The Black History of the White House (36 page)

His relationship with the Congressional Black Caucus, formed in 1969, was particularly acrimonious. In 1970 the Black Caucus requested a meeting with the president to discuss issues relevant to the black community. The administration refused
to meet despite repeated requests. To demonstrate their ire at the situation, all members of the Black Caucus except Brooke boycotted Nixon's 1971 State of the Union address. Finally realizing the political seriousness of the squabble, Nixon consented to a meeting on March 25, 1971. At that meeting the Black Caucus presented him with sixty policy recommendations that had been culled from the work of a task force of “academicians, economists, lawyers, and civil rights activists” and 400 position papers. Although the meeting was cordial and the Black Caucus was able to articulate at length on the importance of implementing the recommendations, Nixon simply ignored the suggestions, and his relationship with the Caucus remained antagonistic through the remainder of his time in office.
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Nixon's long-lasting contribution to racial politics is the “Southern strategy.” As the Republicans watched black voters increasingly switch to the Democratic Party, it dawned upon them that they could exploit the racial tensions in the South by positioning themselves as the party of whites. The Nixon campaign of 1968 developed a number of themes that were racially coded to appeal to whites in the region (and nationally) who felt threatened by the successes of the black freedom movement.

The Southern strategy called for opposition to busing and open housing, emphasized “law and order,” supported public aid for private schools, advocated for states' rights, and gave succor to other thinly coded policies and proposals that signaled to whites that an anti-black agenda was on the way. As future Reagan strategist and Republican Party chairman Lee Atwater once stated, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say ‘nigger.' . . . So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights.”
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Nixon's campaign focused on those issues as well as “law and order” and “cutting taxes,” all of which were seen through a racial lens.

The architect of the plan was political strategist Kevin Phillips, who described the strategy explicitly in his 1979 book
The Emerging Republican Majority
.
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As reported by the
New York Times
in 1970, Phillips stated bluntly, “From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that . . . but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”
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The strategy worked and within a decade, whites in the South were solidly Republican. Even the election of two Southern Democrats, Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, did not yield a majority of white voters from the region (or nationally) for either candidate. As he lay dying from brain cancer, Atwater apologized for the tactics he had used throughout his career, particularly those employed to defeat Michael Dukakis in 1984. In 2005, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman, in a talk before the NAACP, apologized for the party's use of race as a wedge issue, saying that it was a “wrong” strategy.
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Ironically, it was Nixon who first instituted the federal polices now known as affirmative action. In 1969, Nixon appointed Arthur Fletcher as Assistant Secretary of Wage and Labor Standards at the Department of Labor. Fletcher, an old-school, moderate black Republican, devised what was called the “Philadelphia Plan,” a program that pushed for more employment and business opportunities for African Americans and other minorities in the construction industry, i.e., an affirmative
action program. This effort was a part of Nixon's push for black capitalism, an effort he championed as “black power.” Fletcher would later work for the White House during the Ford, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush administrations.

Given Nixon's overall anti-black agenda, policies, and covert programs, it is fitting that he was brought down by a black security guard. On the evening of June 17, 1972, Frank Wills was working as an $80.00-a-week security guard in the Watergate Building in Washington, D.C. The many swank offices located there included the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. When he noticed that duct tape had been put over the lock of one of the doors, and then saw later that it had been removed, he knew something was wrong. He called the police, and they discovered five burglars—Bernard Baker, Virgilio Gonzales, James McCord, Eugenio Martinez, and Frank Sturgis—who had been trying to place secret wiretaps in the office on behalf of Nixon's reelection campaign. While Nixon may or may not have known about the burglary beforehand, tape recordings from the White House reveal that he was involved in the illegal effort to cover up the administration's complicity in the crime.

Although he was seen as a hero in the black community, as it turned out, Wills's future would not be bright. While the
Washington Post
reporters who covered the news story, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, went on to make millions from the books, movies, documentaries, and papers they produced, Wills had a difficult time finding work and fell into deep poverty. (He played himself in the film version of their book,
All the President's Men
.) Although Nixon was permitted to resign without facing criminal charges, Wills was arrested on a shoplifting charge and spent a year in jail. He moved back to Georgia and died nearly penniless on September 27, 2000.

Gerald Ford's presidency was unremarkable on almost every level. A telling detail of his legacy as a footnote to history, he was the only chief executive to serve who had not been elected either president or vice president. It is a testimony to his lack of political import that he is most remembered and, in many cases, reviled for his pardon of Nixon shortly after the president resigned in disgrace. While he was more prone to meet with black leaders than Nixon, he essentially continued his predecessor's agenda of opposing busing, rejected race-based remedies for improving black attendance in higher education, and supported a states' rights approach to most policy issues.

Although much of the country was tilting right as a backlash against the revolts of the sixties, Nixon's dishonorable resignation opened the door for a Democratic victory in 1976. Jimmy Carter became the deep South's first Democrat to win the White House in generations. The peanut farmer and nuclear engineer from Georgia received strong endorsements from the civil rights elite based in Atlanta—Andrew Young, Coretta Scott King, and Martin King Sr.—as well as from Jesse Jackson, NAACP Chairman Benjamin Hooks, and National Urban League President Vernon Jordan. Having grown up in a community that consisted of twenty-three black families and two white families, one of which was the Carters, Jimmy was comfortable around African Americans in ways that nearly all previous presidents were not. But that incubator embodied the unequal status endemic to the South; in Carter's neighborhood blacks always deferred to whites.

