Reagan and the Revival of Racism

South Africa at Home

In the early fall of 1985, the television images from South Africa stirred politicians along the Potomac--including a reluctant President--to unprecedented, if limited, action. They stirred something quite different in me--a sense of vaguely cynical déjà vu, of irony only thinly masking deep pessimism about the course of recent American history.

The déjà vu is obvious. To a white Mississippian who lived and worked in that state during the days of massive resistance to integration, televised pictures of sprawling black demonstrators and charging white cops are old stuff. Only the locale has changed.

But the cynicism springs from something more recent and far more disturbing. We Americans still seem capable of moral outrage about man's inhumanity to man or racism embodied in official policy. But now, unlike 20 years ago, our outrage grows stronger the farther away the repression. What bores or even angers us is the insistence of the nation's minorities that we are still a long way from the mountaintop of true equality. It is a new America, Ronald Reagan's America, and at times it smells a lot like the old Mississippi.

The interior camera throws up its own images:

One is from the Transkei, a tiny section of South Africa carved out by the government in Pretoria as "an independent homeland" for certain blacks. It was early evening in the summer of 1975, and I was out walking on the streets of Umtata, the capital. A light-skinned, middle-aged man close to being a caricature of a European colonialist, complete with clipped mustache, knee socks and (to this American ear) British accent, approached me.

"Do you know where a colored can get a drink at this hour?" he asked.

For a moment, I didn't understand the question. Then, with a flood of queasy embarrassment, I did. Here, in this independent, black-run "nation," the rules of the South African game still held. Whites and nonwhites must eat, drink, be educated, live and die in separate places. It was the reality behind all the official rhetoric of reform, sickeningly familiar to a Southerner of my generation.

Another image: midsummer, 1960, on the main business street of Greenville, Mississippi, my home town. The local leader of the NAACP, a black businessman, walked up, said hello and put out his hand. I froze. Should I break the unwritten code and shake hands with a black man, with God knew how many folk looking on in enraged disbelief? Should I live up to my private beliefs, no matter what segregation demanded?

A friend called out from across the street. I turned quickly, gratefully, in his direction, and the moment passed. I had flunked the test.

And yet another image: May 1954, one of those beautiful spring days that made a Princeton education seem like a long vacation with F. Scott Fitzgerald. My good friend and fellow Mississippian, John Stennis, son of the U.S. Senator, bounced into me on the walkway near Nassau Hall. Had I heard the news? The Supreme Court had just ruled that school segregation--"separate but equal" education--was unconstitutional.

Thunder. Lightning. Both of us freshmen angrily agreed that such constitutional craziness would not be tolerated or obeyed. The Court might rule, but it could not command the white South to abandon its way of life. And while we decent folk knew that Negroes were sometimes--no, too often--abused by the Snopeses among us, that was no justification for Federal intervention of any kind, judicial, legislative or executive. We had to be allowed to change under our own steam, according to our own timetable and in our own way. Anyway, Negroes just weren't ready for racial mingling.

Finally, turn forward to the late fall of 1984, shortly after the smashing re-election triumph of Ronald Reagan. I was a guest at a small Washington dinner party. The conversation at one end of the table focused on civil rights at home and human rights abroad in the Eighties. The managing editor of a once-liberal journal of opinion, a man who still wore the tattered remnants of the liberal label, turned during the often-heated discussion to my wife and remarked, "You have to face the fact that some people are culturally and genetically unsuited for democracy."

No thunder, no lightning, except from my wife, Patricia Derian, a fierce battler for both kinds of rights over the past quarter century. No one else at the table publicly demurred or even seemed to notice that a circle had been closed, that with barely a blush of self-conscious rationalization, a point of view once thought buried for good among all but the overtly racist had resurfaced. It might as well have been a dinner table in the Mississippi Delta in the early Sixties.

Actually, it wasn't all that surprising. In ways that would have been unthinkable ten years ago, five years of the Reagan Presidency has given new hope to America's bigots and renewed legitimacy to the sly slogans of white supremacy. If it is not precisely a return to the time of Redemption, that tragic period in the 1870s when Washington turned its back on the black South and allowed white Southerners to reconstruct slavery in a new guise called Jim Crow, it is not because the President and his men have not tried.

