Working-class men need to come together as they did back in 1879

I understood the depth of it first at a friend's 21st birthday party in college. Somebody raised a glass to celebrate him. Then another raised his and, before it reached his shoulder, tipped it.

He poured libations for the ones who did not make it. Shot, or sent away, before the rest of us got to college. In a room of nothing but young Black and Latino men, we all joined in.

A Latino friend from childhood, hiding from his own gang the last time I saw him. My best friend, Black, locked up for taking sunglasses from a Goodwill. A Filipino buddy shot dead that summer over a drug deal, folks said.

Splash. Splash. Splash.

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Then a friend lifted his glass and toasted the plain fact that one more of us had lived to 21.

That cut me like a knife. In the richest country on Earth we were congratulating a Black man for breathing past his birthday.

That grief runs deep in our community. But it floats on deeper American water.

Not long after, my mind raced through every young man I knew who was suffering or gone. Among them, White friends whose father killed himself when we were teenagers, after the plant let him go.

Last week I promised you numbers on the crisis facing our nation's men. Here are a few.

Start with work. About 7 million American men between 25 and 54 are neither working nor looking for a job. More than one in 10. Every recovery of the last 50 years has left that share higher.

Then violence, which wears two extreme faces. In 2023 Black men were murdered, usually by other Black men, at roughly eight times the rate of white men. Meanwhile white men killed themselves at nearly twice the rate of Black men.

Then prison. America locks up more of its people than almost any nation on earth. Here is what nobody says. Count white Americans alone and they are still locked up at several times the rate of Canada, Germany or Japan.

This is a national problem, far bigger than any one community.

And yet we stay a house divided. Divide and conquer is the oldest game in America. The British brought it here to keep the king rich. The Revolution should have killed it. It did not, because it works just as well at helping the rich get richer.

Whenever working people have reason to stand together, somebody pits them against each other. Dr. King named it in Montgomery in 1965. Borrowing from historian C. Vann Woodward, he called segregation a strategy to keep the masses divided and labor cheap.

After that party I went to my grandmother's house and laid the burden on her table.

Her grandfather was Edward David Bland, born enslaved in Virginia in 1848. He was 16 when he walked out of slavery in the last days of the war, and he learned to make shoes.

Then he went into politics at the worst moment imaginable. Reconstruction was over, the troops sent home, the men who once ran the Confederacy taking it back with rifles.

In trouble together

He did the arithmetic anyway. Poor white farmers wanted the same free schools his people wanted. Together they were a majority. Apart they canceled each other out.

So he pushed for a deal with the unlikeliest partner in Virginia, a railroad magnate and former Confederate general named William Mahone. In 1879, Bland stood before his own people and made the case. He won them over.

They called themselves Readjusters, and they swept into power. In a few short years they abolished the whipping post, repealed the poll tax and funded schools for every child. Virginia had 415 Black teachers in 1879. Soon it had 1,588.

Then, in Danville, on Nov. 3, 1883, after a circular full of lies about Black rule swept the town, white gunmen killed at least five people, four of them Black. Three days later, white supremacists took back the legislature. The oldest trick, right on time.

Still, they had governed four years in the old capital of the Confederacy.

The men in trouble today are in trouble together. The white man in the hollowed-out mill town and the Black man on the South Side want the same thing. A better future for their children.

They are not each other's problem. Nobody is coming to tell them so.

Bland did not wait for anyone. He did the math, organized, and made it real.

The old Readjuster arithmetic still works. Divided we cancel out our children's dreams. Together our families are the majority that can make them real. Let's get to work.

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.

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