Bill Cosby and J. C. Watts are working to make the dream of Booker T. Washingon real–100 years later.

In the past couple of decades, when American celebrities have increasingly offered up politics as the solution to everything, and when by politics they inevitably mean more government control, the situation for black Americans in particular has become increasingly dire.

Although black Americans have made distinct advances since the Reagan revolution opened up the economy to greater entrepreneurship and stronger payoffs for individual initiative, a divide has opened up, as the burgeoning middle class of black Americans has left behind an underdeveloped and direly challenged group of poorly educated, culturally bereft individuals whose ability to participate in productive employment is woefully inadequate.

An outrageous percentage of young black American males is currently incarcerated or has been in the past. It is outrageous that our society has decided to allow conditions in many urban neighborhoods to devolve into such gross lawlessness as to ensure that a vast number of young black Americans will end up in jail.

A good deal of the responsibility for this appalling situation lies with America’s urban school systems, which are controlled by powerful leftist unions and disgracefully fail even to attempt to provide a solid education for urban children whom they consider uneducable, a situation the denizens of the education establishment blame on the children, the children’s parents, popular culture, stingy taxpayers–anybody but their own damned selves, the real culprits.

The results have been enormous. As a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly noted:

Blacks are 13 percent of the population, yet black men account for 49 percent of America’s murder victims and 41 percent of the prison population. The teen birth rate for blacks is 63 per 1,000, more than double the rate for whites. In 2005, black families had the lowest median income of any ethnic group measured by the Census, making only 61 percent of the median income of white families.

Most troubling is a recent study released by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which concluded that the rate at which blacks born into the middle class in the 1960s backslid into poverty or near-poverty (45 percent) was three times that of whites—suggesting that the advances of even some of the most successful cohorts of black America remain tenuous at best. Another Pew survey, released last November, found that blacks were “less upbeat about the state of black progress now than at any time since 1983.”

Yet things were, if anything, even more awful a century ago, when blacks were routinely denied rights others enjoyed, and the law protected and reflected racial prejudice. Then, as now, there were many black and white Americans who offered government as the solution to blacks’ problems, but except for the great accomplishment of breaking the legal stranglehold of Jim Crow, government has done much, much more harm than good, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out four decades ago.

But there was always another vision available: that of Booker T. Washington.

Washington’s vision, offered in the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, was to provide black Americans with a model that could get them out of poverty and into a productive society of their own creation. His idea was to encourage black Americans to develop skills that would make them more useful members of society and contributors to the economy, to ensure that they would not have to be dependent on whites.

Through his Tuskegee Institute and other endeavors, Washington worked for black entrepreneurship, labor skills, personal responsibility, and strong families. His work involved charitable contributions from whites, to be sure, but it was all about equipping blacks to help themselves and succeed in the world as it was.

Unfortunately, as Moynihan noted in the 1960s, over the course of the twentieth century both racial prejudice and inept government efforts to help blacks made them, if anything, more dependent on government than they had been in Washington’s time. And as taxpayer money poured into efforts supposed to help black America, a large, greedy class of hustlers and pro-government flacks arose and took control of black Americans’ leadership.

Individual black Americans fought on, however, following (knowingly or otherwise) the prescription laid down by Washington decades earlier, making themselves so valuable to society that the remaining racial prejudice in American society could not hold them down.

Two of these are in the news now.

The comedian and actor Bill Cosby has increasingly come under attack from the leftist black establishment for his comments and speeches criticizing black Americans for not living up to the responsibilities required of those who would achieve personal success in a free society. The previously mentioned Atlantic Monthly article (aptly subtitled “The Audacity of Bill Cosby’s black conservatism”) outlined the conflict:

The split between Cosby and critics such as Dyson mirrors not only America’s broader conservative/liberal split but black America’s own historic intellectual divide. Cosby’s most obvious antecedent is Booker T. Washington. At the turn of the 20th century, Washington married a defense of the white South with a call for black self-reliance and became the most prominent black leader of his day. He argued that southern whites should be given time to adjust to emancipation; in the meantime, blacks should advance themselves not by voting and running for office but by working, and ultimately owning, the land.

