After the Dream: Black and White Southerners since 1965

11 FROM BUSH TO BUSH

• 11 • FROM BUSH TO BUSH The Complexities of Civil Rights “When the subject is civil rights,” wrote the journalist Steven A. Holmes in 1991, there were “two George Bushes.” There was the George Bush who told a cheering group of black supporters in town for his inauguration that King’s dream of equality would be “a vision for his tenure,” who talked movingly of the “moral stain of segregation” and of his determination to cleanse the nation of its last vestiges. There was the George Bush who appointed the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, and who donated half the proceeds of his autobiography to the United Negro College Fund. But there was also the George Bush whose 1988 election campaign featured the blatantly racist Willie Horton advertisements, who appointed the bleakly conservative Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in place of the liberal icon Thurgood Marshall, and who repeatedly threatened to veto the Civil Rights Act of 1991. The act strengthened the nation’s laws against job discrimination, laws that the Supreme Court had severely weakened two years earlier. George Bush, concluded Holmes, was “a man whose public and private life has included both episodes of moral courage and incidents which his opponents say demonstrate either racial insensitivity or a willingness to use the racial card for political gain.” It was this dualism that characterized his attitude toward civil rights throughout his presidency. Nowhere was it more in evidence than during the long struggle to pass the 1991 Civil Rights Act.1 Despite Willie Horton, Bush began his presidency with a higher level of support from black Americans than any other Republican president in the modern era. He “enjoyed one major advantage,” explained Eleanor Holmes Norton, the congressional delegate from Washington, DC, and that was “not being Reagan.” Blacks had heeded his call for “a kinder, gentler America ”; they had noted certain symbolic actions like meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus, which his predecessor had never done, and his attendance at “significant black events,” again something Reagan had rarely 238 • AFTER THE DREAM bothered with, and had high hopes that he would again provide the moral leadership that had so characterized the early years of the civil rights era.2 This sense of possibility did not last long. It was severely tested in the administration’s first weeks by the nomination of William Lucas as assistant attorney general and head of the Civil Rights Division. Lucas, a black conservative who supported tax exemptions for segregated private schools and vehemently opposed quotas, was scarcely the liberal successor to Reynolds that the civil rights constituency had been seeking. At his confirmation hearings, he displayed, along with a disturbing inexperience in the field of civil rights law, such a bleakly negative view of his proposed role that even Representative John Conyers of Michigan, his original sponsor, withdrew his support, as did Jesse Jackson. The NAACP had been opposed from the start. Though conservative groups rallied to his support, they could not prevent the House Judiciary Committee from rejecting the nomination on the grounds of inexperience—despite the former segregationist leader Strom Thurmond’s plea to “give this black man a chance.” The whole affair cost the president much of the goodwill with which the black community had regarded the new administration.3 President Bush’s nomination problems were compounded further by his choice of Arthur A. Fletcher, a conservative black lawyer and businessman who had also served briefly as secretary of labor in the Nixon administration, as chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Liberals had pressed for the appointment of former commissioner Arthur S. Flemming, who was also strongly supported by civil rights activists in what one of them termed “a measure of his [Bush’s] commitment.” Fletcher, however, a close friend of the president’s who with his wife occasionally visited the White House for private dinners and movie screenings, lobbied hard for the job. His appointment, he told Bush, “will indicate that the Bush Administration hasn’t blinked, nor is it back peddling [sic] on its commitment to civil rights, employment affirmative action, minority business opportunity and a higher quality of life for all of the nation’s citizens.” In response, the president assured him, “When the time comes to name a new chairman of the Civil Rights Commission, I’ll be proud to have an old friend and loyal trooper in that important post.” Fletcher’s...