From Joe William Trotter, Jr. The African-American Experience (Houghton Mifflin, 2001)
African Americans
confronted not only rising unemployment, poverty, and residential segregation
but also overt attacks on the gains of the civil rights and Black Power
movements. Although there were significant differences between and among
Republican and Democratic administrations on these issues, they were linked by
a thread of resistance to social welfare and affirmative action programs.
In 1976, Jimmy Carter's
election rested on almost unanimous black support, but he soon took public
policy positions that dissatisfied his black constituents. As early as May
1977, Carter announced that his administration would not initiate new social
welfare, health, and education programs. Black colleges and universities had
received about 75 percent of their support from federal spending under Title
III of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but Carter reduced such support to nearly
50 percent in 1977 and to 18 percent in 1980. Although he promised to reduce
the defense budget, the military budget increased to a historic $111.8 billion.
In the meantime, the U.S. Supreme Court gradually chipped away at the legal
underpinnings of affirmative action programs and minority set-asides. In University
of California Regents v. Bakke (I 978), the Court ruled that a quota-based
admission policy violated white student Allan Bakke's right to equal access to
educational opportunities and ordered his admission to the University of
California medical school at Davis. Although the Court upheld the validity of
using race as part of an admissions policy designed to increase the diversity
of the student body, the ruling had the effect of dampening institutional
incentives to pursue vigorous affirmative action plans.
Under pressure from civil rights
organizations and dissatisfied black constituents, the Carter administration
nonetheless retained affirmative action and minority set-aside programs. In
1977, Congress passed the Public Works Employment Act, which set aside 10
percent of each grant for "minority enterprises” including those of white
women. In 1982, when Congress passed the Surface Transportation Act, it
required that 10 percent of all federal highway expenditures go to
disadvantaged-group enterprises. Similarly, the 1987 National Defense
Authorization Act set a 5 percent minority goal for procurement and research
and development grants and contracts. By 1990, minority set-aside programs had
spread widely throughout the federal government. and represented some $8.6
billion in contracts. In a series of cases during the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S.
Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of such affirmative action and
set-aside programs. In United Steelworkers of America v. Weber (I 979),
the Court upheld affirmative action hiring and training programs for
minorities. Although Brian Weber's race (white) prevented him from joining a
minority job training program, the Court held that his rights were not
violated. In its craftsman training program in Gramercy, Louisiana, the Kaiser
Aluminum Company admitted blacks and whites on a one- to-one ratio until blacks
in craft jobs reached their proportion in the local work force. The Court also
held that Kaiser's program was private and voluntary and that past
discrimination against blacks justified its existence. A year later, the Court
ordered the Alabama Department of Public Safety to hire black and white state
troopers at a ratio of one to one until blacks reached 25 percent of all
patrolmen. Blacks made up over 26 percent of the state's total population but
had no state troopers before taking the matter to court. In Fullilove v.
Klutznick (I 980), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of
federal set-aside programs. Strengthened by congressional and judiciary support
for affirmative action, states, counties, and municipalities instituted their
own affirmative action procedures during the 1980s. By 1990, over 230 state and
local jurisdictions had set up set-aside programs of various types.
Even as federal courts,
states, and municipalities strengthened affirmative action programs, both
Reagan and Bush cut the affirmative action enforcement powers of the Office of
Federal Contract Compliance (OFCC) and the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission (EEOC) and reduced expenditures for social welfare services. Whereas
Carter had initiated seventeen civil rights violation suits and Nixon twenty-four
during their first six months in office, Reagan’s civil rights division lodged
only five. In 1983, Reagan fired three liberal members of the U.S. Civil Rights
Commission and engineered its reconstitution with a conservative majority.
However, Commissioner Mary Frances Berry, a civil rights activist, attorney,
and scholar, fought back and won reinstatement. She not only filed a lawsuit
but also kept the issue before the public through an extensive press campaign
exposing the injustice of Reagan’s actions. Despite Berry’s heroic actions on
behalf of civil rights, thereafter the U.S. Civil Rights Commission hampered
the enforcement of civil rights legislation, abetted by Reagan's reduction of
its budget by nearly $4 billion. Whereas Carter required federal contractors
with 50 or more employees to file affirmative action plans, Reagan restricted
such requirements to firms with 250 or more employees. The Reagan
administration also eliminated the Guaranteed Student Loan program and reduced
the level of support for food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent
Children.
