Weighted with a heritage of moral iniquity from our past history, hard pressed in the economic world by foreign immigrants and native prejudice, hated here, despised there and pitied everywhere, our one haven of refuge is ourselves.
W. E. B. Dubois
LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Only a few bridges link the worlds of the black minister from Louisville's blighted West End and the white minister from the affluent East Side -- and the traffic generally flows one way.
Children from the predominantly black West End have been bused to schools in the predominantly white eastern suburbs of Jefferson County since 1975. While old housing is allowed to decay in the West End, a steady flow of development on the East Side is luring away those blacks with the means to move.
Those bridges -- built in the name of integration -- are draining the life out of the black community and must be destroyed, says the Rev. Kevin Cosby, 33, the forceful black minister of St. Stephen Baptist Church. His words are inspiring to some, blasphemous to others.
His actions -- leading a successful fight against involuntary busing and advocating black self-preservation at all costs -- have thrust him into the center of one of this city's most heated debates and pushed him to the forefront of a growing movement away from integration by U.S. black leaders.
"I think the civil rights community is out of touch with what's happening," says Mr. Cosby, pounding his fist into his hand. "We went from segregation to desegregation to integration to assimilation to disintegration. Integration meant the disintegration of black institutions."
Once held up as the most effective strategy for achieving racial harmony, integration now is being blamed by some for stealing away the black community's most promising scholars, artists and intellectuals and thereby minimizing the influence of its churches, newspapers, businesses and families.
Longtime civil-rights warriors -- black and white -- remain unswayed. Still vivid in their minds are picket lines and jail cells they endured in order to defeat legalized desegregation in the 1950s, and they refuse to turn back the clock.
"I think a portion of the black community needs [Mr. Cosby's] tonic," says the Rev. Jim Chatham, the white minister of Highland Presbyterian Church in Louisville's affluent eastern suburbs. "But the fact is that the people he is leading need to be able to get along in an integrated society."
Most of the debate has centered on schools. In recent years, students in many of the South's predominantly black public universities have demonstrated to protest proposed mergers with predominantly white universities.
Officials in Norfolk, Va., and Oklahoma City, with the support of black parents, have stopped busing children. Other school systems, from New York to Maryland to Milwaukee, have developed programs specifically for black children.
It is a controversy among blacks that has recently re-emerged in pulpits across the country, as blacks grow increasingly frustrated by the disproportionate amount of violence, drug abuse, poverty and unemployment in their neighborhoods. In the midst of the fray stand Louisville's St. Stephen Baptist Church and Mr. Cosby.
'Love that empowers people'
Mr. Cosby lived in a predominantly white neighborhood in east Louisville but grew up in St. Stephen Baptist Church. His grandfather was minister for 44 years. His mother headed the music ministry until her death 21 years ago.
"It was a place where I saw black people supporting other black people," Mr. Cosby says. "High expectations were set for me, and I learned to love myself. That is the kind of love that empowers people."
When he took over the congregation 13 years ago, Mr. Cosby found his childhood haven surrounded by ramshackle houses, empty industrial plants, liquor stores, pawnshops and prostitutes. He points out tarnished jewels of yesteryear hidden in the decay: Once-profitable clothing stores, restaurants, schools and banks are now boarded up.
He hopes to restore their vibrancy, and in an impressive first step his 1,500-member congregation has built a $1 million Family Life Center. It includes a basketball court with lighted scoreboard and sound system. There is a day-care facility with plush cribs; a music center with organs, pianos and drums; a room for weight lifting and aerobics.
On Friday nights, there are movies for teen-agers and social functions for singles.
He takes great satisfaction in pointing out that no government or corporate dollars went into its construction.
institutions.
"It is important to show that we can do this without white folks," says Mr. Cosby. "I got tired of spending my money as a guest in their institutions."
He says separate can be equal -- and even empowering -- for blacks if a majority would commit to the cause. Mr. Cosby recites black nationalist philosophies of W. E. B. Dubois and Malcolm X, who called on blacks to stop equating success with inclusion in predominantly white institutions and instead build institutions of their own.
