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Black America's happiest Decade Post-Civil Rights Movement

Black America's happiest Decade Post-Civil Rights Movement

  • 70's Decade

    Votes: 18 47.4%
  • 80's Decade

    Votes: 3 7.9%
  • 90's Decade

    Votes: 14 36.8%
  • 2000's Decade

    Votes: 1 2.6%
  • 2010's Decade

    Votes: 2 5.3%

  • Total voters
    38

Red Sonja

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Black America has had a share of ups and downs living in America post-Civil Rights, a bumpy road, a road of joy and pain but still a journey. Which decade do you think was the happiest decade for Black America.
 

Jeff Bezos

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It's between the 80s and 90s. In theory one would think it would be the 60s or 70s, but the things we had to fight through were still too ghastly to ignore like we do now (sometimes). That's not to say the 80s and 90s didn't have any of this (we're still dealing with racism and misogyny to this day), but I think our people got a moment to breathe and be a bit more freer despite a lot of it.

I don't think we were as happy/jubliant in the 2000s, 10s, and certainly not now.

I'll go with the 90s. The impact of ancestors and pioneers - especially in the music and fashion industries decades prior - finally culminated into a ton of success for other Black people. Black-owned businesses really flourished, there was an uptick in Black pride, education, and an emphasis on our roots and history. We were in a much more positive state.

Edit: Re-reading this, my post almost seems like I'm saying (in so many words) that racism/White supremacy and our troubles died after the 70s. That's not the case, I'm just having a hard time explaining my viewpoint.
 

AdoreMel

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This is tough.
70s was post CRM & there was cocaine/heroin, prostitution, gangs & unemployment going on.
80s: crack epidemic. Enough said
90s: crime bill & post-crack America
00s: recession
10s: just lame as hell

I'll be biased & say 70s. They had the I'm black & proud movement still going on. Also the beginning of black television/Hollywood which influenced black televisionof 80s-00s. Great music & fashion plus embrace of natural hair. Despite the cons, I'll say thats kind of freeing.
 

GiannaCubana

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You ask this question every week. The 70s, before the crack epidemic and after the Civil Rights movement.
 

Red Sonja

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This is tough.
70s was post CRM & there was cocaine/heroin, prostitution, gangs & unemployment going on.
80s: crack epidemic. Enough said
90s: crime bill & post-crack America
00s: recession
10s: just lame as hell

I'll be biased & say 70s. They had the I'm black & proud movement still going on. Also the beginning of black television/Hollywood which influenced black televisionof 80s-00s. Great music & fashion plus embrace of natural hair. Despite the cons, I'll say thats kind of freeing.

2010s the gentrified decade, no real black culture.
 

Red Sonja

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Yes. Also the increase of wanting "foreigns", scamming, otc/prescription drugs. Truly went downhill

It did not really affect us they way it has affected white Americans. What was our downfall was the gentirification which killed the black culture. They fact that college degrees don't have value, heck even a law degree is waste of time. The phase of hiring more foreigners over Americans.
 

AdoreMel

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It did not really affect us they way it has affected white Americans. What was our downfall was the gentirification which killed the black culture. They fact that college degrees don't have value, heck even a law degree is waste of time. The phase of hiring more foreigners over Americans.
True about it not being as much as yts but still seeing young blackkids doing codeine, xans & the like is sad to see & hip hop promoting said drugs is even worse. But I agree with gentrification & the aftermath of the recession being our downfall. College degrees don't have value anymore. There's hardly jobs out there degree or not while cost of living is increasing. As a NYer, I had witness family homes that's been passed down from generations to generations being bought out by big corps & dozed over to build those blah dystopian looking buildings. Then this pandemic in the early 20s decade happens...it's really going to take awhile to recover
 

GelilaBekele

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I live in LA so the 80s are a definite no. Gang violence and crack was on 1000. sh!t I guess my mom let me watch all those crazy movies bc I was living that life anyway. Babysitters sister was on crack begging the kids to let her in the house. SMH notes home from elementary school saying no BKs, No KSwiss. No red. No blue. Fights. Shooting after school. I would never let my son grow up like that. Side eying my parents right now.

90s was Rodney King. LA Riots.

2000 was ok for about 8 years before the financial crisis.
 

Red Sonja

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True about it not being as much as yts but still seeing young blackkids doing codeine, xans & the like is sad to see & hip hop promoting said drugs is even worse. But I agree with gentrification & the aftermath of the recession being our downfall. College degrees don't have value anymore. There's hardly jobs out there degree or not while cost of living is increasing. As a NYer, I had witness family homes that's been passed down from generations to generations being bought out by big corps & dozed over to build those blah dystopian looking buildings. Then this pandemic in the early 20s decade happens...it's really going to take awhile to recover
The millenial generation has been through 2 recessions so no doubt I think Black Americans will learn to be stronger and work to bring the community together. Black Americans can't afford disunity and they need to be more economic minded then ever. Black millenials need to throw away the ratchet culture and go back to being traditional people in order to thrive.
 