But first, a half bow in the direction of Ronald Reagan, the all-American good guy. He is no slavering segregationist, no prophet of the purity of white civilization, no maddened defender of a society legally divided by race. He appears to be sincerely convinced that he is color-blind as well. By all reports, he finds acts of discrimination against individuals morally offensive.

The problem is that this very nice man has yet to find a Federal answer to institutionalized racism that he can wholeheartedly support, at least in its early stages. The unavoidable record establishes the fact that at each moment of national decision, he has gone with the segregationists while the majority has gone with racial change.

That was not too bad when he was simply a Hollywood actor and special-interest spokesman stumping for the new conservative Jerusalem. It was at least a geographically isolated challenge to racial equality, though a powerful one, when he was governor of California. It is a disaster now that he is President, in both concrete and symbolic ways.

What kind of disaster was succinctly summarized in 1984 by an editor of a major newspaper in a Middle Atlantic state. In a memo arguing (unsuccessfully) for the paper's endorsement of Walter Mondale instead of the President, he wrote:

When Ronald Reagan is asked why his support among blacks is so abysmally low, he assumes an air of injured innocence and claims that his record on civil rights is "the best-kept secret in Washington." In light of a record of relentless and at times even bitter hostility to traditional civil rights goals, one would think the President would earnestly desire to keep it just that way--a secret.

At the outset of his political career, he was among the few public figures who opposed enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. During Presidential-campaign appearances in the South in 1976 and 1980, he routinely dropped into his speeches a line about how we'd all seen a "strapping buck" buying T-bone steaks at the supermarket with food stamps. In the South, of course, that term is never used except as a vulgar racist epithet.

As President, he has cut basic support programs for the working poor; he appointed as his chief civil rights enforcer a Delaware aristocrat who had never been to Mississippi; he opposed the extension of the Voting Rights Act, the crown jewel of the civil rights legislation of the Sixties; he favored giving tax breaks to segregated private schools; he opposed designating Martin Luther King's birthday as a holiday; when it became apparent the King holiday had overwhelming Congressional support, he then signed the bill in a Rose Garden ceremony (but only after an unguarded snarl that maybe in 35 years we'd know whether or not Dr. King associated with Communists); he restructured the Civil Rights Commission in a way which abandoned that body's historic commitment to racial justice; he appointed a single black to a top-ranking Government position--one who maintains such a low profile that he is widely known in the black community as Silent Sam.

I quote this memo at such length because its author is a white Southerner who, like me, cut his journalistic teeth in the South during the long, bitter years of revolutionary change and bloody resistance. He, like me, had to make a hard journey of personal change along with most of our fellow white Southerners. And he, like me, is now appalled to see the Reagan Administration--in concert with too many other Americans--backing away from the nation's belated attempt to make good on the promises of its basic political documents.

The Administration's policy of (continued on page 214) Revival of Racism (continued from page 108) "constructive engagement" with the organized racism of South Africa is, or was, cut from the same cloth. And here, too, there is a personal connection and a highly personal perspective. I have relatives in South Africa and a family heritage there. Bridges that connect South Africa to Zimbabwe are named after a great-uncle who was an associate of Cecil Rhodes's. As one who has visited there often and calls a number of South Africans friends, and as a person who knows firsthand how difficult it is to change the patterns of centuries, I have deep sympathy for the difficulty of the task confronting that tortured nation.

But as with the American South two decades ago, there is no mileage to be gained by pretending that the white government in Pretoria is as interested in real change as the black majority it rules with an iron fist. And there is even less sense in Washington's maintaining warm relations with South Africa in the name of encouraging an end to apartheid. If that tack had been tried with George Wallace or Lester Maddox or Ross Barnett, to mention three of the South's most notorious segregationist governors of old, the white "way of life" would still be intact there today.

On the other hand, the white South African's accusation of hypocrisy, like the white Southerner's aimed at his Northern brethren in years gone by, has more than a grain of truth. It is far easier to tell others how to clean up their act than to deal with the moral squalor at home. Distancing ourselves from the defenders of apartheid is smart policy; engaging the enduring problems of race here at home is far more important.

