Not My Andy!

Like any aficionado of the Civil Rights Movement, I feel a spiritual kinship with people I have never met and likely never will. I feel that way about Andrew Young. Andy Young began his career as Martin Luther King’s right-hand man and aide. After he left the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he climbed the political ladder, becoming the mayor of Atlanta and a US representative to the United Nations. Andy’s latest incarnation was as an image-builder for Wal-Mart. He had been hired to work on their public relations in urban areas where Wal-Mart had been rebuffed such as Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. Reflecting on Andy Young and his work makes me feel warm and hopeful, so when I came across the New York Times Article entitled “Wal-Mart Image-Builder Resigns,” my immediate reaction was “Not my Andy!”

Unfortunately, it was my Andy. In an interview, Andy was encouraging the entry of Wal-Mart into urban areas because smaller “corner” stores often offer inferior merchandise (he complained of “stale bread, bad meat and wilted vegetables”) and charge exorbitant prices. So far, Andy’s right. If you usually shop for groceries in a bodega, your wallet and your digestive track will take a pummeling.

Andy went on to complain that the owners of the stores don’t stay in the community for generations. They try to make a living and they move on. True again. Here comes the hum-dinger. Andy then identified the owners of these stores by ethnicity: Jews, Asians and Arabs. What? Why, Andy? What’s the point? Sure, these convenience stores have changed hands over the generations. And sure, the owners do tend toward certain ethnicities. You made accurate statements in every regard, but Andy, that’s not the way we express our frustration with expensive low-quality corner stores! The owners of these establishments stock substandard merchandise and charge too much for it because of the margin-wrecking economics of running a small business (particularly a food business) in an economically-depressed setting. I might even go so far as to say most one-off city food stores offer a poor selection of products for inflated prices, even in middle class neighborhoods. Sourcing fresh food at low enough prices to compete with a large grocery chain or say, a Wal-Mart, is impossible for these mom-and-pop stores. They don’t gouge because of their ethnicity, they gouge because it’s the only way they can stay open.

Andy is also correct in noting that the owners of these stores often move out of the area when they retire. Who doesn’t want to retire to Florida after thirty years of working six or seven days a week trying to eek out a living as a convenience store owner? These people aren’t rich. Usually their children work in the stores and the parents are doing their best to make enough to provide for their children and send them to college. When these families “move up” as Andy put it, it’s generally not the parents, but the children who are able to capitalize on their superior educations to make better lives. Once the children make good, the parents close up shop and move to an area with better amenities or to be closer to their children. It’s the circle of life and it’s not race-dependent. Besides, Wal-Mart does not move to neighborhoods for altruistic reasons. The stores are there to turn a profit and they will turn the neighborhoods back over to the corner stores as soon as there is no more money left to be made.

Andy could have made the same point about the bodega-style (in)convenience stores that dot urban blocks without mentioning the ethnicities of their owners. I think that Andy mentioned the ethnicity of the stores’ owners for another reason. Frustration. Andy and many other civil rights leaders are becoming incredibly disgruntled. Please take another look at Andy’s explanation for his comments. He said, “Almost everyone who has come into my community has moved in, made money and moved out and moved up.” Now read it again. What Andy is thinking, but has not said is this, “….everyone…has made money and moved out and moved up….(here are his silent thoughts) but we are still there. My friends and I were beaten up, threatened and killed. We marched until our feet bled, but black people are still there. I know that the strides that other ethnic minorities have made toward being accepted as full Americans are partly due to the sacrifices we made over the last fifty years and yet, black people are still there. What is happening? Bring on the Wal-Mart!”

When Daisy Bates and I were in Selma for the 40th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday we happened into a panel discussion where luminaries of the Movement were discussing their lives and their visions for the future. One leader, whose name I will not divulge, because I do not want you all to think badly about her; she is an incredible freedom fighter and is simply disillusioned now that she sees tangible evidence of all her hard work slipping down the drain. This unnamed leader was listening to Ted Shaw, Director-Counsel and President of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), give a short speech on the importance of convincing Congress to extend the life of expiring provisions of the Voting Rights Act. One of the provisions Shaw spoke about was a provision that required voting materials to be printed in languages other than English.

The leader was visibly disgusted. Why, she wanted to know, was the LDF spending resources on bilingual voting materials, when “those people” were just piggy-backing on all the efforts they had made in the Sixties and why don’t they just learn English anyway? Daisy Bates and I were flabbergasted. As we drove away that evening we discussed the anger of the Old Guard who, as they age are not only losing all desire to self-censor, but are also appearing to be more and more irritated by the state of Black America. They worked exceedingly hard not just for the middle classes who were well-positioned to take advantage of increased employment opportunities, but also for the urban and rural poor who today seem to be falling further and further behind. I believe this is the reason behind their harsh tongue-lashings (Bill Cosby) and their disquieting slips of the tongue (Andy Young).

I want our Movement leaders to feel reassured. I don’t want them to think that we are going to slip into a morass of our own making. Progress is never linear and we are seeking our footing in an environment that is far more difficult and nuanced than what we have faced before. But we will make progress. In the meantime, we don’t soothe our leaders’ discontent by allowing them to scapegoat other ethnicities for our problems. We thank our leaders for their work by doing our work. We try to ensure that poverty is not intergenerational damnation. We work to improve housing and employment opportunities. We work to encourage inner-city residents to vote and to wield more power in their political lives. We work to get our kids to stay in school and to have schools worth going to. We work to restore the most precious legacy of the Civil Rights Movement: hope.