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The early 70s for me. Those were the best times in my life. My children were in college. I was newlywed and my husband opened up husband first business. There were still many black business around the community. My first grandchild grew up in this decade and was able to run, play and have fun without worrying too much about their safety. We had amazing music and concerts were cheap lol. Everyday was like a party. There were lots of black folks I’ve met or was friends with who were middle and upper middle class. But all that ended rather quickly. We’ve never and probably still won’t have consistent growth and stability. This is America after all. The land of the Free(white men) and home of the Brave(thieves,murderers and rapists).
 

IndieDoll

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1990's was all about dancing and being free.
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Melanated9

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In all honesty black people never had a peace of mind. We still were getting lynched in the South in the 80s, police brutality became worse over the decades, and segregation still existed even though the signs were gone.
 

Sprite97

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In all honesty black people never had a peace of mind. We still were getting lynched in the South in the 80s, police brutality became worse over the decades, and segregation still existed even though the signs were gone.

Good point. I agree.

It's better for people to just comment on the best time in their life, personally, not in general. For example, which era, decade or age was the best time in your life?

Because there really has never been a "happiest" time for black people as a whole or in general. In every decade, there has always been racism, segregation, police brutality, crime, drugs, physical abuse, rape, molestation, suicide, murders, unemployment, colorism, etc.

There was lynchings in the 90s and there were several lynchings of black men hanging in trees in the recent years in the 2010s.




And here's an article posted TODAY on LSA about a black man being lynched:

 
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O Bryan

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Subjective.

For ME it was the 2010s. Hands down.

My grandparents really liked the 1970s. And will tell you everything went to sh!t in the mid-80s when crack hit the streets.

I don't participate in 90s nostalgia. It was not that great of a decade.
 

Sprite97

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Subjective.

For ME it was the 2010s. Hands down.

My grandparents really liked the 1970s. And will tell you everything went to sh!t in the mid-80s when crack hit the streets.

Drugs were pretty bad before the crack epidemic. There was a heroin epidemic before the crack epidemic.

Here's the article:

“The speed freak is, in many ways, an outcast in a society of outcasts. He is regarded as a fool by heroin addicts, as insane and violent by those using psychedelics and marijuana, and a ‘bust’ by non-drug using hustlers,” wrote Dr. Roger Smith, a criminologist who studied drug use in San Francisco in the late 1960s.

Greater regulation of the drugs in 1970, along with the stigma attached to speed freaks, caused the drugs to recede as others became more widely used.

In the 1960s and 1970s, heroin use surged, prompted in part by Vietnam War soldiers who were exposed to it while fighting overseas. Unlike the doctor-driven previous drug epidemics, this one victimized poor inner-city neighborhoods most.

In 1970 and 1971, in New York City, more adolescents, many of them black and Puerto Rican, died of heroin-related incidents than any other cause. There was little compassion then for heroin addicts, recalled John de Miranda, a longtime addiction professional who worked with homeless men in Boston’s South End in the early 1970s. “We basically cared for the men nobody else wanted to deal with,” he said

here's the link: Opioid epidemic shares chilling similarities with past drug crises

Here's another article about it:

It was also the drug at the heart of the problem that President Nixon cited in 1969, when he laid out a 10-point plan for reducing illegal-drug use—an effort for which New York was the proving ground. “New York City alone has records of some 40,000 heroin addicts, and the number rises between 7,000 and 9,000 a year,” Nixon wrote in his July 14, 1969, message to Congress. “These official statistics are only the tip of an iceberg whose dimensions we can only surmise.” Two years later, Nixon also cited New York’s drug problem when he pledged that “America’s public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive.” In other words, a war.

Local officials echoed the president. By 1978, New York City special prosecutor Sterling Johnson announced that Harlem was the “drug-trafficking center of the nation,” where dealers openly sold “to the blacks who walked into the streets and the whites who never got out of their cars.” And that had been the case for nearly a decade.

In the early 1970s, Phillip Panzarella worked as a patrol officer in Harlem’s 30th Precinct and later in the NYPD narcotics units that were assigned uptown. A Washington Heights native who retired as a lieutenant after a legendary 40-year career in the NYPD, Panzarella was known to other cops as “Sundance” after the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He says people came from five states to buy heroin in Harlem. “There were a lot of good, hardworking people who wanted drugs off the streets, but it was just a losing battle. There was so much of it,” says Panzarella, chewing on his trademark cigar butt one day in May as he sprayed the lawn of his suburban Long Island home to get rid of a horde of bugs. “It just drained the lifeblood out of Harlem, where there was no money to be made except off drugs.”


At the time, flashy-dressing and high-living superdealers like Earl Foddrell, Frank Lucas (of “American Gangster” fame) and, most infamously, Nicky Barnes ruled the roost and became street idols. “Barnes is, police say, one of the biggest heroin dealers in the country,” a 1977 New York Times Magazine article titled “Mister Untouchable” stated. “In his home base, Harlem, the center of the New York City drug traffic, he is regarded as perhaps the biggest. But he is more than that. To the police, to the drug community and to an extent in the uptown drug-related subculture, Nicky Barnes is a current legend … his name alone inspires awe because of a spit-in-your-eye, flamboyant lifestyle that is perceived by the street people as Barnes’ way of thumbing his nose at officialdom.

Here's the link: Heroin: From the Civil War to the 70s, and Beyond
 
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