The Black History of the White House (37 page)

In December 1980, a few weeks after Reagan won the election, a number of these black conservatives met in San Francisco—one of the most Democratic cities in the nation—to set an agenda for seizing the initiative in black politics. All of the traditional conservative scripts were rolled out as they railed against the government-dependent politics of African American leaders. These black Reaganites missed the irony that outside the pool of white conservatives, they were unable to raise any resources or generate support for their anti–civil rights cause on their own. Yet it was their very blackness that was being traded on. While they steadfastly claim that they wanted to be seen as
individuals and not as racial beings, they had no value to their white conservative sponsors beyond being black.
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Reagan's black appointments reflected the scarcity of qualified far-right black conservatives for key positions in his administration. His only black cabinet appointment was the politically moderate Samuel Pierce as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and reportedly Reagan often forgot his name, although that may have been due to the onset of his Alzheimer's disease, which grew worse during his presidency.

Colin L. Powell was appointed by Ronald Reagan as White House National Security Advisor, launching his long career, during which he was often in conflict with more far-right conservatives inside and outside the Republican Party. Pierce and Powell represented the moderate conservatism of the blacks appointed by the Reagan White House. Others, such as State Department minor bureaucrat Alan Keyes, Reagan's chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission Clarence Pendleton, and EEOC head Clarence Thomas, led the ideological war against civil rights and civil rights leaders.

Reagan's vigorous anti-black agenda did not go unchallenged. In 1984, only days after Reagan's reelection, the black-led Free South Africa Movement (FSAM) was born that launched a year-long political mobilization against Reagan's collaborationist policies toward the Apartheid regime. FSAM employed a dual nationwide campaign that included civil disobedience at the South African embassy in Washington, D.C. and consulates around the country, and lobbying black and progressive members of Congress to impose sanctions against South Africa. With support from celebrities to grassroots activists, public opinion turned against Reagan and he suffered his only foreign policy defeat when in October 1986, Congress overrode Reagan's veto and passed the Comprehensive Anti-
Apartheid Act that banned trade and investment in South Africa. The movement, led by FSAM, had successfully shifted the debate from anti-communism to a debate regarding racism against South Africa's black majority.

George H. W. Bush softened but essentially carried forward Reagan's agenda. He falsely promised a “kindler, gentler” administration but attacked the civil rights agenda with budget cuts and tepid law enforcement of civil rights. He left three marks that stand out in White House racial politics: the Willie Horton campaign advertisement, the selection of Clarence Thomas for the U.S. Supreme Court, and the war on drugs.

Bush's opponent in the 1988 campaign turned out to be more the convicted murderer and rapist William Horton than Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Horton had escaped from a Massachusetts prison furlough program in June 1986 and a year later brutally and repeatedly raped a white woman after beating and tying up her fiancé in Maryland. He was eventually caught and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in Maryland. Although the furlough program had started under Dukakis's Republican predecessor, Governor Francis W. Sargent, in 1972, he maintained and strongly defended the program. Republicans saw a racial opening, and after focus groups demonstrated that the Horton story could turn even Democrats to vote for Bush, it became a central issue in the race. Both the formal Bush campaign and groups that supported it began to air commercials featuring Horton—even calling him “Willie” rather than “William,” which the Bush campaign preferred in an effort to make Horton sound even blacker—and the inept Dukakis never recovered. Bush tapped white fear of blacks to win the White House.

After the venerable Thurgood Marshall, the first and only black Supreme Court Justice up to that point in history,
announced his retirement in July 1991, Bush nominated Clarence Thomas as his replacement. Supremely unqualified, having only served one year as a federal judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Thomas had never argued before the Supreme Court and had no legal writings of note. Bush cynically counted on the reluctance of an all-white U.S. Senate to deny a black candidate and on the predictable division among African Americans. He was correct on both counts. Thomas held the most extreme conservative view possible and was chosen to satisfy Bush's right-wing anti-abortion, antigovernment, pro-corporate, anti–affirmative action, and anti–civil rights base. His nomination generated the most intense mobilization of African Americans around a Supreme Court nominee since the case of Judge Parker in the 1920s. However, support for Thomas by some prominent liberal African Americans, including poet Maya Angelou, civil rights leader Rev. Joseph Lowry, and NAACP board chair Margaret Bush Wilson, created enough space for some white Democrats to feel that they could support Thomas's nomination.

Despite Anita Hill's credible charges of sexual harassment which surfaced during the nomination process and were later verified by the
Washington Post
and other media sources, as well as irrefutable evidence of Thomas's extremist views, which he sought to deny and obfuscate during the hearings, he was confirmed to the Court by a Senate vote of fifty-two to forty-eight on October 15, 1991, the narrowest margin in over 100 years (forty-one Republicans and eleven Democrats voted yes; forty-six Democrats and two Republicans voted no).
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Since that time he has been the most consistent far-right voice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

As president, Bush also escalated a war against drug users and traffickers. The explosion of crack cocaine use and marketing
was exploited by the administration and its allies in Congress to institute a series of new federal laws that harshly and disproportionately punished users, small-time dealers, and petty criminals. Laws that sent people away permanently, such as the “Three-Strikes-and-You're-Out” law, tended to fill the jails and prisons without substantially denting the use or sale of illegal narcotics. Two-thirds of the antidrug budget focused on law enforcement, while only one-third addressed prevention and treatment. To sell this program, the drug threat was racialized by pervasive images of black users and young black men dealing drugs.
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The impact of those discriminatory policies is felt today. As Human Rights Watch researcher James Fellner sadly notes, “Among black defendants convicted of drug offenses, 71 percent received sentences to incarceration in contrast to 63 percent of convicted white drug offenders. Human Rights Watch's analysis of prison admission data for 2003 revealed that relative to population, blacks are 10.1 times more likely than whites to be sent to prison for drug offenses.”
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Drug policies account for the grossly disproportionate incarceration of African Americans. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics' report
Prison Inmates at Midyear 2007
:

