To each his own reservation

AMERICA JOHN GRAHAM

Washington—Not ten miles from here, near a little Maryland village called Potomac, an extraordinary estate is being planned. Sixty-seven houses will be built, each with its two acres and each costing at least $200,000, or rather more than £80,000. A perfectly ordinary country fence will mark the two-mile perimeter. Inside this fence, however, there will be another fence, this time made of wire mesh, and inside this second screen, tucked away in the shrubbery, will be a host of elec- tronic sensors.

This piece of real-estate fantasy, which seems more germane to spy fiction than to the real world, is nothing to do with the Federal government. It is unconnected with any Federal agency or with the military establishment. It is not intended as a compound for Russian diplomats, and as far as I know the CIA is not involved. It is intended simply for private indi- viduals, ordinary people with $200,000 to spend and a fortress mentality.

Fortress is the key. The idea is to 'provide maximum security for residents during this crime-ridden era.' If you live in one of these houses, you will have to carry a registration card. Anyone who visits you will be stopped by guards at the gate, while they telephone you to see if you give permission for the visi- tor to enter the enclosure. 'We will try to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to get in who doesn't belong,' a lawyer for the de- velopers is quoted as saying. `We are going to give people safety, something they can't get any place else. We will make it as burglary-proof, as trespass-proof and as vandalism-proof as possible.'

Well, electronic sensors are only modern- day drawbridges, and there's nothing wrong with a little privacy. Moreover, at $200,000 a time this is hardly likely to start a trend. But beneath this extravagant yen for security lies a deeply disturbing fact: in this enormous country, the least densely populated in the western world except for Canada, people are finding it harder and harder to get somewhere they want to live in, somewhere to feel free and safe. They move from the cities to the suburbs, from the suburbs to the outer suburbs, from the outer suburbs to the coun- try. Hence this strange development in the pleasant pastureland of the Maryland country- side.

Something equally strange, and much more important, is happening in the cities, and no- body knows why. For years, the city popula- tion of America has been growing. Between 1960 and 1966, for instance, it grew by about a quarter of a million people a year. Sud- denly, in the last two years, it has started to decline, and at a very fast pace. The loss is 400,000 people in each of the last two years, and this has wiped out the gains of the pre- vious five years at least.

The demographic history of America is one of the most fascinating of twentieth century studies. The negro migration from south to north, for instance, which began in the First World War, was given a sharp prod by the mechanisation of the southern cotton planta- tions and went on right through the Second World War and the 1950s, must be counted among the great human movements of modern times, both in its size and in its results. In every case the aim was the city, and primarily the great cities of the northern states. The rush to concrete intensified after the Second World War. Between 1950 and 1966, of the total growth in the black population of America, the staggering figure of 98 per cent occurred in metropolitan areas. The black man was be- coming almost exclusively urban. In what is called 'the inner city,' or 'central cities,' the in- flux was 370,000 blacks a year.

A shorter-term reverse migration was taking place among the whites, who were leaving the cities for the suburbs at 140,000 a year. The growth of the white population in metropolitan areas between 1950 and 1966 was only 22 per cent. In other words, almost 80 per cent of the increase in whites was taking place in the suburbs or the country. This naturally raised the black percentage of the total city popula- tion, as did the fact that the blacks began to have a higher birth rate from 1950 on.

Such, then, was the pattern; but in the past two years it has changed out of all recog- nition. Whites are still leaving the cities, but at a vastly quicker rate: half a million a year. Blacks are still going into the cities, but at a vastly slower rate, little more than 100,000 a year. The black immigration has, in fact, slowed even more dramatically than the white exodus has quickened. All my figures are taken from a Professor Miller, who is head of the population division of the Bureau of the Census, and he holds that net black immi- gration into the cities may actually have stopped, that the 100,000 figure of the last two years can be attributed largely to natural increase.