Following Reagan’s reelection in 1984,
the Supreme Court took an even more aggressive stand against affirmative
action. During his second term, Reagan took advantage of vacancies on the high bench
and made appointments that shifted the balance of power from the liberal to the
conservative end of the political spectrum. Subsequent court rulings reversed
support for affirmative action by tightening the rules of evidence. In the City of Richmond v. Croson (I 989), the high
court held that the city’s set-aside program violated the Fourteenth
Amendment's equal protection clause. According to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor,
writing for the majority, there was "no evidence" that
"qualified minority contractors" had been passed over for contracts
or subcontracts because of race "either as a group or in any individual
case." O'Connor and the Court held that blacks would have to meet a strict
"disparity impact" test--that is, they would have to prove case by
case the impact of current discrimination rather than broad societal
discrimination or past evidence of discrimination. As a result of this
decision, within two years state and local governments spent nearly $13 million
on "disparity impact" studies designed to prove the extent of past
and present discrimination and to justify their set-aside programs. Following
the Court's increasingly restrictive decisions in civil rights cases, Associate
Justice Thurgood Marshall declared that such decisions represented nothing less
than "the product" of 'deliberate retrenching of the civil rights
agenda."
In comparison to Reagan,
Bush announced a "kinder and gentler" set of policies. Although he
reinforced the policies of his predecessor on the core issues of social
welfare, employment, and urban poverty, Bush opened the White House to more
meetings with black leaders; increased the budget of the EEOC; and signed the
Civil Rights Act of 1991, a modified version of a 1990 measure that he had
vetoed. Nonetheless, by the early 1990s, popular white support for the civil
rights agenda had nearly disappeared. In 1990, a survey conducted by the
Times-Mirror Corporation showed that nearly 81 percent of white men and women
alike disagreed that the nation should make "every possible effort to
improve the position of blacks and other minorities, even if it means giving
them preferential treatment." Such sentiment cut across party lines and
pushed the Democratic Party toward the right on civil rights and social welfare
issues.
In their presidential
bid, William Jefferson Clinton and his running mate, Al Gore, penned a book, Putting
People First (I 992), that stated their goals for the nation. Key to the
Clinton-Gore campaign was a pledge to "end welfare as we know it."
Clinton and Gore declared, "It's time to honor and reward people who play
by the rules. This means ending welfare as we know it.... No one who can work
should be able to stay on welfare forever." Clinton also disappointed
prospective black voters when he approved the execution of a severely retarded
black death row inmate as part of a deliberate strategy to undercut Republican
charges that Democrats were soft on crime. Jesse Jackson made a special plea on
behalf of the condemned man on "moral" and "humanitarian
grounds, but to no avail. One New York political analyst remarked that Clinton
"had someone put to death who had only part of a brain. You can’t find
them any tougher than that."
On assuming office,
Clinton established a working group on welfare reform and proposed to Congress
his "Work and Responsibility Act of 1994." At issue were several
interrelated programs-Supplemental Security Income, Food Stamps, Medicare,
Medicaid, and especially Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The
established AFDC programs included a work component entitled JOBS (job
Opportunities and Basic Skills Training), but critics argued that few
recipients actually worked or received basic skills training under the program.
Single women with children made up about 90 percent of all AFDC recipients.
Since the federal government worked closely with states and guaranteed that
money, would be available to meet needs despite fluctuations in the economy,
these programs were considered "entitlements." To move current welfare
recipients into the work force, the measure proposed to limit unrestricted cash
payments under public assistance programs to a maximum of two years but made
exceptions for mothers of infants and disabled children. Although the plan’s
shortcomings were criticized by Democratic supporters, congressional
Republicans killed the measure and substituted their own, harsher, 'Personal
Responsibility Act of 1995." The Republican bill set up the Temporary
Assistance to Needy Families program, provided single block grants to states,
and revised the notion of "entitlements" to "funds based on
need." Emboldened by their so-called Contract with America, a document
signed by numerous Republican leaders pledging a balanced budget and an end to
the welfare state, a number of newly elected Republican congressmen insisted on
eliminating the old New Deal social welfare arrangement. The Republican measure
restricted recipients to a lifetime limit of sixty months on public assistance
pro- grams and eliminated exemptions for mothers of infants and disabled
children, as well as the elderly.
