Winning While Losing: Civil Rights, The Conservative Movement and the Presidency from Nixon to Obama

2. African American Civil Rights and Conservative Mobilization in the Jimmy Carter Years

2 AFRICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS AND CONSERVATIVE MOBILIZATION IN THE JIMMY CARTER YEARS Joseph Crespino and Asher Smith In the late 1970s it was an article of faith among conservative Republicans that liberal bureaucrats in Jimmy Carter’s administration were enforcing racial quotas. One of the most controversial issues among conservative Christians was an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) policy that denied federal tax exemptions to racially discriminatory private schools. Critics argued that small, independent religious schools were forced to submit to quotas or else face legal harassment from the federal government. The issue galvanized Protestants and was a critical issue in bringing these voters into the Republican fold. Two of the most influential New Right leaders, Paul Weyrich and the direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie, cited the IRS controversy as critical to conservative mobilization in the 1970s.1 At the 1980 Republican National Convention, one of the planks in the GOP platform pledged to halt the “unconstitutional regulatory vendetta launched by Mr. Carter’s IRS Commissioner against independent schools.”2 In the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, conservative Justice Department officials convinced the administration to revoke the IRS policy, which they believed had begun under Carter. In January 1982, the Reagan administration announced that it was dispensing with the policy and ordered that the tax-exempt status be restored to institutions that had been denied it under the old policy, among them· 55 · 56 · Joseph Crespino and Asher Smith Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, which maintained a policy against interracial dating.3 The problem was that the conservative activists and officials had gotten their history wrong. The policy had begun not under Jimmy Carter but under Richard Nixon in 1970, one of the most contentious years of southern school desegregation. What looked to conservatives like federal harassment of innocent Christian schools appeared to many other Americans like an appropriate and necessary effort by the federal government to enforce school desegregation in the most reactionary parts of the South. Editorial pages across the country charged Reagan with supporting what the New York Times dubbed “Tax Exempt Hate.” An embarrassed Reagan administration quickly reversed itself, denying any racial motivation and explaining its decision on legal grounds.4 The controversy over the IRS policy toward racially discriminatory private schools is a good example of the complex intersection of civil rights, presidential politics, and conservative political mobilization in the years following the landmark civil rights legislation. In the 1940s and 1950s, civil rights battles had taken place primarily in the courts. In the 1960s, the fight moved to Congress, where legislators passed historic legislation that corrected nearly a century’s worth of abject discrimination. Those laws created executive branch agencies that moved civil rights battles into presidential politics in novel ways in the 1970s. Congress tasked presidential administrations with enforcing complex civil rights laws that affected vast areas of public life. It was through bureaucratic processes that abstract ideas about racial equality were actually worked out. This was rarely a simple or easy process, yet these efforts significantly advanced the goals of fairness and equality in American life. DuringCarter’spresidency,thesewereoftensmall-boregainsachieved through executive branch powers. The administration struggled to remedy past discrimination in a way that appealed to a broad swath of voters or Congress, many of whom like the church-school supporters fell under the sway of a burgeoning reaction against various forms of government regulation. As the Carter administration struggled to make tangible the civil rights movement’s demands for greater equality, conservatives criticized the government for going beyond the color-blind proscription of civil rights legislation. Programs denounced as racial quotas became important props for conservative critics in their larger attack on what they considered to be big government run amok. African American Civil Rights and Conservative Mobilization in the Carter Years · 57 Jimmy Carter won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976 as a moderate candidate who would move his party to the political center after its disastrous defeat in 1972. As governor of Georgia he had established a reputation as one of the top New South leaders. Upon winning the governorship in 1971, Carter made an extraordinary announcement that signaled a dramatic break with the state’s segregationist past. “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over,” he pledged in front of former Governor Lester Maddox and fellow Georgians . “No poor, rural, weak or black person should...