•

But let's return to that 19-year-old Mississippian at Princeton on that spring day in 1954. He lived in a nation that had coexisted quite readily with segregation in the South and elsewhere for a long time and with Jim Crow's constitutional validation since the Supreme Court's Plessy vs. Ferguson decision in 1896. Congress had not passed a meaningful civil rights measure since the post--Civil War Reconstruction period. Of all the Presidents since Grant, only Harry Truman had been willing to give more than lip service to the notion that black people should not permanently remain second-class citizens. The incumbent President, Dwight Eisenhower, found it impossible to give unqualified public praise to the Court's desegregation decision.

In my section of the country, black Americans were considered less than human in the eyes of the law and in custom. Blacks--Negroes, as was the respectable word; niggers, as was the nearuniversal white designation--were nonbeings in the most obvious sense. All but a handful were prevented from registering to vote or actually voting, kept from that basic right of citizenship by an elaborate network of restrictive laws and, all else failing, by the simple expedient of physical intimidation and murder.

There were two sets of public schools: the merely inadequate, for white children, and the stunningly inferior, for black children. When I was a high school student, the average educational level of black Mississippians was third grade. The functional equivalent was probably closer to first grade, thanks to the shoddy facilities and inadequate textbooks provided for those separate-but-equal schools. No black--child or adult--went to school with a white within the state. That was not surprising, since no black could drink from a water fountain reserved for whites, use a toilet designated as white-only, eat at a table or counter in a restaurant frequented by whites or even look boldly into the eyes of a white man or (God forbid) a white woman. To attempt to shake hands with a white man was to court assault; to be thought of as "uppity" was dangerous for a black man's health; to seem to pose any kind of sexual threat to a white woman was fatal. What was true for Mississippi was true throughout the South.

As for the chance to live up to his economic potential even within the confines of segregation, it was a given that no black would or should be allowed to supervise the work of a white. It was also a given that all but the most menial jobs in factory, business and government were reserved for whites. Three dollars a day was considered high pay for a maid. Five dollars a day for farm labor was considered revolutionary, and virtually all farm and domestic day labor in much of the South was done by blacks.

But enough of the black Southerner, who, ill housed, ill clothed and ill fed, was essentially invisible to the bulk of the white majority. We whites were all but monolithic in our public adherence to segregation. White supremacy was no casual tenet. It was not a thread woven into a larger fabric. It was the warp and woof of the region, its culture, its politics, its religion, its history and its mythology. There were a few moderates, people like my newspaperman father, who argued with great bravery for gradual accommodation to racial change and racial justice. For their careful balancing of the demands of religion and democracy against the region's insistence on white conformity, they were tarred as Communists, scalawags and, worst of all, integrationists. As for the handful of white liberals, the true integrationists, they were isolated reminders that even the most closed of societies cannot totally silence dissent. They were our Sakharovs, our Solzhenitsyns--and they had about as much effect on our region as Russian dissenters have on the Soviet Union.

Such were the South and the nation in 1954, when Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the Supreme Court's unanimous opinion in Brown us. Board of Education. It was a finding that expressed the nation's new consensus that state-supported racism was unconscionable. But despite that consensus, political timidity in high places--plus zealous political resistance in the South--postponed any real change until the Sixties. The Court's 1955 formulation was for implementation "with all deliberate speed." The rate of change over the next five years would have required a century for completion.

That might have been fast enough for some Americans and far too fast for firebrand segs, but it was far too slow for blacks. Starting with such famous instances as the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott (which catapulted the young minister Martin Luther King, Jr., to national prominence), blacks increasingly took matters into their own hands. By doing so, they set in train a process that was to create a familiar pattern in the Sixties: black activism, white reaction (usually violent) and Federal response. Sit-ins were followed by freedom rides and the March on Washington. Voter registration and freedom schools preceded and followed successful school-desegregation lawsuits. And always there was the raw hatred, the naked bigotry, the bloodshed:

• In 1962, two dead as Federal troops were called in to ensure the enrollment and safety of a single black man at the University of Mississippi.

• In 1963, the assassination of black leader Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, and George Wallace's stand in the schoolhouse door in Alabama.

• In 1964, the brutally casual slaughter of three young civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, during the long hot summer--different only in degree from the other murders, burnings and beatings that marked that period.

