Chapter twelve

Making Race a Central Wedge Issue

The mid-1970s were a time of recession, inflation, and economic uncertainty that symbolized the end of the postwar boom across the capitalist world. In the U.S., this economic crisis led to the first widespread layoffs and cutbacks in government spending in two decades. As a result, the radical movements of the 1970s ran into much more determined opposition to the social change they sought. The U.S. ruling class defeated the challenges to its rule posed by the radicalization of the 1960s and 1970s with a strategy that combined repression with reform. The previous chapter outlined the repressive measures the government took against the radical wing of the movement. Meanwhile, the reform option took shape in the creation of a space in the Democratic Party for a layer of Black officials with a stake in the system.

It has been more than forty years since the first Black mayor was elected in a major city. Since that time, it has become clear that Democratic officials elected through strong Black voter turnout answer to the same moneyed interests as the white officials who preceded them. In hundreds of instances, Black politicians’ actions toward the poor and working-class Blacks who constitute their base range from neglect at best to outright attack at worst. Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson, for example, viciously defeated a strike of Black sanitation workers in 1977—to the delight of the predominantly white businessmen who made up the city’s Chamber of Commerce.1 Coleman Young, mayor of Detroit, was so determined to break a municipal workers’ strike in 1986 that he threatened to call out the National Guard. And perhaps most disracefully, Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode engineered the firebombing of the Black countercultural group MOVE, which advocated armed self-defense against police brutality, in 1985. Eleven people were killed in the attack—including six children—and more than sixty-one homes were destroyed.2

The approach of creating political space for Black Democratic candidates reached its zenith with Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns, organized through his National Rainbow Coalition (NRC). In 1984, Jackson was able to win 21 percent of the total votes cast in the Democratic primaries—and he won a number of important Southern states outright. But thanks to party rules limiting the number of delegates he could claim at the party’s convention, Jackson was able to gain the backing of only 11 percent of the delegates. So Jackson was thrown into the position of having to endorse Walter Mondale as the Democratic candidate, even though Mondale went on, predictably, to nix every element of the NRC’s platform proposals. In the end, the platform itself barely touched on issues of importance to Black America.3

Jackson enjoyed broader support in 1988, when he ran a decidedly more mainstream race. Keeping his campaign message relatively conservative, he was able to consolidate the support of the Black Democratic establishment. In a shift from 1984, when they had opposed his candidacy, officials such as Mayor Andrew Young in Atlanta and U.S. Rep. Mickey Leland (D-Texas) this time backed Jackson—or at least didn’t endorse his opponents. They were no doubt swayed by the support Jackson won among their constitutencies in the 1984 race.

Jackson’s attempts to consolidate his position within the Democratic Party were in line with the overall trajectory of his career, since he had been on the right wing of the civil rights movement from the beginning. He had made a name for himself within the SCLC through his outstanding abilities as a fundraiser, but politically he was firmly within the conservative wing of the group. As part of this wing, he opposed Martin Luther King, Jr.’s launch of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968, for example. And Jackson disagreed with the direction of King’s politics toward the end of his life—where King attempted to connect civil rights with workers’ rights and demands for greater social spending.4

Jackson would go on to announce his independence from SCLC in 1971 with the formation of his Chicago-based Operation PUSH. But Jackson made this move on a right-wing basis that revolved around calls for “Black capitalism” (something even Richard Nixon publicly supported). Operation PUSH emphasized support for Black businesses, self-reliance, and the development of conservative mores within the Black community.

Cheering capitalism is something Jackson has done enthusiastically throughout his career. In a letter to Business Week in 1987, Jackson wrote:

A strong, healthy private economy is essential to our national well-being and our hopes for social progress. The future of the business Establishment and of the nation itself are dependent upon attention to the long-range effects of current American business polices. The long term interests of American business and the American people are mutual and inseparable.5

This stance has gone hand in hand with devoted efforts on Jackson’s part to prevent Black militants from building political alternatives to the two-party system. When more than 8,000 Blacks from widely varied political backgrounds gathered in Gary, Indiana, for the National Black Political Convention in 1972, Jackson was instumental in shutting down the efforts of radicals there to create an all-Black left-wing party.6 The convention endorsed a Black Political Agenda that criticized the American system as a whole, and condemned both the Democrats and the Republicans for their failure to address the needs of Black people. Jackson came out strongly against the Agenda, and claimed it was only a draft to delegates from Michigan—the majority of whom were conservative and firmly within the Democratic Party. Jackson argued that any delegates who opposed the electoral strategies put forward by the convention’s leadership were destroying Black unity.

