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Ellis Cose was a longtime columnist and contributing editor for Newsweek magazine, the former chairman of the editorial board of the New York Daily News, and is the creator and director of Renewing American Democracy, an initiative of the University of Southern California, Northwestern, and Long Island University. He began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education, and columnist and chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today. Cose has appeared on the Today show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC World News, Good Morning America, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the University of California, among others, and has won numerous journalism awards. Cose is the author of The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America, Bone to Pick, The Envy of the World, the bestselling The Rage of a Privileged Class, and several other books.

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From a venerated and bestselling voice on American life comes a contemporary look at the decline of black rage; the demise of white guilt; and the intergenerational shifts in how blacks and whites view, and interact with, each other

In the heady aftermath of President Obama's election, conventional wisdom suggested that the bitter, angry, and destructive elements of discrimination were ebbing at last and America was becoming a postracial nation. But with this dawning age that promised so much came shifting demographics and a newfound seat of rage in the polarizing Tea Party movement, even as black optimism gained ground, giving rise to questions about assumed truths concerning race in America.

Combining the talents earned from a lifetime in journalism with the insights and thoughtfulness of a close observer of the American experience, renowned author Ellis Cose offers a fresh, original appraisal of our nation at this extraordinary time, tracking the diminishment of black anger and investigating the "generational shifting of the American mind." Weaving material from myriad interviews as well as two large and ambitious surveys that he conducted—one of black Harvard MBAs and the other of graduates of A Better Chance, a program offering elite educational opportunities to thousands of young people of color since 1963—Cose offers an invaluable portrait of contemporary America that attempts to make sense of what a people do when the dream, for some, is finally within reach as one historical era ends and another begins.

In short, The End of Anger is not just about blacks but about America—its past and its hoped-for future—and may well be the most important book dealing with race to be published in recent decades.

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The End of Anger

Ecco

Chapter One

For centuries, black Americans lied to white Americans
It was a matter of simple survival. Slaves did not speak in
anger to their masters. Yes, America saw slave rebellions?the most
famous was led by Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia, in 1831.
But rage was generally held deep within. So most whites, during
the years of slavery and for decades thereafter, believed that blacks
were content. ?They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous
to the black slave,? wrote W. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk,
published in 1903. But the truth, said DuBois, could be found in
the ?Sorrow Songs,? the Negro spirituals: ?They are the music of
an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of
death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world.?
Blacks could not forever hide their anger in spirituals and
whispered resentment. In 1940, as the war against fascism in
Europe threatened to engulf America, Richard Wright published
Native Son, the story of a black man, Bigger Thomas, who is filled
with rancor and rage. After World War II, as black Americans
increasingly equated Jim Crow with Nazism and black soldiers
who had fought for whites? freedom abroad were humiliated at
home, black anger spilled fully out into the open. Ever since
then, whenever African Americans have spoken in public about
our experience in this country, anger has been a recurrent and
dominant theme.
?There are . . . as many ways of coping . . . as there are black men
in the world, but no black man can hope ever to be entirely liberated
from this internal warfare?rage, dissembling, and contempt
having inevitably accompanied his first realization of the power of
white men,? wrote James Baldwin in ?Stranger in the Village? in
1953. He returned to the theme in 1955 in Notes of a Native Son.
?There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his
blood?one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or
surrendering to it,? he wrote.
Black Americans are no longer fuming?or at least, not anything
like we once were. The angry black man?Bigger Thomas
and his ilk?has become marginalized, irrelevant, passé. In this era,
public anger (fringe kooks notwithstanding) rarely has an explicitly
racial edge. We are witnessing, in short, a fundamental shift in the
nature of the black-white relationship in America, under girded by
a major evolution in some core American assumptions. As white
racism has become unacceptable, unremitting black anger has
become inappropriate?a huge change from where things stood
only a generation or two ago.

As psychologist Linda Anderson observed,
Fifteen or twenty years ago, I think our own ambivalence and
anger?built-up rage?really was more prominent than it is
now. I think we?re at a place where those of us who are positioned
. . . to make change and acquire wealth, to a certain
extent?there?s no time for it. We are working so hard to take
advantage of the window of opportunity [created by] being in
this culture where we have Obama in place.

In Black Rage (1968), psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price
M. Cobbs argued that anger was a natural and pervasive reaction to
the condition of blacks in America. ?Aggression leaps from wounds
inflicted and ambitions spiked,? they wrote in their book, published
just four months after Martin Luther King?s assassination.
It grows out of oppression and capricious cruelty. . . . People
bear all they can and, if required, bear even more. But if they
are black in present-day American society they have been asked
to shoulder too much. They have had all they can stand. They
will be harried no more. Turning from their tormentors, they
are filled with rage. . . . We believe that the black masses will rise
with a simple and eloquent demand to which new leaders must
give tongue. They will say to America simply: GET OFF OUR
BACKS!

In December 1993, Colin Ferguson emptied two clips from
a semiautomatic pistol into commuters on a Long Island Railroad?

killing six people and injuring nineteen others. Notes found in his pocket explained his action as a result of the rage he felt as a black man. A month or so later, I returned from an overseas trip to scores of phone calls from reporters seeking my comments
on the bloodbath. To my astonishment, they informed me that
Ferguson?s attorney, William Kunstler, had cited me as an authority
on his ?black rage defense? and urged them to call me. My
credential was having recently published The Rage of a Privileged
Class. The book had nothing to do with demented gunmen, but it
did speak to an anger?rooted in racial slights, lack of respect, and
generally shabby treatment?that was rarely voiced but often felt
by middle-class black Americans.

Vernon Baker was one such American, though I was not familiar
with him when I wrote Rage. At a White House ceremony in
January 1997, the former second lieutenant received the Medal
of Honor from President Bill Clinton. The award was for heroics
during World War II. During an epic battle on a hilltop in northern
Italy, Baker took out four nests of enemy soldiers. Of the 1.2 million
black soldiers who served in the military during World War II,
Baker was the only one to receive the medal while still alive. Six
others were honored posthumously at the same ceremony during
which Baker received his medal.

Shortly before accepting the honor, Baker, who was living in
Idaho, spoke with Washington Post columnist Milton Milloy and
confided that the white commander of his segregated unit had fled
from the battle, saying that he would return with reinforcements.
Instead, he abandoned the black battalion on the hill and told his
superiors that the men had been ?wiped out.? That commander,
reported Milloy, was recommended for the Medal of Honor, while
Baker?s unit was written up as ?sluggish.?
?That was the story of our lives,? said Baker. ?We used to call
ourselves the ?promotion pool? for white officers.?
?The main feeling I had during that time was anger. I was
an angry, angry young man,? said Baker. He repeated the

sentiment in numerous interviews, including one with a New York
Times reporter: ?We were all angry. But we had a job to do, and
we did it.?

In his 1997 memoir, Lasting Valor, Baker writes scathingly of
the military?s disdain for black soldiers, who were considered ?too
worthless to lead ourselves. The Army decided we needed super-
vision from white Southerners, as if war was plantation work and
fighting Germans was picking cotton.?
Elsewhere in the book he observes: ?Our commanders made it
clear that they considered black soldiers failures, no matter what
we did, and that they would ensure history reflected that. It was
difficult to tell who the bigger racists were?the commanders
behind us or the Germans in front of us.?
Baker describes a black sergeant, Napoleon Belk, who reminded
him of himself:
Under that dandy figure was an angry black man ready to raise
his fists at the...