• In 1965, whites and blacks alike gunned down for civil rights activism in Alabama as Selma became first a symbol of uncompromising repression, then a starting point for a long civil rights march to the state capitol in Montgomery.

And the walls came tumbling down. Where there had been less than a trickle of civil rights legislation in the late Fifties and early Sixties, there was now a flood: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which broke the back of segregation in public places and laid the groundwork for equal opportunity in the workplace; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the single most important piece of civil rights legislation in this century, guaranteeing the ballot--and with that guarantee, political power--to blacks and other minorities long denied it; the Public Accommodations Act of 1968, which took a medium-length step toward opening housing to all people without regard to race, creed or color. What had been a lonely, frightening and piecemeal effort to punch through the walls of segregation became a national crusade. The Southern citadel had crumbled.

•

Whites had been imprisoned behind those walls along with blacks. For me as for so many others, it was suddenly a time of liberation. No more fear of violent reaction to simple decency and civility. No more careful circumlocution in the name of effectiveness and being practical. For so long, the first priority for the white moderate had been to be able to echo the old war veteran who, when asked what he did in the late conflict, replied, "I survived." Now we could live, as well.

I'll always remember my father complaining, half in jest and half in bemused wonder, "They wanted to kill me, and all I ever wrote was that qualified Negroes ought to be allowed to vote and hold a decent job. Here you are, running all over the state doing politics with black civil rights leaders, and no one says a thing!"

But having effectively hauled the South up to its racial plateau, the rest of white America seemed surprised that black Americans did not believe that they had reached the mountaintop. What had been enshrined by law in the South was contrived by custom, residential living patterns and back-room and board-room evasions in the North. When civil rights groups began to target the segregation caused by such devices and to protest continued economic deprivation, they began to lose allies. Northern white impatience with continued civil rights "agitation" began to surface just as Southern resistance became more sophisticated, less blatant. And as the courts and Federal agencies reached out with new and politically untested remedies, such as busing and affirmative action, to overcome the effects of deep-seated discrimination in education and jobs, the reaction grew more pronounced.

"Reverse discrimination" became a new and powerful slogan. "We've gone far enough" became a popular expression. "What do those blacks want now?" was asked ever more insistently. And for those whites seeking a convenient symbol of all that they disliked and feared, there was that minority of the black minority willing to give them a convenient bogeyman--that pathetic reflection of actual impotence, "black power" and black separatism.

Richard Nixon, ever alert to whiffs below ground, caught the spirit of the emerging times and fashioned a "Southern strategy" aimed at bringing disaffected Southern whites into the Republican Party. As columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak wrote at the time, "The symbolism was unmistakable .... He was on the side of the South, the white majority and the status quo." But despite the public rhetoric and private assurances, the Nixon (and then Ford) era did not produce either reversal of direction or political realignment. Court-ordered busing reached its highest point during the 1969-1976 period. Social-welfare programs that proportionately benefited minority Americans the most expanded markedly during the same period.

And then came Jimmy Carter, white, Southern, speaking in an accent that could easily be mocked--and speaking eloquently in favor of full equality for all Americans. He spoke from a South that had undergone dramatic transformation to a nation that still had a long way to go to provide for all citizens the equality of opportunity routinely expected by and routinely offered to most of its white citizens. Nor was it just talk. By appointment, legislative initiative and Executive writ, he pushed for change.

And I knew whence he came, too, and at what cost. Being a white Southerner meant, for most of my life, having the smug certitude of liberal critics to the North visited upon us with the regularity of the tides and seasons. It meant hearing well-meaning prescriptions for racial utopia offered by those who were apparently blind to the rotten existence of minorities in their own back yards. It meant, finally and most depressingly, having to admit that, at root, they had been right and we wrong about the need for Federal intervention and rapid transformation.

But it also meant that a lesson so costly was not one to be abandoned in the face of shifting sentiments in the erstwhile centers of racial and moral righteousness. So Jimmy Carter, President, persevered on the course that Jimmy Carter, Georgian, had come to accept only after considerable intellectual and emotional turmoil. As it turned out, it was not necessarily a course, or a cost, that a majority of his countrymen was willing to embrace.

