Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must
overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry
and injustice. And we shall overcome.''
The New York Times
March 23, 2008 Sunday
Late Edition - Final
Yet it was President Johnson, too, who
foresaw the end of what Glenda Gilmore, a
Yale historian and author of ''Defying
Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights,
1919-1950,'' described last week as a 20year ''national conversation on race'' in the
1950s and 1960s. After signing the Civil
Rights Act in July 1964, the president is
said to have observed that he had just
handed over the South to the Republicans
for at least a generation. The Republicans
seized the opportunity to peel off
Democratic states. They studied the
campaigns of George Wallace, the Alabama
governor who ran as an independent
presidential candidate in 1968, to see how
he appealed to whites. They developed the
''Southern strategy'' that helped Richard
Nixon and later Ronald Reagan. With
blacks voting overwhelmingly Democratic
by now, and their party struggling to hold
onto white working-class ethnic voters in
the North, there was little incentive for
presidential candidates of either party to
bring up race in a serious way.
Talk About Race
BYLINE: By JANNY SCOTT
SECTION: Section WK; Column 0; Week
in Review Desk; CODE-BREAKING; Pg. 1
Barack Obama, the front-runner for the
Democratic presidential nomination, took
the almost unimaginable step of going
before a national audience at a precarious
juncture in a close campaign and speaking
explicitly about what race means to blacks
and whites. He spoke of black anger and
white resentment and the significance of
race in American history; his purpose was
political but he spoke with seriousness and
gravity and at length. Whether the speech
helped or hurt him remains to be seen. But
the moment was unlike virtually any in the
more than 40 years since the triumphs of the
civil rights struggle tore up party alignments
of the past and tamped down explicit
discussion of race by presidents and majorparty candidates addressing the American
people.
Politicians were not alone in dropping the
issue. The Watts riots broke out within days
of the signing of the Voting Rights Act of
1965; the Vietnam War increasingly
supplanted civil rights in the public's
attention.
The dynamic had been different once -when African-Americans had begun to vote
Democratic as well as Republican and
presidential candidates of both parties
competed for their votes; in 1948, Harry
Truman, courting swing voters in a close
election, became the first presidential
candidate from a major party to campaign in
Harlem (and ordered an end to segregation
in the armed services right after he won the
Democratic nomination). In the early 1960s,
opinion polls found that a majority of
Americans saw civil rights as the dominant
issue facing the country. And President
Lyndon B. Johnson, in one of several
memorable 1965 speeches on race, said,
speaking before a joint session of Congress
after the ''Bloody Sunday'' voting-rights
march from Selma, Ala.: ''Their cause must
be our cause too. Because it is not just
''Our morale was busted by the war,'' said
Richard N. Goodwin, the former Johnson
speechwriter who wrote the '65 race
speeches. ''The moral energy you needed
was not there anymore.''
Middle-class whites who had supported
civil rights in the Jim Crow South pulled
back when the struggle moved North. They
decided it was time to move on. That
decision coincided with the rise of some of
the thornier issues in civil rights -- poverty,
economic justice, black identity, the Black
Power movement, Professor Gilmore said.
Whites were alarmed in the late 1960s and
early 1970s by urban violence; they had
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grievances about busing, affirmative action
and other social programs. Talking about
race became increasingly loaded. When
word of an internal government report on
the condition of the black family, written by
Daniel Patrick Moynihan for the speech on
race that President Johnson had delivered at
Howard University and using the word
''pathology,'' leaked to the press in 1965, a
furor ensued, sabotaging a planned
conference on future government policy to
help blacks. Mr. Moynihan was accused of
being racist, although not by black leaders
like Roy Wilkins and the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.
House officials afraid of political risks.
Critics of affirmative action like Abigail
Thernstrom, who with her husband,
Stephan, wrote ''America in Black and
White: One Nation, Indivisible,''
complained that they were excluded from
the conversation. ''If you want to do a
serious commission, you need to get a
variety of voices,'' she said at the time. The
commission's report was met with
disappointment. John Hope Franklin, the
Duke University historian who was
chairman of the panel, said last week that
the effort was ''knocked down'' by much of
America.
Race did not disappear entirely from
presidential campaigns; it went under cover.
It lay buried in code phrases like ''crime in
the streets,'' ''states' rights,'' and ''welfare
mothers.'' Michael Klarman, a professor at
the University of Virginia Law School who
specializes in the constitutional history of
race, said, ''Nixon talks about 'law and
order,' which is a code term for the urban
race riots and rising crime rates. He talks
about appointing strict conservatives to the
Supreme Court, which is a code term for
justices who won't insist on mandatory
busing. And he talks explicitly about how
we ought to have 'local control of schools.'
Without explicitly using the language of
race, he is saying whites shouldn't have to
go to school with blacks.''