Jackson’s hostility to independent politics was made yet clearer when he threw his support behind George McGovern’s presidential bid in 1972. He also backed Jimmy Carter in 1976. And in 1980, after Carter had outraged many Black voters with his surprisingly conservative policies, Jackson argued that Blacks “had the responsibility” to consider the candidacies of Republicans as well as Democrats, in effect arguing that Ronald Reagan may have had more to offer Black people than Carter.7

Many on the left have chosen to ignore Jackson’s actual record when it comes to the relationship between the Rainbow Coalition and the Democrats—arguing that it provided a “mass base” from which an independent third party could be built. But Jackson has shown his commitment to staying within the Democratic fold, no matter how badly the party treated him and his supporters at times. As he argued in 1984, “The poor have too much invested in the Democratic Party to pick up our marbles and go home.”8 From its founding, the NRC functioned much more as a progressive caucus within the Democratic Party—one that was quickly pulled rightward. Jackson’s success in shoring up the support of the Black Democratic establishment in his 1988 campaign did not then set him up to advance the needs and concerns of Black people within the party. At best, it consolidated his role as the leader of the Democratic Party’s liberal wing, which would then go on to make apologies for the right-wing leadership of the party.

Despite Jackson’s success, it became commonplace for politicians of both main parties to use what has become known as the “race card” to their advantage. Appealing to the basest of fears and prejudices, politicians of both parties have used racism to mobilize voters and to stigmatize government programs for the poor. For these reasons, the issue of race has been central to the move rightward by both parties. In 1964, Lyndon Baines Johnson appeared miles to the left of the arch-conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. Democrats and much of the left strongly urged a vote for Johnson as the only salvation from Armageddon. Goldwater, setting himself up as an opponent of civil rights legislation in Congress, won only the most hard-core segregationist states of the Deep South.9 The Goldwater campaign provided a road map for future Republican campaigns. But by 1996, even Goldwater declared that he believed the Republican Party had gone too far to the right under the influence of Christian fundamentalism.10

The rightward shift of both parties can be traced back to the 1968 presidential election. The third-party campaign by Alabama governor George Wallace became a model for future presidential campaigns by both Democratic and Republican hopefuls. Wallace ran as a “law-and-order” candidate and a diehard segregationist. He appealed to Democratic Party voters who were opposed to granting any concessions to the Black movement. To the surprise of many pundits, Wallace received just under 14 percent of the vote.11

Many of the issues that Wallace campaigned around became the core of the New Right’s agenda in the 1980s. Using populist rhetoric to denounce “big government,” Wallace also called for the “defense of traditional values,” as well as a renewed patriotism and militarism. At the center of his campaign, however, was racial politics. Wallace had first gained national attention as an ardent white supremacist. As noted in Chapter Eight, in his 1963 Alabama gubernatorial inaugural address, Wallace proclaimed, “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”12 For the presidential election campaign, he largely avoided direct race-baiting, instead masking his racist message with various code words. The real meaning of his message was unmistakable. He called for an increased use of force to suppress the Black urban uprisings, derided the Black movement and the War on Poverty, and launched a McCarthyite attack on liberal politicians and intellectuals.