But there is another wrinkle on the demo- graphic map. Blacks, too, are moving to the suburbs, as they find life in the inner city in- tolerable. Up to 1966 this movement was about 20,000 a year, nothing very noticeable; but in 1967 and 1968 it swelled to 200,000 a year, almost half as many blacks escaping as whites. When this was first noticed, it offered en- couragement to all who were looking for some palliative to America's racial and urban diseases. 'At last,' people said, 'we'll get the blacks and the whites living together in cosy suburban bourgeoisie, each in their detached houses, with green lawns and two cars in the garage'—integration by antimacassars and elec- tric-powered grass-cutters.

Alas, not so. This month, exactly a year after the publication of the Kerner report on civil disorders, another independent study, headed by such highly respected men as John Gardner and John Lindsay, has filed a pro- gress report. It has turned over the stones of metropolitan America and found some un- pleasant insect life beneath. Certainly, many blacks who used to live in the heart of the city have gone to a more prosperous existence in surroundings ideologically recognisable, from Westchester County to Teddington. But there has been precious little integration. In some places semi-rural negro enclaves have sprouted. All too often the move has simply shifted the slum-ghetto from one area in the metropolitan complex to another.

'The suburban slum-ghetto,' says the report, 'is becoming a visible, although unmeasured, phenomenon in many large metropolitan areas, particularly those around the older cities.' This is not the root of the racial trouble, but it is perhaps the biggest single impediment to any solution. Blacks and whites simply do not see much of each other because for the most part they live in different areas. When blacks do move to what is traditionally a white preserve, they form their own enclave just like a white residential bloc in an African city, say Nairobi. The Kerner commission recog- nised this a year ago and documented it. During the last twelve months Messrs Gard- ner, Lindsay and company found that 'the physical distance between the places where blacks and whites lived did not diminish . . . and threatens to increase with population growth.'

Nor is there any noticeable narrowing of the gap between the perceptions and experiences of blacks and whites about American society. Any survey you care to take points this up with astonishing clarity. One recent and responsible poll, for instance, found that 48 per cent of whites thought civil disorders were planned; only 18 per cent of blacks did; 64 per cent of the whites thought the disorders had hurt 'the cause of the negro rights'; the corresponding black percentage was 23. It matters not for the sake of this argument who is right- or wrong; what matters is that black and white are poles apart in their ordinary thinking about what goes on.

The gut question is whether this polarisation will become a permanent American institution. There are forces on both sides which favour this. Most people scoff at talk of black separatism. The separatists are a small minority of blacks, they say, and so they are. This month's report found no evidence that any more than a small minority 'was prepared to follow militant leaders towards separatism- or the tactical use of violence.' This minority. however, is extremely vocal and therefore has an impact well beyond its numbers, especially on the young. And very many young blacks are out of work, able and ready to listen to anyone. and living on the streets. In 1967 a third of negro teenagers were unemployed, and even though this had improved to 27 per cent last year, that is still a shatteringly high figure. And in case anyone scoffs •at the significance of this, remember that the two age groups most responsible for crime in America are fifteen year olds and sixteen year olds.

These are the people who live a jungle life in the city centres, with little apparent hope of escape. It was their condition that prompted one of the Kerner commission's predictions, a prediction so well put that it deserves repeti- tion: 'If the negro population as a whole developed even stronger feelings of being "penned in" and discriminated against, many of its members might come to support not only riots, but the rebellion now being preached by only a handful. Large-scale violence, fol- lowed by white retaliation, could follow. This spiral could quite conceivably lead to a kind of urban apartheid with semi-martial law in many major cities, enforced residence of negroes in segregated areas, and a drastic re- duction in personal freedom for all Ameri- cans, particularly negroes.'

Personally, I would consider it a reduction in personal freedom if my friends had to stop at a checkpoint before coming to see me. And as for the tactical use of violence, if I were a young militant I wonder what I would pick as a target for my petrol bombs? Well, not ten miles from Washington, in the rolling horse country of Maryland