Or so Ronald Reagan, the perennial Presidential candidate, decided. It was not a tough decision. As my editor friend observed in his memo, the Reagan record on civil rights had been lousy. There was not a single Federal civil rights initiative of any sort, from judicial to Presidential to legislative, that won his backing. And, as captured in excruciating detail by Texas newsman and author Ronnie Dugger, there were those oft-repeated words of coded, and not so coded, assurance to those who longed for a return to the good old days:

• "I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964--a bad piece of legislation."

• On the Voting Rights Act of 1965--"The Constitution very specifically relegates control of voter registration to local government." And, he carefully added, the act was "humiliating to the South."

• On the 1968 Housing Act--"I am opposed to telling people what they can or can't do with their property. This has nothing to do with discrimination. It has to do with freedom."

One of the prevailing bits of conventional wisdom in Washington is that the Presidency has a mysteriously redemptive effect on those who achieve it: Small men grow; provincial men expand their horizons. Those who were weaned on racism sup on the Constitution and, like Lyndon Johnson, proclaim that "we shall overcome," blacks and whites together. It is nice to hold out that prospect. It is, however, as often as not a myth.

In any case, there was no such Damascus-road conversion for Ronald Reagan on the way to, or in, the Presidency. Personally tolerant though he may be, he has satisfied conservative idealogs and unreconstructed haters alike. Whenever a choice had to be made, he made the wrong one. Dugger put it best when, concluding a chapter in his fine book, On Reagan, the Man and His Presidency, he wrote:

"Let us concede that President Reagan describes himself as he sees himself when he says, 'I am opposed with every fiber of my being to discrimination.' But what he does with every fiber of his public power is to strengthen it."

•

For a brief moment in the Presidential campaign of 1980, as the old campaigner sought out the fabled middle ground of America's national politics, he seemed to be reversing his field. Putting the past behind him, he said he now accepted the 1964 act because it "is institutionalized and it has, let's say, hastened the solution to a lot of problems." He also said, "The Federal Government's responsibility is to protect the constitutional rights of every individual, at the point of a bayonet if necessary," and noted that a Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, had been "the first man to resort to those bayonets," at Little Rock, in 1957.

Despite these remarks, usually made once and then shelved, the new President made crystal-clear in his first Inaugural Address how he actually stood:

"It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of Government."

Intervention and intrusion. Jim East land, the longtime segregationist Senator from Mississippi, never said it better. Nor, though he was speaking in a different context, could a better answer have come from the black community than this remark by Vernon Jordan, the former head of the Urban League:

"Black people don't need to be told Government is on our backs, because we know that it has been by our side, helping eradicate the vicious racism that deprived us of our lives, our liberty and our rights."

It was help that the new President and his dedicated lieutenants were determined to eradicate. Part of their attack on "intervention and intrusion" was outlined four years later in an Urban Institute report:

"While members of the Reagan Administration bridle at the suggestion that they are 'soft' on civil rights, it cannot be denied that they have moved boldly and consciously to limit the scope of the law in enforcing equal opportunity. And while previous Republican Administrations have shown some resistance to the use of these laws in the past, this Administration--more than any other--has attempted to impede any further widening of their interpretation."

As the Reagan team sees it, Government could and might be vigorous in pursuit of remedies and recompense for individuals proved to have suffered from discrimination, but it should not undertake actions that benefit classes of victims or provide systemic relief. In mid-1985, the President's former Solicitor General, Rex Lee, provided a capsule interpretation:

"The basic notion of group-based distinctions runs counter to the theme of the struggle for equal opportunity. The effort to eliminate racial, sexual, religious or other discrimination is an effort to break away from group stereotypes or assumptions and concentrate on the individual."

What that meant in practice was that while the number of individual actions brought by the Justice Department, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and other Federal agencies charged with civil rights enforcement went up or did not appreciably decline during the first five Reagan years, the number of actions that would affect large numbers of people or establish precedents for more generalized relief went down drastically or fell off the enforcement table entirely.

