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Americans and their political leaders have been tongue-tied on the subject of race. We were reminded of that last week when Senator Barack Obama, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, took the almost unimaginable step of going before a national audience at a precarious juncture in a close campaign and speaking explicitly about what race meansto blacks and whites. He spoke of black anger and white resentment and the significance of race in American history; his purpose was political but he spoke with seriousness and gravity and at length. Whether the speech helped or hurt him remains to be seen. But the moment was unlike virtually any in the more than 40 years since the triumphs of the civil rights struggle tore up party alignments of the past and tamped down explicit discussion of race by presidents and major-party candidates addressing the American people.
The dynamic had been different once — when African-Americans had begun to vote Democratic as well as Republican and presidential candidates of both parties competed for their votes; in 1948, Harry Truman, courting swing voters in a close election, became the first presidential candidate from a major party to campaign in Harlem (and ordered an end to segregation in the armed services right after he won the Democratic nomination). In the early 1960s, opinion polls found that a majority of Americans saw civil rights as the dominant issue facing the country. And President Lyndon B. Johnson, in one of several memorable 1965 speeches on race, said, speaking before a joint session of Congress after the “Bloody Sunday” voting-rights march from Selma, Ala.: “Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
Yet it was President Johnson, too, who foresaw the end of what Glenda Gilmore, a Yale historian and author of “Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950,” described last week as a 20-year “national conversation on race” in the 1950s and 1960s. After signing the Civil Rights Act in July 1964, the president is said to have observed that he had just handed over the South to the Republicans for at least a generation. The Republicans seized the opportunity to peel off Democratic states. They studied the campaigns of George Wallace, the Alabama governor who ran as an independent presidential candidate in 1968, to see how he appealed to whites. They developed the “Southern strategy” that helped Richard Nixon and later Ronald Reagan. With blacks voting overwhelmingly Democratic by now, and their party struggling to hold onto white working-class ethnic voters in the North, there was little incentive for presidential candidates of either party to bring up race in a serious way.
Politicians were not alone in dropping the issue. The Watts riots broke out within days of the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the Vietnam War increasingly supplanted civil rights in the public’s attention.
“Our morale was busted by the war,” said Richard N. Goodwin, the former Johnson speechwriter who wrote the ’65 race speeches. “The moral energy you needed was not there anymore.”
Middle-class whites who had supported civil rights in the Jim Crow South pulled back when the struggle moved North. They decided it was time to move on. That decision coincided with the rise of some of the thornier issues in civil rights — poverty, economic justice, black identity, the Black Power movement, Professor Gilmore said. Whites were alarmed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by urban violence; they had grievances about busing, affirmative action and other social programs. Talking about race became increasingly loaded. When word of an internal government report on the condition of the black family, written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan for the speech on race that President Johnson had delivered at Howard University and using the word “pathology,” leaked to the press in 1965, a furor ensued, sabotaging a planned conference on future government policy to help blacks. Mr. Moynihan was accused of being racist, although not by black leaders like Roy Wilkins and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Race did not disappear entirely from presidential campaigns; it went under cover. It lay buried in code phrases like “crime in the streets,” “states’ rights,” and “welfare mothers.” Michael Klarman, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School who specializes in the constitutional history of race, said, “Nixon talks about ‘law and order,’ which is a code term for the urban race riots and rising crime rates. He talks about appointing strict conservatives to the Supreme Court, which is a code term for justices who won’t insist on mandatory busing. And he talks explicitly about how we ought to have ‘local control of schools.’ Without explicitly using the language of race, he is saying whites shouldn’t have to goto school with blacks.”
In 1980, Ronald Reagan, campaigning on a platform that included “states’ rights,” opened his general election campaign in Philadelphia, Miss. — a decision criticized because it was where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964.