Wallace’s success at the polls did not go unnoticed. Then-Republican Party strategist Kevin Phillips, an aide to Attorney General John Mitchell, submitted a lengthy analysis of U.S. voting trends to President Nixon, arguing that a Republican victory and a long-term realignment could be achieved by using race as a “wedge issue.” Phillips summarized his argument in a 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority. The book’s main argument was that a turn to the right and the use of veiled anti-Black rhetoric could be the basis for Republican electoral success in the South. The Wallace campaign, according to Phillips, signaled the growing alienation of Southern racists with the Democratic Party: the “principal force which broke up the Democratic Coalition [was the] Negro socioeconomic revolution and liberal Democratic ideological inability to cope with it.”13

He added:

Until the national Democratic Party embraced the Negro socioeconomic and civil rights revolution of the nineteen-sixties, the Deep South upcountry shunned the economic conservatism of both the Republicans and Dixiecrats…. Although the civil rights revolution was straining Democratic loyalties all over the South, the poor white hill counties saw Goldwater as the Dixiecrat-style economic conservative whose commitment to New Deal farm, home loan, rural electrification, Social Security and other programs was minimal…. Liberalism lost its support base in the upcountry by shifting its principal concern from populist economics to government participation in social and racial upheaval.14

In the words of Thomas and Mary Edsall, authors of Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics, “Race and taxes...functioned to force the attention of the public on the costs of federal policies and programs. Those costs were often first experienced in terms of loss—the loss of control over school services, union apprenticeship programs, hiring, promotions, neighborhoods, public safety, and even over sexual morals and a stable social order.” In addition, “Opposition to busing, to affirmative action, to quotas, and to housing integration have given a segment of the traditionally Democratic white electorate ideological common ground with business and the affluent in shared opposition to the federal regulatory apparatus.”15

This strategy, dubbed the Southern strategy, became the cornerstone of the Republican Party’s post-1972 presidential election efforts. Nixon went out of his way to appeal to the racist vote in the South. After Supreme Court judge Abe Fortas resigned in April 1969, Nixon nominated Judge Clement Haynsworth, Jr., who was a segregationist from South Carolina. The Senate rejected his nomination in a vote of 55–45. Unbowed, Nixon nominated another segregationist Southerner, G. Harold Carswell in 1970. Carswell was seen as unqualified and was also rejected. These defeats represented a blow to Nixon, but he used them to appeal to racist Southerners.

I understand the bitter feelings of millions of Americans who live in the South about the act of regional discrimination that took place in the Senate yesterday [April 8, 1970]. They have my assurance that the day will come when men like Judges Carswell and Haynsworth can and will sit on the high Court.16

Nixon reached out to Southern right-wingers, such as Senator Strom Thurmond, in order to ensure Southern support, foreshadowing many of the themes that later became part of Ronald Reagan’s campaign arsenal. Nixon urged Congress to impose a moratorium on court-ordered busing, nominated conservatives to the Supreme Court, pleaded with the Court for postponement of Mississippi’s desegregation plan, and lobbied Congress to defeat the fair-housing enforcement program and the extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The issues of “reverse discrimination,” ending affirmative action, busing, and government programs for the poor all became rallying points of this “New Right.” Ronald Reagan’s presidency represented a continuation—albeit with greater gusto—of the assault on the gains of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Ronald Reagan opposed every major piece of civil rights legislation that came before Congress, as did his vice president, George Bush, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which he denounced as a “bad piece of legislation.”17 On the campaign trail in August 1980, Reagan declared himself a champion of “state’s rights”—a phrase understood by many Southern whites as an endorsement of white supremacy. Reagan’s message was all the more obvious since he launched his presidential campaign in the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were murdered by members of the Klan in 1964. (In 1984, Reagan again returned to Philadelphia and asserted that “The South Shall Rise Again.”)18

Reagan questioned the very idea that Blacks faced racist discrimination in the United States. “Sometimes I wonder if they really want what they say they want,” Reagan remarked, “because some of those leaders are doing very well leading organizations based on keeping alive the feeling that they’re victims of prejudice.”19 In a speech to the National Black Republican Council on September 15, 1982, Reagan argued that Blacks “would be appreciably better off today” if the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson had not been passed: “The big taxers and big spenders in Congress had started a binge that would slowly change the nature of our society, and even worse, it threatened the character of our people.”20

