vancement. The Supreme Court in 1980 ruled that
Congress could impose racial quotas to counteract
discrimination against African Americans in federal
and state laws. Other court rulings supported affir-
mative action as a way to counteract years of racial
discrimination. Some African Americans improved
their social economic standing significantly, as the
1980’s witnessed the expansion of a robust, African
American middle class across the United States. De-
spite these social and economic advances, persistent
challenges for many African Americans remained,
including inadequate health care access, discrimina-
tion in housing, and high levels of unemployment
and poverty.
Crime rates continued to escalate across the
United States, and their effects were magnified in
poor African American communities. As a result, ra-
cial tensions also increased during the 1980’s. On
July 10, 1980, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission re-
leased a study indicating that police brutality was still
a serious problem and a major cause of urban tur-
moil. During the 1980’s, the Ku Klux Klan increased
their white supremacist activities in the South, en-
gaging in more marches and cross burnings. That
pattern was followed throughout the country, as
hate groups became more active and more such
groups sprang into being.
Crime associated with the African American com-
munity was exemplified by two particularly high-
profile incidents. First, the city of Philadelphia
attempted to evict members of the radical group
MOVE from a home in an African American residen-
tial neighborhood. Authorities dropped a bomb on
MOVE’s rooftop bunker, killing eleven people and
destroying more than sixty row homes, at a loss esti-
mated at more than $8 million. In a second high-
profile case that dominated national news for sev-
eral weeks, Bernhard Goetz, a white man traveling
alone on a New York subway, was approached by four
African American men. Later claiming that the men
threatened him, Goetz shot all four, paralyzing one.
After much delay and many lawsuits, Goetz was ac-
quitted of attempted murder and assault. The polar-
izing reaction to the Goetz shooting was one of the
many stark racial incidents that marked major cities
in the 1980’s.
Impact The 1980’s were a mixed decade for Afri-
can Americans. Many saw their lives improve, but
many others remained trapped by persisting institu-
tional structures of racism. The success stories were
often used to argue against the need for affirmative
action and other programs designed to eliminate
those structures. Moreover, as personal statements
of racism became less common among whites (ei-
ther through a decrease in the sentiment or through
a decrease in its public acceptability), the impor-
tance of institutional racism in the absence of racist
intent was questioned.
During the 1980’s, political conservatism in-
creased as a force in American public discourse as
well as in electoral politics. To a certain extent, this
conservatism entailed direct racial discrimination.
More often, however, race was used to symbolize
class. The decade witnessed an increasing gap be-
tween the haves and have-nots, and discussions of
poverty focused with great frequency on poor Afri-
can Americans, who, while a significant proportion
of the poor, were not in the majority of that category.
Nevertheless, urban poverty, unemployment, and
welfare were often discussed, whether implicitly or
explicitly, in racial terms, and public attitudes to-
ward race and class became mutually imbricated.
As Spike Lee pointed out inDo the Right Thing
(1989), however, African Americans received a dis-
proportionate amount of attention, not only as sym-
bols of impoverishment but also as symbols of suc-
cess. Many of the most successful cultural icons
of the decade, including Michael Jackson, Eddie
Murphy, Magic Johnson, and Oprah Winfrey, were
African Americans. As a result, many Americans
adopted the odd double standard evinced by the
character of Pino in Lee’s film: They were hostile to-
ward African Americans as a group while adulating
individual African American performers and sports
heroes. Thus, both as positive and as negative fig-
ures, African Americans were featured prominently
in the public discourse of the decade.Further Reading
George, Nelson.Post-soul Nation: The Explosive, Con-
tradictor y, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980’s as Experi-
enced by African Americans. New York: Viking
Books, 2004. Offers a year-by-year accounting of
the major political, sports, and entertainment
events that had an impact on African Americans
in the 1980’s.
Hampton, Henry, Steve Fayer, and Sara Flynn.Voices
from Freedom: An Oral Histor y of the Civil Rights
Movement from the 1950’s Through the 1980’s. New30 African Americans The Eighties in America