''It's not an easy subject for black people or
white people,'' said Ira Berlin, a historian at
the University of Maryland who writes on
slavery. ''As Obama indicated, there are lots
of legitimate hurts on both sides. It is
extremely easy for people to misspeak. In
part because we don't speak a lot and
because we don't speak a lot you don't
understand the language. People don't
understand where the land mines are. They
sometimes use the wrong words or are
condescending or seem to be condescending
when they're trying to be honest. It's easy
for people to take offense when the wrong
language is used, particularly when they've
got within them a lot of anger and are
looking for someone to beat with a small
stick. In those circumstances, it's often
better to say nothing.''
In 1980, Ronald Reagan, campaigning on a
platform that included ''states' rights,''
opened his general election campaign in
Philadelphia, Miss. -- a decision criticized
because it was where three civil rights
workers had been murdered in 1964.
Mr. Obama hardly seemed to be looking for
an opening. His hand was forced. For more
than a year, he had campaigned in such a
way as to appear to transcend race. The son
of a white mother and a black father, and
educated in elite schools, he emphasized
what he has called ''the universal issues that
all Americans care about.'' He managed to
elude narrow pigeonholing as a black
politician. But he finally confronted race
head-on in the speech in Philadelphia on
Tuesday, responding to an escalating
controversy over videotaped snippets of
inflammatory anti-white and anti-American
rhetoric by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.,
his longtime spiritual adviser and former
pastor.
Democratic presidents like Jimmy Carter
and Bill Clinton addressed the race issue in
various forms, but not nearly in the strong
terms offered up by Mr. Obama last week,
historians say. In June 1997, President
Clinton proposed a year-long national
''conversation'' about race and appointed a
high-powered advisory board to hold town
meetings and report on its findings. The
undertaking was plagued by lack of
organization and interference from White
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Mr. Obama's approach was historical,
personal and finally political. He traced the
country's racial divide back to the
Constitutional Convention, which the
question of slavery brought to a stalemate
''until the founders chose to allow the slave
trade to continue for at least 20 years.'' He
said the answer to slavery lay in the
Constitution's promise of liberty, justice and
a union to be perfected over time. He said
he had hoped his campaign would continue
the progress of others toward a more just
society. But it would not be possible to
solve the challenges without understanding
''that we may have different stories but we
hold common hopes.''
Steele, a senior research fellow at the
Hoover Institution and author of ''A Bound
Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama
and Why He Can't Win,'' called the speech
''shallow, beautifully delivered and just
disingenuous'' -- coming from Mr. Obama
''who has been blessed with every manner of
opportunity in this society.'' Mr. Wright's
anger is demagoguery, said Mr. Steele, who
like Mr. Obama is biracial. Racism ''no
longer remotely accounts for the difficulties
in black America,'' Mr. Steele said. As for
the lack of discourse about race, it is a
product of political correctness, ''the
language of white guilt.''
Asked what is needed to break the
stalemate, he said, ''White bravery.''
He told his own story, with its many
narrative strands: son of a black man from
Kenya and a white woman from Kansas,
raised in part by a grandfather who survived
the Depression and served in Patton's Army,
married to a black American ''who carries
within her the blood of slaves and slave
owners.'' He asked white Americans to try
to understand the humiliation, doubt and
fear that Mr. Wright and members of his
generation, who came of age in the 1950s
and '60s, grew up with and still remember.
And he asked black Americans to
understand the experiences that have bred
resentments over what whites saw as
unfairly hurting them: busing, affirmative
action, crime.
Mike Huckabee, the Baptist minister and
former governor of Arkansas who
abandoned his own campaign for the
Republican nomination in March, was
quoted saying, ''I grew up in a very
segregated South. And I think that you have
to cut some slack -- and I'm going to be
probably the only conservative in America
who's going to say something like this, but
I'm just telling you -- we've got to cut some
slack to people who grew up being called
names, being told, 'You have to sit in the
balcony when you go to the movie. You
have to go to the back door to go into the
restaurant.' ''
Those resentments ''helped shape the
political landscape for at least a generation,''
he said. Along with black anger, they had
distracted attention from ''the real culprits of
the middle-class squeeze'' -- a greedy
corporate culture, the power of special
interests, economic policies that favor the
few.
The country is a work in progress, Mr.
Obama suggested. People of different races
are more likely to live and work near each
other than they were in the past. Americans
now cry foul when a politician ''plays the
race card.'' There are some 10,000 black
elected officials. And a front-runner for the
Democratic presidential nomination is
black. ''I think he is uniquely positioned
because he straddles the racial divide very
well,'' said David Goldfield, a historian at
the University of North Carolina at
Charlotte. ''I think some of what he said will
resonate. But it's a gamble.''
Whether voters buy into Mr. Obama's
analysis and take up his invitation to move
on may become apparent in the coming
primaries in places like Pennsylvania. It
remains to be seen whether he has nudged
whites and African-Americans any closer to
mutual understanding or simply stoked the
anxieties and suspicions that helped close
down the conversation before. Shelby
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