There was much more to Washington’s philosophy than agrarianism, however, and Cosby has increasingly expressed the vision in recent speeches, as noted in the Atlantic article:

“Men, if you want to win, we can win,” Cosby said [at a summer 2007 speech in Detroit]. “We are not a pitiful race of people. We are a bright race, who can move with the best. But we are in a new time, where people are behaving in abnormal ways and calling it normal.… When they used to come into our neighborhoods, we put the kids in the basement, grabbed a rifle, and said, ‘By any means necessary.’

“I don’t want to talk about hatred of these [white] people,” he continued. “I’m talking about a time when we protected our women and protected our children. Now I got people in wheelchairs, paralyzed. A little girl in Camden, jumping rope, shot through the mouth. Grandmother saw it out the window. And people are waiting around for Jesus to come, when Jesus is already within you.” . . .

He was preaching from the book of black self-reliance, a gospel that he has spent the past four years carrying across the country in a series of events that he bills as “call-outs.” “My problem,” Cosby told the audience, “is I’m tired of losing to white people. When I say I don’t care about white people, I mean let them say what they want to say. What can they say to me that’s worse than what their grandfather said?”

From Birmingham to Cleveland and Baltimore, at churches and colleges, Cosby has been telling thousands of black Americans that racism in America is omnipresent but that it can’t be an excuse to stop striving. As Cosby sees it, the antidote to racism
is not rallies, protests, or pleas, but strong families and communities. Instead of focusing on some abstract notion of equality, he argues, blacks need to cleanse their culture, embrace personal responsibility, and reclaim the traditions that fortified them in the past. Driving Cosby’s tough talk about values and responsibility is a vision starkly different from Martin Luther King’s gauzy, all-inclusive dream: it’s an America of competing powers, and a black America that is no longer content to be the weakest of the lot.

Politics, Cosby notes, is not the answer. (Are you listening, Barack Obama? Cosby does not think so.) The Atlantic story recalls Cosby’s speech at the 2004 NAACP awards:

He began by noting that although civil-rights activists had opened the door for black America, young people today, instead of stepping through, were stepping backward. “No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband,” he told the crowd. “No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child.”

There was cheering as Cosby went on. Perhaps sensing that he had the crowd, he grew looser. “The lower-economic and lower-middle-economic people are not holding their end in this deal,” he told the audience.

Cosby disparaged activists who charge the criminal-justice system with racism. “These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake,” Cosby said. “Then we all run out and are outraged: ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, ‘If you get caught with it, you’re going to embarrass your mother.’”

Then he attacked African American naming traditions, and the style of dress among young blacks: “Ladies and gentlemen, listen to these people. They are showing you what’s wrong … What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans. They don’t know a damned thing about Africa—with names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed, and all that crap, and all of them are in jail.” About then, people began to walk out of the auditorium and cluster in the lobby. There was still cheering, but some guests milled around and wondered what had happened. Some thought old age had gotten the best of Cosby. The mood was one of shock.

The reaction of the black leadership and white leftists was the predictable firestorm of denials and contempt. In the overall black community, however, the reaction was much more positive. As The Heartland Institute’s Lee Walker has noted, black Americans in fact have an inherent conservatism, with which Cosby’s speech resonated greatly.

The author of the Atlantic Monthly article on Cosby ultimately sides with the elitists, dismissing Cosby’s claims and Washington’s philosophy, saying they are based on racial self-hatred and belief in false myths about whether blacks can overcome institutional racism that the author says pervades America society.

Yet the very success of the Atlantic Monthly author himself, not to mention that of Cosby, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Will Smith, Robert Johnson, and countless other less-famous black Americans belies that notion. Cosby is right.

Perhaps the effort of former congressman J. C. Watts, a black Republican and solid classical liberal/Reagan conservative, will help bring that message to black Americans. As AP notes, Watts is starting a cable TV news network pitched toward black Americans:

Black Television News Channel, scheduled to launch in 2009, will provide "original news programming with a distinctly African-American perspective," according to a news release. It recently announced a multiyear agreement with Comcast Corp. . . .

The news release said BTNC expects to be added to Comcast systems in key markets for black audiences such as Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Atlanta and Baltimore.

This endeavor is a great example of the entrepreneurship recommended by Booker T. Washington and other wise leaders. If it reflects Watts’ values and ideas (which are similar to those expressed  increasingly by Bill Cosby in recent years), the Black Television News Channel will be a worthy and welcome addition to the American culture, not just black America.