Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (50 page)

The Supreme Court, November 1994. Back row, left to right: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter, Clarence Thomas, Stephen G. Breyer. Front Row, left to right: Antonin Scalia, John Paul Stevens, William H. Rehnquist, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy.
Richard Strauss Collection, The Supreme Court Historical Society.

Newt Gingrich holding the Republicans’ “Contract with America,” 1994. ©
Reuters/CORBIS.

A T-shirt vendor outside the courthouse during the O.J. Simpson trial in Los Angeles, July 1994. ©
Ted Soqui/CORBIS SYGMA.

The shattered Oklahoma City federal building, bombed April 19, 1995.
Staff Sgt. Dean W. Wagner/Defense Visual Information Center, Riverside, California.

Cartoonist Mike Peters on affirmative action,
Dayton Daily News,
December 1997.
King Features Syndicate.

A nation of immigrants.
© The New Yorker Collection 2004 Mick Stevens from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

Independent counsel Kenneth Starr reading from the U.S. Constitution during the impeachment inquiry of the House Judiciary Committee, November 19, 1998. ©
Reuters/CORBIS.

Damage to the U.S.S.
Cole
, following its bombing at Aden on October 12, 2000. ©
Reuters/CORBIS.

Bill Clinton with Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, August 2000. ©
Reuters/CORBIS.

President-elect George W. Bush and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Washington, D.C., December 2000.
AP/Wide World.

A reflection, 2003, on America’s past and present.
© The New Yorker Collection 2003 David Sipress from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

C
HIEF AMONG THESE
more serious social and economic problems, as ever in American history, were divisions between blacks and whites. Were these divisions narrowing or widening? One prominent scholar of race relations, Harvard sociology professor Orlando Patterson, was guardedly optimistic, writing in 1997, “Relations between ordinary Afro-Americans and Euro-Americans are, in fact, the best they have ever been, although still far from ideal.”
³¹
Many other writers, especially in the early and mid-1990s, were if anything more pessimistic than in the past. Their books flung apocalyptic-sounding titles at readers:
American Apartheid
,
Tragic Failure
,
The Coming Race War in America
. Andrew Hacker, author of one such book (revealingly titled
Two Nations
), concluded in 1992, “A huge racial chasm remains, and there are few signs that the coming century will see it closed.”
³²

Patterson and others of his persuasion pointed to several encouraging developments. These included the rise of steadily more liberal racial attitudes among whites, at least as measured by polls; continuing support by a majority of blacks for integration, not separatism; the successful integration of the nation’s armed services; and less stereotypical representation of blacks in film, television, and ads. Blacks, they added, were gaining representation in government bureaucracies, police and fire departments, and labor unions.
³³
African Americans were pleased in 1994 when Byron De La Beckwith, long suspected of having murdered civil rights hero Medgar Evers in 1963, was finally convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the killing.

Most black leaders were also happy that affirmative action procedures—by then solidly entrenched in major corporations as well as universities—had survived, and they were pleased by the integration that had developed in the military. They also welcomed advances that they were making in local politics. Though blacks still had little chance of being elected to the Senate—Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois became only the second African American to succeed in doing so (in 1992)—they scored victories elsewhere.
³⁴
During the late 1980s and 1990s, African American candidates won mayoralties in the predominantly non-black cities of New York, Seattle, Denver, and Minneapolis.
³⁵