Cook: The more, the mightier, the black middle class

David Cook
David Cook

In the past several years, city leaders, planners and thinkers have made a concerted and strategic effort to recruit and retain certain groups of people to Chattanooga.

Like outdoor athletes.

photo David Cook

Artists, hipsters and the creative class.

Gig-folks and tech wizards.

Entrepreneurs and start-up hopefuls.

Bringing such smart, attractive and positively-disruptive professionals to town is a way to add to the breadth and depth of Chattanooga life. The more, the merrier.

It is now time -- past time -- to begin the intentional recruitment of another group, one able to do as much, if not more, to enlighten and enrich our city.

Black college graduates.

We need black college graduates.

By recruiting and retaining young, black, college-educated professionals, Chattanooga would be able to amplify and bolster the black community here. The more, the mightier.

Yet more importantly, by increasing the number of black college graduates here -- let's say 85 percent more by 2018 -- we would then be able to expand and grow one faction of our city that is neglected and nearly non-existent.

A black middle class.

We need a black middle class.

The African-American middle class once stood on sturdier economic ground during our industrial years; nowadays, poverty is the new black here in Chattanooga.

It's hard to reach middle class doing service work. Hard to build a stable family life waiting tables or cleaning hotel rooms. Much of our VW success is irrelevant for some folks; the auto plant might as well have located on the moon. In fact, some neighborhoods have regressed -- become poorer -- since VW's arrival.

A black middle class seems unable to emerge, almost like the crimped end of a hose. We have a prison pipeline and an unemployment pipeline but no prosperity pipeline for young black Chattanoogans.

"If there is not an organic African-American middle class in Chattanooga, then perhaps leaders should focus on luring graduates of Spelman, Howard, Tennessee State, and Jackson State with low-interest loans," Dr. Ken Chilton said.

Monday night, Chilton -- the former head of Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies who's now teaching at Tennessee State University -- delivered "The State of Black Chattanooga" during M.L. King Week ceremonies.

He spoke about the lack of a black middle class, but he also asked the audience a most important question.

"What does success in Chattanooga's African-American community look like?" he asked.

Such an answer must be authored by black leaders, both those familiar (accepted by the white community) and the radical (those not.)

"The white elite lacks the expertise to effectively plan for low-income blacks," Chilton said. "I don't think it's intentional. They are good at creating places for hikers, kayakers, cyclists, artists and hipsters, but they don't know what it takes to lure young college-educated African-Americans."

If most of the halls of power are populated by white Chattanoogans, then there must be some downward sharing of power that creates space for black Chattanoogans to safely create their own plan for success and then utilize the resources, connections and policies already so available to white Chattanooga.

Yes, it's messy. (Look no further than this column, written by a white man who spoke to a white professor about the black middle class.)

But it's also just.

After all, we have intentionally encouraged Chattanooga to become a great place for outdoorism.

Chattanooga, a great place for entrepreneurs. For innovators.

But Chattanooga a great place to be black?

Until such a sentence becomes more than satire or insult, then we aren't really a full city at all.

Contact David Cook at dcook@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6329. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter at DavidCookTFP.

Upcoming Events