Affirmative action, for instance, became and remains anathema to the Reagan Administration. From day one, it fought any suggestion that it should apply the principle, which holds that institutions and employers should be required to take affirmative steps to overcome the effects of past discrimination, up to and including preferential hiring, until certain racial or other imbalances are corrected. The Administration's interpretation of a 1984 Supreme Court ruling involving the conflict of seniority rights and affirmative action in the layoffs of some Memphis firemen became a club. It was wielded in 1985 over 51 local and state governments in an effort to roll back their affirmative-action programs. It was an interpretation hotly disputed by civil rights spokesmen, of course, but also by a number of lower courts, which rejected it summarily.

In South Africa, the white regime often uses black policemen to deal with black unrest and to patrol black areas. The President uses his few visible black officials in much the same way, sending them out to man the barricades against black complaints and demands.

No one is a more energetic spear carrier for the Administration than Clarence Pendleton, head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and vigorous opponent of affirmative action and quotas. He was not the President's first choice for the post, but his appointment in itself would be a striking argument against affirmative action, since it is hard to believe that he was appointed on the basis of anything except his race. As he sees it, or at least as he plays it, his job is to oppose new (and many old) civil rights initiatives rather than to act as a goad to the Administration's conscience. While he is remarkably mute when it comes to detailing examples of continued white racism, he is not reluctant to label leaders of the civil rights community racists. For the first time in its history, the commission he heads is at war with its natural allies and brings solace to its natural enemies.

But Pendleton is only a minor example of an Administration-wide pattern. As New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote, "The United States Government has essentially changed sides....Instead of fighting for blacks and women, who have been the historic victims of discrimination, the Justice Department is now 'emphasizing the rights of white males.'"

And, added Edwin Dorn of the Joint Center for Political Studies, "When we say that women and blacks have been discriminated against, we are saying in the same breath that other people have been discriminated for. Viewed from this perspective, some of the complaints about preferences and quotas are really shrieks of alarm that the wrong people might benefit from them .... Those who wax eloquent about the idea of color-blindness should be obliged to tell us how to achieve that ideal in a society where color continues to have tangible consequences."

Busing was reserved for a special place in President Reagan's hell. The Administration supported antibusing legislation, sought reversal of court-approved busing plans and entered as a friend of the court in opposition to busing sought by civil rights plaintiffs. Even in Charlotte, North Carolina, where busing was a long-settled and successful matter, the President underscored his position by speaking of the failed "social experiment nobody wants." (The Charlotte Observer answered editorially, "You Were Wrong, Mr. President.")

But affirmative action and busing, it is argued, are unsettled issues in America.

Busing, in particular, does not have majority support in either the black or the white community, though it has absolute validity as a legal solution for persistent de facto as well as de jure school segregation. And affirmative action's more ardent proponents have managed to blur the distinction between guidelines and mandatory quotas, an approach that bounces against the bone-deep conviction of many white Americans that those not responsible for past discriminations should not be penalized in the present.

(A reply to that conviction came from an interesting source in June 1985. Secretary of Labor William Brock told the national convention of the NAACP:

"We as a country have lived for 200 years with a major part of our population in remarkable disadvantage. And it takes some time to recover from that. Perhaps we [present-day] whites were not here then. But that does not change the obligation we have as citizens to respond to that situation.")

But the Administration's attack on Federal "intervention and intrusion" goes far beyond busing and affirmative action. What was at first treated as a possible aberration rapidly became the most worrisome aspect of the President's civil rights tactics. It is not just that the President is opposed to expanding the frontier of the permissible in Government action. What is stupefying, when it is not frightening, is Washington's systematic campaign to undo many of the widely accepted civil rights advances of the past 25 years while simultaneously pursuing other domestic policies that economically beggar those it is politically attacking.

The following scenario reads like a Ku Klux Klan wish list. It is, instead, a shorthand record of significant steps backward by the Reagan Administration from January 1981 on. The Administration has:

• First kept silent, then dragged its feet, then sought the least expansive extension possible as the Voting Rights Act came up for renewal in 1982. Its approach was to quibble over long-settled details. The President let it be known that he was worried about "those provisions which impose burdens unequally upon different parts of the nation." Behind that shield, Senator Jesse Helms and company vigorously sought to kill the act forever. They failed, and a tough measure was passed, thereby guaranteeing to Southern blacks, in particular, that their hard-won right to vote would not be sold out in 1982 as cynically as it had been sold out in 1876.