Democratic presidents like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton addressed the race issue in various forms, but not nearly in the strong terms offered up by Mr. Obama last week, historians say. In June 1997, President Clinton proposed a year-long national “conversation” about race and appointed a high-powered advisory board to hold town meetings and report on its findings. The undertaking was plagued by lack of organization and interference from White House officials afraid of political risks. Critics of affirmative action like Abigail Thernstrom, who with her husband, Stephan, wrote “America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible,” complained that they were excluded from the conversation. “If you want to do a serious commission, you need to get a variety of voices,” she said at the time. The commission’s report was met with disappointment. John Hope Franklin, the Duke University historian who was chairman of the panel, said last week that the effort was “knocked down” by much of America.
“It’s not an easy subject for black people or white people,” said Ira Berlin, a historian at the University of Maryland who writes on slavery. “As Obama indicated, there are lots of legitimate hurts on both sides.It is extremely easy for people to misspeak. In part because we don’t speak a lot and because we don’t speak a lot you don’t understand the language. People don’t understand where the land mines are. They sometimes use the wrong words or are condescending or seem to be condescending when they’re trying to be honest. It’s easy for people to take offense when the wrong language is used, particularly when they’ve got within them a lot of anger and are looking for someone to beat with a small stick. In those circumstances, it’s often better to say nothing.”
Mr. Obama hardly seemed to be looking for an opening. His hand was forced. For more than a year, he had campaigned in such a way as to appear to transcend race. The son of a white mother and a black father, and educated in elite schools, he emphasized what he has called “the universal issues that all Americans care about.” He managed to elude narrow pigeonholing as a black politician. But he finally confronted race head-on in the speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday, responding to an escalating controversy over videotaped snippets of inflammatory anti-white and anti-American rhetoric by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., his longtime spiritual adviser and former pastor.
Mr. Obama’s approach was historical, personal and finally political. He traced the country’s racial divide back to the Constitutional Convention, which the question of slavery brought to a stalemate “until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least 20 years.” He said the answer to slavery lay in the Constitution’s promise of liberty, justice and a union to be perfected over time. He said he had hoped his campaign would continue the progress of others toward a more just society. But it would not be possible to solve the challenges without understanding “that we may have different stories but we hold common hopes.”
He told his own story, with its many narrative strands: son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, raised in part by a grandfather who survived the Depression and served in Patton’s Army, married toa black American “who carries within her the bloodof slaves and slave owners.” He asked white Americans to try to understand the humiliation, doubt and fear that Mr. Wright and members of his generation, who came of age in the 1950s and ’60s, grew up with and still remember. And he asked black Americans to understand the experiences that have bred resentments over what whites saw as unfairly hurting them: busing, affirmative action, crime.
Those resentments “helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation,” he said. Along with black anger, they had distracted attention from “the real culprits of the middle-class squeeze” — a greedy corporate culture, the power of special interests, economic policies that favor the few.
Whether voters buy into Mr. Obama’s analysis and take up his invitation to move on may become apparent in the coming primaries in places like Pennsylvania. It remains to be seen whether he has nudged whites and African-Americans any closer to mutual understanding or simply stoked the anxieties and suspicions that helped close down the conversation before. Shelby Steele, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of “A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win,” called the speech “shallow, beautifully delivered and just disingenuous” — coming from Mr. Obama “who has been blessed with every manner of opportunity in this society.” Mr. Wright’s anger is demagoguery, said Mr. Steele, who like Mr. Obama is biracial. Racism “no longer remotely accounts for the difficulties in black America,” Mr. Steele said. Asfor the lack of discourse about race, it is a product of political correctness, “the language of white guilt.”
Asked what is needed to break the stalemate, he said, “White bravery.”
Mike Huckabee, the Baptist minister and former governor of Arkansas who abandoned his own campaign for the Republican nomination in March, was quoted saying, “I grew up in a very segregated South. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m going to be probably the only conservative in America who’s going to say something like this, but I’m just telling you — we’ve got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, ‘You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant.’ ”
The country is a work in progress, Mr. Obama suggested. People of different races are more likely to live and work near each other than they were in the past. Americans now cry foul when a politician “plays the race card.” There are some 10,000 black elected officials. And a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination is black. “I think he is uniquely positioned because he straddles the racial divide very well,” said David Goldfield, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “I think some of what he said will resonate. But it’s a gamble.”
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