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NEWS & LETTERS, January-February 2005Black/Red ViewRacism and politicsby John Alan The practice of racism, both openly violent and covered over in politics, has existed in this nation since it was founded. Martin Luther King Jr. once said: "The Black revolution is much more than struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its inter-related flaws: racism, poverty, militarism and materialism." Recently it was reported that after 40 years the authorities in Philadelphia, Miss., finally arrested a suspect who was deeply involved in the 1965 murder of three voter-registration workers from the Congress of Racial Equality. CIVIL RIGHTS MURDERS The suspect is Edgar Ray Killen, a 79-year-old preacher who, investigators say, organized and led two carloads of Klansmen on the night of the killings, was arrested at his home in Philadelphia, Miss., and charged with the murder of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. Forty years ago this act of Klan terrorism in a small Mississippi town did immediately attract the attention of many conservative politicians across this nation, who were against the so-called "racial liberalism" of President Lyndon Johnson's administration. "Racial liberalism" meant the Civil Rights Act of 1964--which ended racial segregation in public facilities and racial discrimination in the workplace--and the Voting Rights Act, which put the federal government behind the Afro-American right to vote. Of course, the "racial liberalism" of the Johnson administration was its response to the Civil Rights Movement. During that time Ronald Reagan was a notable opponent of Lyndon B. Johnson's "racial liberalism." He was opposed to the concept of integration and was working hard to gain enough political power to prevent the enactment of any law that would end racial segregation in America. Fifteen years later, when Reagan ran for president in 1980, he opened his presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter at a fairground near Philadelphia, Miss., and told a cheering crowd of 10,000 white people that he believed in "states' rights." The Ku Klux Klansmen who murdered Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman in Neshoba county also said they were "states' righters." The reason Reagan started his 1980 campaign in the South was to establish a Southern strategy to get white Southerners to vote for a Republican candidate by making race a major issue of the election. Reagan won the election and once he was in the Oval Office reduced all funds for desegregation and encouraged court action to end desegregation programs. To gut civil rights enforcement he appointed Clarence Thomas, the Black conservative, to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). PLAYING THE RACE CARD Ronald Reagan isn't the only candidate for president to have played a race card to get white votes. George H. W. Bush, the father of the current president, played it blatantly when he ran for president in 1988. He used the crime of Willie Horton, an African-American convict--who raped a white woman while on furlough--to defeat his opponent, Michael Dukakis, who was the governor of Massachusetts at the time of Horton's furlough. He held Michael Dukakis responsible for Willie Horton's crime and generated fear of the Black "criminal" to propel himself into the presidency. Bush, like other presidents before him, found Black faces to represent his racist agenda. He appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, despite strong allegations by EEOC employee Anita Hill of sexual harassment in the workplace. Clarence Thomas' views are conservative in the sense that he believes you have to forget about race once you arrive at high positions in the government. He believes that the Constitution should be interpreted exactly in the spirit in which the founders wrote it, regardless of the fact that many of the founders were slave owners. Current President Bush might appoint Clarence Thomas Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The concerns over that stem not only from the conservative views espoused by Thomas, but also by his grudge against those who challenged his nomination in 1991. According to THE WASHINGTON POST (Dec. 6-12, 2004), "Thomas retains a special animus for certain civil rights activists and liberal interest groups such as People for the American Way, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Alliance for Justice. He blames them, in large part, for the damage done to his reputation. 'These people are mad because I'm in Thurgood Marshall's seat,' he told one visitor.... Thomas keeps a list in his head of who was for and against him during his confirmation hearings. He is still bitter." To have such a man as chief justice does not bode well for the civil rights of any Americans. History is not changed by courts. Rather it is mass activity that forces the courts to make decisions we now find landmark, such as Brown v. Board of Education. If it was just up to the courts, slavery would never have been abolished. But if the mass struggle ends with appointments to courts or elections of officials, it will not be enough to change the society and to uproot racism. Clarence Thomas, like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, may be the result of the movement, but they are not the future of it. |
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