On 22 August 1996, President Clinton
signed the Republican Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
Reconciliation Act, or "welfare to work," legislation into law. Only
by proving that he was not soft on welfare, Clinton believed, could he win
reelection in November 1996. At the same time, the federal government extended
grants in aid to large corporations. In 1994, for example, spending for social
welfare programs reached about $75 billion, whereas corporate aid was over $ 1
00 billion. In March 1994, the Washington Post reported that
"ending welfare as we know it" should mean cutting off not only unwed
mothers but "indolent corporations that have grown fat at the public
trough." Although a cross-section of liberal and conservative constituents
formed the Stop Corporate Welfare Coalition in August 1996, efforts to curtail
federal aid to corporations produced few results.
Anti-social welfare and anti-affirmative
action policies were deeply rooted in popular white resistance to the gains of
the civil rights and Black Power movements. The state of California helped to
lead the way. In 1978, white workers and middle-class property owners joined
forces and passed Proposition 13, which cut taxes that supported social welfare
services. During the 1980s, the so-called tax revolt spread across the country.
In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209. Known as the California
Civil Rights Initiative, Proposition 209 mandated an end to affirmative action
and set-aside programs in educational, public service, and any other agency
supported by government funds. In the wake of Proposition 209, anti-affirmative
action movements spread rapidly to other states, including Arizona, Colorado, Florida,
Washington State, Ohio, and Michigan, where a federal court challenge to the
conservative reaction to affirmative action in higher education was pending as
of mid-2000.
"Color-Blind"
Approaches and Genetic Theories
Some conservative intellectuals
justified the emerging racial order on the basis of "color-blind"
ideology, or meritocracy. They argued that racial categories should be
discarded as things of the past, emphasizing individuals rather than groups as
the core constituents of postmodern society. As one recent analyst noted, 'The
view that race is not biological ... appears at first blush as progressive, but
in fact, color blindness as advocated in the mainstream attempts to neutralize
... the social power of race." In short, as the legal scholar Kimberie
Crenshaw notes, "Neutral functions here as a euphemism for white."
Unlike their "color-blind" contemporaries, however, social theorists
like Charles Murray and his late colleague Richard J. Herrenstein turned to older
genetic arguments to support the dismantling of the Second Reconstruction. In
their book The Bell Curve (1994), they argued that African Americans
occupied the lower rungs of the political economy not only because of cultural
conditions but because of "inherited racial characteristics."
Although both Murray and Dinesh D'Souza, another late-twentieth-century
conservative intellectual, initially emphasized cultural explanations, Murray
and Herrenstein now adopted explicitly genetic or biological explanations of
racial disparities.
Intimidation and Violence
The spread of extralegal forms of intimidation and violence reinforced the conservative agenda. During the 1980s and 1990s, the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups experienced a revival. The Klan nearly tripled its national membership and staged massive rallies across the country. White vigilantes shot, beat, and killed blacks in northern, southern, and western states and cities. Victims included men and women, young and old, middle-class and poor blacks, political activists and nonactivists. In November 1979, Klansmen and Nazis killed five protesters at an antiracist rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. An all-white jury acquitted the accused despite the preponderance of evidence pointing to their guilt. A year later, a gunman shot Vernon Jordan, director of the National Urban League, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Although Jordan’s assailant, Joseph Franklin, admitted that he hated blacks, an all-white jury exonerated him of attempted murder charges. In 1980 alone, some twelve blacks were lynched in Mississippi. In Atlanta, twenty- eight black youths were murdered between 1979 and 1982. Although authorities linked two of the murders to a black man, Wayne B. Williams, the FBI showed a disregard for black families by failing to pursue evidence leading to possible convictions in the other cases. In 1989, a white mob killed a sixteen-year-old black youth, Yusuf Hawkins, in a predominantly white neighborhood in Brooklyn.
Police brutality and injustice before the law reinforced the wave of extralegal violence that blacks faced during the period. Between 1976 and 1981, police killed and/or maimed black suspects in Philadelphia, Detroit, New Orleans, and Oak- land. In New Orleans, police killed four young black men in retaliation for the death of a white police officer, allegedly killed by an African American. In 1979 alone, Oakland police killed nine black mates. In February 1989, Tampa, Florida’s black community erupted into violence when police killed Edgar Allen Price, a black man suspected of drug dealing. And on 31 March 1992, a Los Angeles resident and amateur photographer filmed the brutal police beating of black motorist Rodney King. Officers had given chase to King’s automobile, which they reported as speeding. After catching up to King, and stopping and cornering his automobile, they ordered him out of the car. According to officers, King resisted arrest, which justified the excessive force used to subdue him, but the film that flashed across national and international television portrayed several policemen mercilessly flailing the man with nightsticks after he had fallen to the ground. As we will see later, after courts found the offending officers not guilty, the South Central Los Angeles community exploded into violence.