Carter's White House appointed a number of African Americans to highly visible high-ranking positions. They included Andrew Young as ambassador to the United Nations, Patricia Roberts Harris as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Eleanor Holmes Norton as head of the EEOC,
and Clifford Alexander as Secretary of the Army. The Young appointment ended in disaster when, in August 1979, it was exposed that contrary to administration policy, he had met secretly with the Palestine Liberation Organization's chief UN representative Zehdi Terzi earlier that year on July 26. Carter had a formal agreement with Israel that no unauthorized or unplanned meetings should take place between U.S. officials and the PLO. Young compounded the situation by initially stating that the encounter had been an accident but later revealing that it had indeed been planned. Although black leaders almost universally supported Young and endorsed the United States meeting with the PLO, Carter did not hesitate to ask for his resignation. Young had gotten into trouble earlier in his tenure for stating that Cuba was a “stabilizing” factor in the civil war that was unfolding in Angola during that time, a war in which the U.S. government backed the other side. Although Carter's foreign policy doctrine gave emphasis to human rights, he and Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski held to Cold War politics when it came to African policies.

To help address his black and female constituencies, President Carter hired Louis Martin as a special assistant. He was instrumental in the black appointments noted above and helped Carter navigate the racial waters of Washington, D.C. Martin coordinated the symbolic dimensions of the White House's outreach to black America, including Carter's visits to black organizations, photo opportunities between the president and blacks, and other efforts.

During Carter's tenure, perhaps the most significant policy issue for the nation's racial politics was the
Bakke
decision. When Allan Bakke was turned down for admission to the University of California at Davis Medical School, he charged “reverse” discrimination. Bakke claimed that he had been discriminated
against as a white person because the school had admitted, through a special task force program, African Americans who on average had lower test scores and lower grade point averages than he did. He failed to mention that about 20 percent of whites that had been admitted to the school also scored lower than Bakke had, and that there were a number of blacks who were turned down for admission through the task force program. Rather than focus on what was more likely age discrimination—Bakke was thirty-two at the time he applied and had been turned down by twelve other medical schools—he decided to present himself as a victim of racism. On October 12, 1977, the case that many considered the most significant affecting education since
Brown v. Board of Education
, went before the U.S. Supreme Court.

At the Carter White House, chaos ensued. Without a strong and clear stance from the president, staffers presented conflicting positions. Carter sought a middle ground by opposing quotas but supporting remedies that would increase the number of blacks and other minorities in medical schools. In the end, the Supreme Court decision, announced on June 28, 1978, was a mixed bag of conclusions. In a five-to-four vote, the Court ruled that a special admission program through the task force process was “unlawful,” and it directed that Bakke be admitted to the school. However, also on a five-to-four vote, the Court ruled that race could remain a consideration in the admissions process. Four Justices (Burger, Rehnquist, Stevens, and Stewart) found the program illegal on statutory grounds, while Powell argued its unlawfulness for constitutional reasons. Thurgood Marshall, the first and only black on the Court, wrote a seething dissent contending that the decision meant the country had “come full circle” and comparing it to the 1896
Plessy v. Ferguson
ruling.
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The Congressional Black Caucus,
civil rights leaders, and black academics severely criticized the decision as a step backward and the opening salvo of a series of attacks on affirmative action. Although the decision came fairly close to what President Carter wanted, he lost both black and white support because of the White House's poor handling of public discourse.

Carter would only last one term. Although his lackadaisical approach to civil rights concerns lost him some black votes, it was his handling of the Iranian hostage crisis that conveyed an image of weakness and lack of resolve. When militant Iranian students took hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, Carter was unable to win their freedom before election day, and he paid the cost. The crisis was an opening for the Republican Party to reassert a force-driven foreign policy and ratchet up Cold War tensions. Representing a sea change in both domestic and foreign affairs, the next occupant of the White House was Republican victor Ronald Reagan.

The Reagan Reversal and Beyond

Reagan's White House represented a true turning point in black history. On every single issue of concern to the black community and every step that had been taken forward, the new administration was pushing back. As global demand for an immediate end to the racist apartheid system in South Africa grew, the Reagan administration issued its policy of “constructive engagement,” i.e., limiting criticism of the regime's murderous behavior while supplying white South Africa the resources to perpetuate its domination of the black population. Reagan had opposed
all
the key civil rights bills of the 1960s, including the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing Act, and affirmative action across the board.

Reagan also sought to bring an end to the influence of
the civil rights leadership network. Unlike the presidents that had recently preceded him, he brought in his own network of conservative black activists to challenge the black members of Congress and civil rights leaders for the political ears, eyes, and heart of the black community. This included academics Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, Walter Williams, Robert Woodson, Shelby Steele, and Stephen Carter; journalists Juan Williams and Armstrong Williams; and government staffers Alan Keyes, Clarence Thomas, Clarence Pendleton, and William Keyes. None of these individuals had a broad, or in most cases even narrow constituency among African Americans, or any ties to the civil rights community. A key distinction between them and previous black Republican and conservative African Americans who served or worked with Republican presidents is that they were vehemently anti–civil rights, anti-welfare, and antigovernment. They were generally unknown until given prominence during the Reagan era by media that preferred controversy over history and context. As scholar Leon Newton notes, Reagan deliberately worked to foster a “change of public discourse regarding race and politics as it affects the lives of African Americans.”
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