According to the Reagan administration, the problem lay with the victims of racism, not the racists—or the system itself. In fact, antiracists were the problem. As Reagan’s U.S. Civil Rights Commission Chairman, Clarence Pendleton, Jr., put it: “The new racists, many of them Black, exhibit the classical behavior system of racism. They treat Blacks differently than whites because of their race.”21

President George Bush I followed in Reagan’s footsteps. Central to Bush’s election were the scurrilous “Willie Horton” ads that accused his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, of being “soft on crime.” The ads faulted Dukakis for the fact that Horton, a Black prisoner released on a Massachusetts prison furlough program, raped and murdered a white woman. More than a decade of race-baiting also created space in mainstream politics for many who were previously considered right-wing crackpots and fringe elements—such as Nazi and Klan member David Duke. At a packed December 4, 1991, news conference in Washington, D.C., the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan announced that he was entering the race for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. He denounced George Bush for selling out the party’s principles by signing a 1991 civil rights bill, by raising taxes, and by failing to protect the American worker from foreign competition. Bush denounced Duke as a “charlatan,” and tried to distance himself from the self-avowed Nazi, but the link between Bush and Duke was clear. The conservative business magazine the Economist commented that Bush’s condemnation of Duke would carry

more conviction had Mr. Bush not won his election to the presidency in 1988 on the back of television advertisements attacking his opponent for supposed leniency towards a murderer, Willie Horton. Mr. Horton just happened to be Black. Nothing should be read into that, protested the Republicans at the time, nor into much of the advertising that some Republicans have since taken to using in campaigns elsewhere in America. Yet the language used in those campaigns is the same coded language used by “the reformed” Mr. Duke, as the voters, Black and white, well understand.22

The Democrats and the Democratic Leadership Council

The shift to the right in U.S. politics was not wholly due to the Republican Party. A crucial component to the Republicans’ success over the last thirty years has been the role played by its alter ego, the Democratic Party. The collaboration of the Democratic Party was an indispensable precondition for Reaganism coming to dominate mainstream politics. As Kevin Phillips (the earlier mentioned architect of the GOP’s successful Southern strategy) wrote in his book The Politics of Rich and Poor, “part of the reason that U.S. ‘survival of the fittest’ periods of economic restructuring are so relentless rests on the performance of the Democrats as history’s second most enthusiastic capitalist party. They do not interfere much with capitalist momentum, but wait for excesses and the inevitable populist reactions.”23

Phillips rightly argues that the policies associated with Reaganism were first introduced by Jimmy Carter. “The case can be made that even Jimmy Carter provided more assistance to economic change than Nixon did, in part by extending bipartisan support for economic deregulation and tight money during the late 1970s.”24 During the 1976 presidential campaign, Carter declared, “he saw nothing wrong with communities ‘trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods,’ and that he would not promote the power of the govenment to force ‘the intrusion of alien groups’ into a neighborhood.”25 Carter again embarrassed his Black supporters just before the election when he refused to resign from his Plains, Georgia, Baptist church, when, citing a 1965 resolution banning “niggers and civil rights agitators,” church deacons banned four Black men from Sunday service.26 These statements should have come as no surprise to anyone who had followed Carter’s career. In his 1970 gubernatorial campaign, he attacked his Republican opponent in the general election by reminding voters what role the Republican Party played during the Civil War: “The last time the Republicans were in Atlanta was 100 years ago. They burned it down.”27

Once in office, Carter appointed Dixiecrat Griffin Bell to the position of U.S. attorney general. As a federal judge in the 1960s, Bell had upheld a Georgia court ruling that banned Black state assemblyman Julian Bond from taking his seat, and had supported President Nixon’s nomination of the openly racist G. Harold Carswell to the Supreme Court. As attorney general, Bell refused to enforce federal rights legislation.28 This produced a crisis among Black Democrats who had campaigned for Carter’s election. Gary, Indiana, Mayor Richard Hatcher admitted, “[I]t’s difficult for any Black leader who pushed the election of Jimmy Carter to face the people he campaigned with.”29

