Elliot Liebow’s exploratory study of African American streetcorner men was an “attempt to meet the need for recoding and interpreting lower-class life of ordinary people, on their grounds and on their terms.” His study focused on a group of men and their activities on the street corner of the New Deal Carry-out shop in downtown Washington D.C.
Liebow wrote that the goal of his ethnography was to show the behavior of the African American male frequenting the street corner as “a direct response to the conditions of lower-class Negro life rather than as mute compliance with historical or cultural imperatives.” He accomplished this by looking at the men and their relationship to jobs, their children, wives, lovers, and friends.
Children, Wives and Lovers
As fathers the men rarely saw their children. Some would provide financial support but the degree of involvement depended on the father’s relationship with the mother. Fathers who did not live with their children showed them more affection because they did not feel pressure or responsibility, therefore less pressure of failure. In the section titled “husbands and wives,” Liebow presented the tension between marriage and common law.
Marriages broke apart because they were seen as another part of life bound for failure. As a consolation the men went to the street corner “where the measure of a man is considerably smaller,” and less was expected of them. Men presented themselves as exploiters of women financially but often they were both lover and exploiter like Leroy to Charlene and Sea Cat to Gloria.
Friendships
Liebow presented the importance of face-to face relationships with the men. In their networks, the people at the edges were neutral, while towards the center were the people the man knew and liked best. He gave the example of Tally’s network where Wee Tom started out as a co-worker, then became a drinking buddy and then a close friend. Importance of pseudo-kinship was also important in bonding with other men on the street corner to have friends for physical and emotional security. But there was an inability to keep them for long.
In the end, the street corner was a sanctuary for those who could no longer endure failure. Liebow concluded that a large part of the answer was the need to support good schools and teachers who would teach children the needed skills to earn a living so that they do not fall into the cycle in which their fathers and grandfathers remained trapped.
Liebow’s Research
Liebow met Tally first from among the men and told him that he was working on a study of family life in the city. He provided such a good account of the men’s situations that occasionally the reader forgets that Liebow is there as an observer. By barely mentioning himself, Liebow neglects the effect of his presence as an outsider in the activities and attitudes of the men. However, he did triangulate his information through conversations with various people on the street corner and with other published studies.
Liebow saw a large overlap between marriage and common law. He learned to dig deeper in the anti-marriage talk on the street corner. He saw the men’s situation as more than being pushed into marriage by circumstances.
He analyzed the different theories of men as dogs, prevalent on the corner, to show how narrow viewpoints led the men to irrelevant solutions. For example, Richard said the solution to his marriage problems would be a car so he could have a woman outside of walking distance and his wife would not find out.
Poverty Trap
Liebow wanted to understand the men as they saw themselves. Liebow confronted readers through his research with the “elements of entrapment” that the Negro men faced while on the job; where employers put wages so low that conditions are created where men were forced to steal and then are punished for it by their employers.
Self-respect and worth was kept low in the streetcorner men’s community because a good portion of a man’s income was from theft. Liebow wanted to help the men by presenting in his research the barriers to work that the men came up against: considerable distances to where work is available, unpredictable layoffs, union barriers, and technology taking over.
Liebow drew his readers into their plight by writing of how the men held their work in contempt because middle class values did. The jobs they were given did not give them respect or meet their monetary needs so: “The job fails the man and the man fails the job.” He brought more awareness to the marred identity of African American men.
By listening to the women of the streetcorner men, Liebow allowed their voice to be heard. Being essentially illiterate, unskilled and black, these men were at the bottom of society. Liebow did an excellent job of stressing the need to change the poverty cycle that promises failure from father to son. He suggested placing the problem in “the more tractable context of economics, politics and social welfare.”
He pointed to the crucial need to undo the racist structure and be intentional, with a clear purpose and motive, for empowering these men. He addressed the need to shatter the self-deception of the powerful white majority and encouraged the moral and political initiative of their own empowerment passing over to African Americans.
Limitations and Conclusions
In the appendix Liebow wrote that being a white man, with different clothes and different way of speaking, kept him in the outsider role during his research. However, he formed a bond by describing his Jewish background growing up in a predominantly black neighborhood. He avoided generalizing his research to all low-income African American men and looked to his study as specific to that particular group of men. He encountered so many different facets to relationships and attempted to understand the varieties of personalities.
He recognized that he was working with people who were stuck in the poverty trap by their economic and social circumstances and felt obligated to work with them. He wanted his research to be more than mere information in the vast conglomeration of ethnographies; but to have the story and voice of these people heard and for action to be the response.
Source:
Study of Negro Streetcorner Men by Elliot Liebow
Iemima Ploscariu - As a recent college graduate of Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, Iemima's writing experience consists of work done for ...
