory and the collective foundation for problem solving. In such a way, living for millennia in a place, the aboriginal people of Australia mastered the subtle signs of the bush country, and the Inuit invented names for many kinds of snow. “Generational knowledge,” Roanoke reporter Mary Bishop called it, and I think that is an excellent name for the information which belongs to a community that has lived together for a long time. This is the essence of the ghetto neighborhoods that evolved over several generations. It is, we learn from the story of the Montgomery bus boycott, the ghetto, rooted in place, that is the material basis for Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community—the slaves’ dream of New Jerusalem, the highest expression of people living together in justice and compassion.
To Dwell or Not: The Uncertain Future of the Ghetto
A dilemma was embedded in the effort to defeat segregation. It was segregation that had made the ghetto. The ghetto, in turn, had made the archipelago state and its local representative, the neighborhood. The alteration—if not the death—of the neighborhood-based community was planted in the death of segregation. Segregation—and the accompanying violence and maltreatment—was intolerable. But what was to become of the ghetto once segregation was defeated?
Among the leaders who faced this issue was my father, Ernest Thompson, who, in the mid-1950s, was a nationally recognized trade union leader. He had been part of the Great Migration, leaving the oppression of rural Maryland in 1922 to make a better life in New Jersey. He immediately took up the struggle for better working conditions. Against great odds he worked to form unions and threw himself wholeheartedly into the union drives that took off after the 1932 election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The union movement, he often pointed out, was a coalition among the workers of different nationalities who worked together in the same plants. The union movement was neither of the ghetto nor in the ghetto. Under the onslaught of McCarthyism, many unions retreated from progressive positions on rights for black people. My father realized that the leadership for the struggle for Negro freedom would come from the ghetto itself. “The Negro must embrace the ghetto like a mother her child,” my father said, as he turned his efforts toward organizing the political power of the ghetto.23 His was not a position of separatism, for he understood clearly that decisions about the ghetto were made outside its boundaries, in city hall or in Congress. Rather, he hoped to use the ghetto as a base of power from which to work in coalition with other groups in the fight for basic necessities, education and housing chief among them. Desegregation, in his view, was the beginning of a new life for the ghetto, not its end. But how was this to be?
It was the urbanist Jane Jacobs who provided a vision of the possible future of the ghetto postsegregation.24 She argued that, though we call all poor neighborhoods “slums,” we should distinguish between two kinds of poor neighborhoods: perpetual slums and unslumming neighborhoods. They might look the same initially, she noted, but they were on distinctly different trajectories due to the actions of area residents. A slum would endure if residents left as quickly as they could. A neighborhood could transform itself, if people wanted to stay. It was the investment of time, money, and love that would make the difference. Following this line of reasoning, one might imagine some ghettos that would flourish and others that would flounder, depending on whether or not the area received investment from residents and attention from the larger body politic.25
It is significant that much of the Jewish ghetto in Rome is still standing, nearly 450 years later. Laura Supino told Carol Shapiro, “Jews have been living in this neighborhood for 22 centuries, two hundred years before the common era, with no break in their presence. So we are the only Jewish community to be present always in the same place before the Diaspora. Jewish people still live here, but of course all Italian citizens can live here and Jews can live in every other part of the town. But this quarter has always been a meeting place and a place for Jewish memories.”26
Sentiment aside, make no mistake about it, the ghetto of Rome was not just a ghetto: it was also a slum. According to Anya Shetterly, “There was just tiny narrow streets, all the garbage went out on the street. You can just imagine the smell.” But, in 2002, Let’s Go Rome tells tourists, “Although Dickens declared the area ‘a miserable place, densely populated and reeking with bad odours,’ today’s Jewish ghetto is one of Rome’s most charming and eclectic neighborhoods, with family businesses dating back centuries and restaurants serving up some of the tastiest food in the city.”27
Segregation in a city inhibits the free interaction among citizens and invariably leads to brutality and inequality, which themselves are antithetical to urbanity. When segregation disappears, freedom of movement becomes possible. That does not necessarily mean that people will want to leave the place where they have lived. The ghetto ceases to be a ghetto, it is true, but it does not stop being a neighborhood of history. Postsegregation, the African American ghetto would have been a site for imaginative re-creation, much like the ghetto in Rome.
The Second Great Migration, which began in 1940 and ended in 1970, posed another extraordinary set of challenges to the ghetto and to the city. The ghettos, largely built by the hopeful and resourceful migrants who arrived during the
