RACE RELATIONS

The New Conservative Climate

Although civil rights leaders had believed that the movement toward social and racial equality for minorities was slowing in the 1970s, the determined conservatism of the 1980s Reagan era caught them unprepared. The conservative mood that settled across some sections of the American public in this decade seemed to be a backlash against the civil rights movement that had been building since the land-mark victories of the 1960s. Many white middle-class voters found Reagan's conservatism appealing because they feared that social change in America had been too rapid and too extensive. As a candidate, Ronald Reagan had criticized school busing and affirmative action programs; as president he continued to exhibit a distaste for civil rights activism and for some of the gains that activism had achieved. During his two terms in office he met only once with the Congressional Black Caucus, and black leaders realized that, for the first time in many years, they had no real allies in the White House. Meanwhile, cuts in federal spending for such programs as food stamps and Medicaid proceeded without effective opposition, fueling the perception that the president and his administration were insensitive to issues affecting low-income and minority Americans. As the decade progressed, and civil rights policies and legislation from previous years were attacked and sometimes reversed by the Reagan administration, many blacks became increasingly discouraged. In a 1988 Newsweek poll, 71 percent of blacks surveyed said that the federal government was doing "too little" to help blacks. A year earlier Justice Thurgood Marshall, a legendary civil rights activist and the only black ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, said he believed that President Reagan ranked at "the bottom" of U.S. presidents in terms of rights for blacks. "Honestly," he said, "1 think he's down with Hoover and that group…when we really didn't have a chance."

Another Troubled Decade

The 1980s were riddled with racial incidents, many of which made the local news where they occurred and some of which made national headlines. The decade began with the 1980 Miami riots that followed the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating death of a black man, riots that left 9 dead and 163 injured. The decade ended with the 1989 fatal shooting in Bensonhurst, New York, of a sixteen-year-old black youth by young white men. In the years between, there were highly publicized events involving hate groups such as neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, which in 1987 attacked civil rights marchers in Forsyth County, Georgia, who were celebrating the recently established Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. In addition to other violent incidents—such as that in the Howard Beach section of New York City, in which three white teenagers attacked three black youths, one of whom died—the decade also saw a rise in racially motivated incidents on college campuses, incidents watched closely because colleges had traditionally been considered havens of tolerance. In the two academic years between 1986 and 1988, the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence listed 163 incidents on campuses across the country. Throughout the United States many blacks felt that the social climate had turned against them, that there was both greater hostility from some white groups and greater indifference from others. Newsweek magazine's special report, "Black and White in America," described the general attitude as "less caring" than in the 1960s. District of Columbia representative Walter Fauntroy, a veteran civil rights activist, detected "a new meanness" in human relations. At the same time, older leaders such as Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had died, and some major civil rights organizations that flourished earlier, such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), had declined. At the beginning of the decade, with the triumph of Republican conservatives in national politics, black leaders looked grimly at the troubles ahead. Vernon Jordan, head of the National Urban League, who had been shot and seriously wounded in 1980, said in a 1981 speech to the organization, "The complexities of today's racial, economic and political issues are such that there is no one grand strategy or leader to deliver us. We will have to draw on our immense resources of survival skills to get us through these hard times."

Jesse Jackson

The Reverend Jesse Jackson, a youthful black leader during the civil rights battles of the 1960s and 1970s and considered by some blacks the successor to Martin Luther King Jr., became a pivotal figure in race relations and civil rights in the 1980s. In 1983, charging that Democratic leaders had been too passive in the face of Republican cutbacks in programs for the poor and minorities, he became a Democratic presidential candidate; he also announced his intention to build a coalition of dispossessed minorities, including African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans—what he called a "rainbow coalition" of those who were "rejected and despised" and "left naked before the Lord in wintertime." This presidential campaign, and another in 1988, not only made him a hero to many blacks but also proved something that had appeared unlikely if not impossible before: that a black could be taken seriously as a presidential candidate. Indeed, in the 1988 primaries Jackson gained the support of a significant number of white voters; although he did not win the Democratic nomination, he was a major force by the time of the party's national convention in Atlanta, where his eloquent plea for racial harmony in America drew admiration from Americans of all races. After 1988 the idea that Jackson, or some other African American, could become president in the reasonably near future did not seem unreasonable.

Louis Farrakhan

Black leader Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, was a stirring orator who exerted a profound influence on his followers, many of whom were young black men from inner cities who were lured away from drugs, violence, and the casual siring of illegitimate children to a new lifestyle based on pride, self-discipline, education, and the avoidance of drugs (including alcohol and tobacco) and promiscuity. But, although he was closely associated with Jesse Jackson and a strong supporter of Jackson in both his presidential campaigns, Farrakhan was widely viewed outside the black community—and by some blacks, as well—as an anti-Semite, a demagogue, and an extremist in his view of race relations. Acknowledging these widespread perceptions, Jackson was forced to distance himself publicly from Farrakhan, although he refused to break completely with him. The principal disagreement between Farrakhan and Jackson concerned their views of race relations: while Jackson advocated the integration and harmony of all racial groups in American society, Farrakhan preached racial antagonism and separatism. In speaking tours across the United States, Farrakhan was greeted by large and enthusiastic crowds. At Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1985, for example, he addressed twenty-five thousand listeners. At this meeting, according to a reporter for The Economist Farrakhan attacked "established Black leaders, white folk in general, and Jews in particular." Five years later, in an interview in People magazine, Farrakhan stated his view that the United States should pay reparations to blacks for the oppression they have suffered. "Blacks are separate," he said. "If America does not have the will to bring about a change within a permanent underclass, then…what does America owe us? Reparations must include the freeing of all blacks from state and federal penitentiaries. Then let us ask our brothers and sisters in Africa to set aside a separate territory for us, and let us take the money that America is spending to maintain these convicts and [invest it in] a new reality on the African continent."

Former KKK Member Wins Political Office

Although small in number at the beginning of the 1980s, the white supremacists in the Ku Klux Klan attracted extensive media coverage and won new converts to their ranks as the decade proceeded. While the KKK began to change its image somewhat, presenting itself as an organization of paramilitary guerrillas fighting for racial survival, it continued its terrorist cross burnings: from 1985 to 1987 the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center reported forty-five cases of arson and cross burnings, as well as hundreds of acts of vandalism. Then, in 1989, in an event that symbolized the troubled race relations in the decade, David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Klan, won a seat in the Louisiana legislature. Elected by a virtually all-white suburb of New Orleans, Duke took pains to dismiss his earlier leadership role in the KKK, attributing it to youthful indiscretion; but most outside observers were unconvinced, believing that his campaign demonstrated racist views carefully couched in language designed to obscure them. To the great embarrassment of the national Republican Party, Duke had been elected as a Republican. Although both President Reagan and President Bush had denounced Duke, many people felt that Republican policies had promoted the climate in which people like Duke could thrive. Critics pointed to the allegedly race-baiting "Willie Horton" television ad that, the year before Duke's election, Republicans had used against Bush's opponent, Michael Dukakis. Duke's election gave him nationwide media attention; he later ran for the U.S. Senate but was defeated, to the relief of those who hoped for improved race relations in the next decade.