The custody incarceration rate for black males was 4,618 per 100,000. Hispanic males were incarcerated at a rate of 1,747 per 100,000. Compared to the estimated numbers of black, white, and Hispanic males in the U.S. resident population, black males (6 times) and Hispanic males (a little more than 2 times) were more likely to be held in custody than white males. At midyear 2007 the estimated incarceration rate of white males was 773 per 100,000.
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Due to his implementation of tax increases after he had sworn to oppose them, and his halfhearted response to the 1992 uprising in Los Angeles following the not guilty verdict in the Rodney King beating trial, Bush's support from conservatives and moderates eroded. The upstart candidacy of H. Ross Perot and the skilled campaign of Bill Clinton cost Bush his reelection and brought another Southern Democratic governor to the White House.

Clinton appointed five black Cabinet members during his first term—Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, Labor Secretary Alexis Herman, Energy Secretary Hazel R. O'Leary, and Veteran Affairs Secretary Jesse Brown—and enjoyed widespread support by blacks. He was called “our first black president” by Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison. She went on to write, “Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”
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Naturally, Clinton relished his cozy relationship with the black community. Yet a number of critical policy moves by Clinton generated high opposition among blacks, most notably the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the 1994 Crime Bill, and welfare reform. All these initiatives had begun under the previous Bush administration, and there had been hope that Clinton would end them. NAFTA was strongly opposed by all the traditional constituencies of the Democratic Party: organized labor, blacks, Latinos, women, and human rights activists. They feared correctly that the legislation would drive jobs out of the country, disproportionately benefit large corporations, destroy what was left of the domestic textile industry, and hurt minority employment. Clinton was only able to pass the bill by building a coalition of moderate and conservative Republican legislators and some Democrats.

Another wedge issue that Clinton bought into was crime. In 1994, still in the midst of hysteria about crack cocaine and narco-terrorism, Congress debated the passage of the most sweeping reform in federal crime policy in generations. The legislation included more than fifty new death-penalty provisions, harsher penalties for a wide range of crimes, and essentially an abandonment of the notion of rehabilitation. Clinton was again forced to build a conservative-to-moderate coalition of Republicans and Democrats to pass the bill. During this same period, the controversy emerged over the Reagan-era relationship between the CIA-backed Contras—the murderous band of rebels who were fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua—and Latin American drug dealers who trafficked cocaine to America's inner cities. Research by Pultizer Prize–winning journalist Gary Webb documented that for the better part of a decade, a California-based drug ring sold tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs and funneled millions in drug profits to the CIA-backed Contras.
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Webb's revelation that high-level U.S. officials knowingly allowed massive amounts of drugs and money to change hands at the expense of poor inner-city neighborhoods, mostly communities of color, set off an explosive controversy that rocked Washington. Declassified government documents and testimony conclusively proved that the CIA had secret dealings with the Justice Department from 1982 to 1995 that permitted the agency to avoid reporting cases of drug trafficking by its agents and assets.
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Many black commentators further believed that the CIA and the U.S. government deliberately allowed drugs into the cities to subvert black militancy there.

Since the days of Reagan's racist “welfare queen” stereotypes, conservatives had been calling for an end to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, decrying
what they called government-bred dependency on the part of the undeserving poor. In seeking moderate votes, the Clinton campaign highlighted welfare reform as a policy goal. After the Republican victory in Congress in 1994, conservatives passed a radical reform bill that Clinton signed despite massive opposition from black communities. Congressional Black Caucus members, divided on many of these issues, were not able to prevent any of these initiatives from becoming law.

Another milestone occurred during Clinton's term: the elevation of Ron Brown as the first African American chair of the Democratic Party. Brown, a moderate, helped maintain the administration's centrist posture and was crucial to Clinton's successful reelection in 1996. African Americans had strongly supported Clinton in both his presidential campaigns: he won 82 percent of the black vote in 1992, and 84 percent in1996.
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But in neither election did Clinton win the majority of the white vote.

The White House “Race Initiative” was Clinton's major thrust into racial politics. The project was launched in June 1997 with goals “to articulate the President's vision of racial reconciliation” and “to promote a constructive dialogue” about race. President Clinton conducted a series of town hall meetings around the country and established an advisory board chaired by historian John Hope Franklin. The initiative was all talk, and no new programs were developed as a result of it.

The racially sophisticated Clinton was followed by the racially clueless George W. Bush. Although former vice president Al Gore had won the popular vote by 50,999,897 to 50,456,002, former Texas governor Bush won control of the White House with a Supreme Court vote of five to four in what became one of the most disputed elections in the nation's history. The African American community felt especially aggrieved, because so many votes cast by African Americans in Florida were not counted, suppressed with shady methods by the state's Republican Party. The fact that Bush's brother, Jeb Bush, was governor of Florida at the time—and that Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris headed up George Bush's campaign in the state—fed the sense of electoral fraud and collusion.