Despite its image today as being the party of racial minorities, for most of its history the Democratic Party was the party of white supremacy. Southern Democrats—the Dixiecrats— always had enormous influence inside the party. But the civil rights movement challenged the alliance between Northern capitalists and Southern racists at the heart of the party. And, importantly, the Black vote was no longer marginal. Black votes were necessary to elect John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Jimmy Carter in 1976. With the Republican adoption of the “Southern strategy,” the Democrats lost an increasing number of votes to the Republicans.30

In the aftermath of the 1980 elections, Democratic Party bosses began in earnest to try to shed their image as the party of “civil rights.” After Reagan’s reelection in 1984, Democratic pollster William Hamilton warned the party’s leaders that they “can’t very well lose the white male vote by 2 to 1 and expect to be serious players in a two-party system.”31 In February 1985, newly elected Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Paul Kirk announced that caucuses within the DNC (representing such groups as Blacks, Hispanics, Asian/Pacific Islanders, women, gays and lesbians) were “political nonsense,” and promised to abolish them. Former DNC chair Robert Strauss summed up the new consensus among party leaders on “special interest groups.” “The defeat will mean nothing to them. The hunger of these groups will be greater. Women, Blacks, teachers, Hispanics. They have more power, more money than ever before. Do you think these groups are going to turn the party loose? Do you think labor is going to turn the party loose? Jesse Jackson? The others? Forget it.”32

The Democratic Party’s move to the right was spurred by the creation of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in February 1985. Initiated by several prominent Democrats, the council’s aim was to move the party back to the middle by shedding its liberal, antibusiness, soft-on-defense image.33 According to one Democratic strategist, “The fear of a lot of people is that this group wants to take the cream of the party’s leadership and leave [DNC Paul] Kirk with Jesse Jackson and the single-issue interest groups.”34 The liberal wing of the party was in agreement with the turn. According to Ted Kennedy in 1985: “There is a difference between being a party that cares about women and being the women’s party. And we can and must be a party that cares about minorities without becoming a minority party.”35

The DLC strategy carried the day in the Democratic Party, and its partisans viewed themselves as vindicated when the DLC ticket of white Southerners Bill Clinton and Al Gore won the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections. At best, the Clinton-Gore administration promoted a “race-neutral” approach to social policy that simply tried to avoid issues of racial discrimination. At worst, it pandered to racism by scapegoating Black welfare recipients or Latino immigrants. This was no accident, because abandoning any notion of government action to correct racial injustice has been central to New Democrat politics from the start. Clinton abandoned Lani Guinier, his original choice to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, in the face of a hysterical right-wing campaign branding Guinier a “quota queen.”36 While claiming a posture of wanting to “mend” rather than “end” affirmative action, Clinton ordered the end of dozens of federal affirmative action “set-aside” programs. “I’ve done more to eliminate programs—affirmative action programs—I didn’t think were fair,” Clinton boasted in one of the 1996 presidential debates, “and to tighten others up than my predecessors have since affirmative action’s been around.”37 The administration pressed the Congressional Black Caucus to drop from the 1994 crime bill a “Racial Justice Act” that required assurances that the death penalty wouldn’t be administered in a racially discriminatory way.38 And the administration refused to change federal drug sentencing laws on crack cocaine that overwhelmingly discriminate against Black offenders.39

Just how much the Clinton-Gore administration took Black support for granted became evident in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s stolen presidential election in 2000. Democrat Gore received near-monolithic support from Blacks in spite of doing little to deserve it. And despite well-documented cases of Black disenfranchisment in Florida, candidate Gore demobilized protests in the interests of “stability.”40 An aggressive Republican campaign and a corrupt Supreme Court decision pushed Bush into the White House, even though Gore had won more than half a million more votes than Bush. In some ways, the imposition of Bush in 2000 seemed the latest revenge of the Confederacy. The Electoral College, an institution established at the behest of slaveholders to protect their interests, foisted on the country a president who received fewer popular votes than his opponent. The historic legacy of racism and inequality, built into the constitutional system, reared its head again on the cusp of the twenty-first century.