-
1. Conversations with a Former President
- University of South Carolina Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 Conversations with a Former President My Blackberry vibrated, and I looked at my watch. It was 2:15 a.m. on the morning of January 27, 2008. I answered, and after several intermediate conversations, this powerful voice came on the other end: “If you bastards want a fight, you damn well will get one.” I needed no help identifying that voice. It was Bill Clinton, the former president of the United States, my longtime political friend who some were calling the country’s “first black president.” Black America, and particularly black South Carolina, had found political refuge in the presidency of this remarkable man. Tonight, however, that friendship was being tested. His wife, Hillary, had just suffered a major defeat in South Carolina’s Democratic primary, which was supposed to be a test of black political strength between Senator Clinton and a charismatic newcomer, Barack Obama. Obama had whipped her, and Bill Clinton wanted me to explain why. Aboard Air Force One (second from left) with President Bill Clinton, Reverend Jesse Jackson and Senator Ernest Hollings on the way to Greeleyville, South Carolina, to dedicate the first church rebuilt after a rash of black-church burnings in South Carolina in 1996. William J. Clinton Presidential Library. 4 Blessed by Experiences I told him I had pledged neutrality to the rules committee of the Democratic National Committee as a condition of their authorizing a primary in South Carolina , and I had kept that promise. I asked him to tell me why he felt otherwise. He exploded, using the word “bastard” again, and accused me of causing her defeat and injecting race into the contest. That charge went back to an earlier disagreement we had about Senator Hillary Clinton’s suggesting that, while Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had done an excellent job promoting the issues of civil and voting rights for black people, it took a sensitive president such as Lyndon Baines Johnson to have the resolution of those issues enacted into law. In a New York Times article referencing an interview Mrs. Clinton had with Fox News on Monday, January 5, 2008, she was quoted as saying “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” The article went on to say that Mrs. Clinton thought her experience should mean more to voters than uplifting words by Mr. Obama. “It took a president to get it done,” Mrs. Clinton said. It was an argument I had heard before while growing up in the South, even from white leaders who supported civil rights reform. It took black leaders to identify problems, but it took white leaders to solve them, they said. I had accepted that argument for a long time; but in 2008 it seemed long outdated, and it was frankly disappointing to hear it from a presidential candidate. When the reporter called to ask my reaction, I did not hold back. Whose Role is More Important? As I read news reports of this little dustup, I thought about the many debates that took place during the civil rights era. Not all of the discussion was black and white. Very often it was a debate within the black community. Was the NAACP more critical to our efforts than SCLC? Was Whitney Young more important than A. Philip Randolph? I hated these debates, having had an early experience that taught me how misplaced they were. It occurred during my last incarceration during our nonviolent war in the 1960s against racial inequality. We were challenging several “breach of peace” ordinances that were put in place to stymie our efforts to integrate public facilities in South Carolina . On March 15, 1961, student leaders from several colleges and high schools met at Zion Baptist Church on Washington Street in Columbia to march on the capitol. My roommate, “Duke” Missouri, and I attended the rally to help them organize , but we were not planning to march. We had had enough of jail for a while. So we dressed as if we were headed to church and went to Columbia. I wore a relatively new three-piece olive green suit, a new gold shirt, and a paisley-printed tie. Zion Baptist Church was packed. When the NAACP field secretary, the Reverend I. DeQuincey Newman, saw us, he figured from the way we were dressed that we were not planning to do much that day. He also knew that we were graduates of Mather Academy, a highly...