Mr. Cosby's views pushed him into the center of a controversy when he announced his support of a "student assignment plan" proposed by the Jefferson County School Board, which oversees the metropolitan area's schools. The plan would dismantle the county's involuntary busing program -- which over the years has been praised for making Louisville's schools among the most desegregated in the country. The result, undoubtedly, would be segregated schools.
The issue ignited fiery arguments and raucous protests reminiscent of those in the 1960s. Some of those who opposed the plan called Mr. Cosby "the most dangerous element of the debate."
Lyman T. Johnson, 85, who is credited with leading the campaign that opened the University of Kentucky to black students, wrote in the Louisville Courier Journal: "Kevin Cosby has a talent for leadership . . . but if he wants to pull our people back into the ghetto, then he can go to hell."
But the "student assignment plan" was adopted. It is scheduled to begin in the fall.
"Black children do not need to sit next to white children to be successful students," he says.
Leaving the poor behind
It is Sunday morning. The congregation fills the Family Life Center's basketball gym and adjacent meeting rooms. Mr. Cosby greets his followers with a clenched fist, the "black power" sign of the 1960s.
A choir, wearing white-and-red robes, sings slave spirituals that stir the crowd into a frenzy. Then one person after another is brought to the front of the church to exemplify what can be achieved through black unity: a shy, recovering alcoholic who works as a janitor at the church performs a rousing rendition of "When the Saints Go Marching In"; a young journalist stands teary-eyed before the church and tells how his life has been filled with love since he began leading the church's mentoring program; and in celebration of Black History Month, the Rev. Brenda Brown-Groom speaks about the strength and beauty of blacks.
Later that day, Mr. Cosby is the keynote speaker at the Louisville Urban League's annual ecumenical service. He criticizes "integration maniacs" and, for a split second, the room falls silent.
"You-all didn't hear what I said?" he asks.
"We heard you, preacher," they chant. "Speak the truth."
Mr. Cosby goes on to say that through integration, racial barriers have been lowered just enough to allow the brightest in the black community to cross into "the promised land" of nice homes, nice cars, good-paying jobs and private schools.
"Far too many of professional blacks have assimilated and turned their backs on blacks in the city," he says, waving his finger toward Louisville's well-off suburbs. "They get in their Volvos, drive east and never look back on those in the city who are gang-banging and smoking crack.
"There's a sickness among 90 percent of black professionals who can't live among their own people," he added.
It is no surprise, then, that some of Mr. Cosby's most vocal critics are young professional blacks, as well as elderly civil rights leaders who say history has proven beyond a doubt that separate can never be equal.
Madeline Maupin-Hicks, a prominent Louisville attorney, insists that people like her should not have to "bear the brunt" of saving the black community. She says they should be able to buy houses wherever they please without feeling they are losing their identity.
Jim Hill, an attorney and professor at the University of Louisville, rejects Mr. Cosby's memories of how black neighborhoods and businesses thrived before segregation was outlawed. "Thriving -- when blacks had to ride in the backs of buses?" says Mr. Hill, who faced mobs as one of the first students bused in Louisville.
Forsaking integration
On the opposite side of town from St. Stephen, Mr. Chatham, the Presbyterian minister, says that Mr. Cosby too easily dismisses the gains of such blacks as Mr. Hill and Ms. Hicks.
"If we resegregate this society so that you have enclaves on one side of town and we have enclaves on the other, "you will see more burned crosses, and more grown boys in stupid white robes . . . and more prejudicial venom from both sides," he said.
But those enclaves still exist. Statistics from the 1990 census shows that many of the country's inner cities -- largely abandoned by whites and increasingly by middle-class blacks -- are as divided by race and economic status as they were 20 years ago.
For this reason, Mr. Cosby insists that it is time for blacks to stop waiting for whites to "get good religion" and to put aside the hope of true integration.