The Old Kinship

Thompson headed north. Good jobs were north. Their listings in the back of Ebony magazine beckoned young men. He was aiming for New York but got as far as Washington. He became a bus driver in 1966. A few years later, he and his wife moved to Prince George's, where they raised three daughters and he put in decades on the clock.

"Look here, working hard is the basis for everything," Thompson said. "I mean overtime, Christmas, New Year's, holidays -- the whole nine yards." Work was dignity and manhood. It was the sure, quiet rebuttal to the nasty things whites said about you. It is Thompson's most unassailable belief, incubated in segregation and stoked inch by inch -- his brother had polio, and it was Thompson who helped around the house when his mother became a single parent. He worked odd jobs as a teenager. Then he became a daddy. He provided for his family. "I felt good," Thompson said. "I still do."

Union and government jobs in Washington held incredible appeal for young African Americans during the mid-1960s. The major pieces of civil rights legislation had been passed. Historical momentum and moral authority were on their side, and that opening helped swell the ranks of black men in Washington from 196,257 in 1960 to 245,198 in 1970, a 25 percent increase.

That's partly why more older blacks feel strongly that if you do what you're supposed to, despite discrimination, you control your fate, said John L. Jackson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. It's a sentiment that echoes the findings of a Washington Post poll last spring showing that a majority of black men believe that their collective problems are the result of individual shortcomings, not structural barriers -- this even as a majority acknowledged experiencing racism. But Jackson points out that it was a self-selected group that picked up and came north. Like immigrants in their own country, they already had the fortitude to do well. And landing a union job helped guarantee safety, health care and regular salary increases.

Today, it's harder to find a job that pays a high school graduate $80,000. Black men compete with immigrants for the kinds of low-skilled jobs -- landscaping, construction and cleanup -- they once had a lock on. Most service-sector jobs don't pay enough to raise a family. And the educational system doesn't prepare black men for the new world of work from grades K through 12. Community was often a balm against internalizing racism, Jackson said, but it was also easier to spot racism "when there was a sign that said 'whites only.' "

In some ways, Thompson recognizes that younger men face tough challenges: fewer good jobs, poor schools. But he can't shake the belief that a black man should strive, and overcome anyway, the way he did. Thompson is deeply contemptuous of the men who he says have lost their souls. "This not wanting to work, not taking care of your responsibilities, that's not something we did," he said.

* * *

'We Need a Leader'

By 12:30 on a Wednesday afternoon, Thompson, Garrison and Hodges had put in more than two hours of bowling with the ABC league in Marlow Heights, one of the six leagues to which the members of Team 33 belong. Afterwards, they met Mitchell for lunch at Ruby Tuesday, and the men vented in a bygone slang.

Things have changed. Gotten expensive. Cats now don't want to work.

"I got cousins who wouldn't take a job as a pie taster in a pastry factory," Garrison bellowed. He grew up as one of eight siblings in Montgomery, Ala. During the 1955 bus boycott, his mother sometimes walked more than a dozen miles round-trip to work. He was walking with a cousin once, and whites driving by threw urine on them.

"Everybody tries to blame racism," Thompson said.

"But prejudice can't stop education," Garrison added.