• Actively sought to reverse the 11-year-old ban on tax exemptions for segregated private schools, religious or not. The President, as he later admitted, was personally involved in the effort, along with William Bradford Reynolds, his designated hit man in the Justice Department's civil rights division. Reagan acted in response to a plea from House Minority Whip Trent Lott, a Mississippian whose acceptance of the new racial order of things is often questioned. The Administration's position was rejected by Congress and then, in what should have been a humiliating coup de grâce, by a decisive 8-1 Supreme Court majority in 1983. The President allowed as how he had been misunderstood all along and was simply trying to prevent "government by edict."

• Welcomed a Supreme Court decision that, in its broadest application, would allow local schools and other institutions to get Federal funds without having to comply with antidiscrimination guidelines. The ruling, called Grove City, became the focus of the most important civil rights measure before Congress. Called the Civil Rights Restoration Act, it would affirm Congress' intent that any institution that receives Federal money in any way must comply with all antidiscrimination strictures, whether racial, religious, sexual or physical. The Administration, openly and privately, helped block Congressional passage in 1984, despite overwhelming majorities in both houses for the bill.

• Packed the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, previously noted for its independent pursuit of full equality for all, with members who slavishly follow the Reagan Administration line, word for word.

In the face of that record, the counterattack at first seemed almost mild. Julius Chambers, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, said the Justice Department's opposition to affirmative-action and school-desegregation plans had the effect of "encouraging overt racism." Benjamin L. Hooks, executive director of the NAACP, spoke of the Administration's "blatant hostility toward civil rights." And, referring to Reynolds, whose nomination for the number-three job at Justice was to be rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee, five House members wrote, "The head of the civil rights division of the Justice Department ... is supposed to wield the sword of the law to defend minority civil rights. The fact is that Mr. Reynolds has used that sword of the law to hack away at the victim--to subvert minority civil rights."

After Reynolds was defeated, Reagan said, "Let me emphasize that Mr. Reynolds' civil rights views reflect my own. The policies he pursued are the policies of this Administration and they remain our policies as long as I am President."

•

And that is what began to seriously disturb many Republicans in 1985. Having remained almost mute for more than four years of steady Administration backtracking from previous bipartisan civil rights positions, they decided it was bad politics for them and bad policy for the country. In an extraordinary departure from the past, Republicans from right to center deserted the President's South African policy, with some of the most vocal criticism coming from a young group of New Right Congressmen that issued its own anti-apartheid manifesto.

But if that was extraordinary, the decision in late August by Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole and the Republican National Committee to enter briefs opposing the Government's restrictive position on the Voting Rights Act of 1982 was earth-shattering. As Senator Dole and nine other members of Congress told the Supreme Court, the Reagan Justice Department's position blatantly misrepresented the purpose of the voting-rights measure and advanced a theory "expressly rejected by Congress."

Almost simultaneously, however, it was revealed that the White House was studying plans to relax requirements for affirmative action by Federal contractors. The Justice Department also drafted new rules that would make voting-rights challenges harder to initiate than many Congressmen had intended. "Unconscionable" and "extremist" were two of the milder words used by civil rights proponents to describe both steps.

Such are the policies of one Ronald Reagan. That is the Reagan of inflexible opposition to Government remedies for old wrongs, the Ronald Reagan whose economic policies cut most cruelly in 1981 into programs of special benefit to minority Americans and whose proposed 1986 fiscal-year budget would have cut them even deeper. But there is also the Ronald Reagan who said in his second Inaugural Address:

We will not rest until every American enjoys the fullness of freedom, dignity and opportunity as our birthright.... Now there is another area where the Federal Government can play a part. As an older American, I can remember a time when people of different race, creed or ethnic origin in our land found hatred and prejudice installed in social custom and, yes, in law.

There is no story more heartening in our history than the progress we've made toward the "brotherhood of man" that God intended for us. Let us resolve there will be no turning back or hesitation on the road to an America rich in dignity and abundant with opportunity for all our citizens.

Glowing words, good words, American words. But when it comes time for civil rights deeds, Reagan's is an Administration that cares more for the wounded sensibilities of the haves than for the needs of the have-nots, political or economic.

That is the only possible way to understand the way he and his Government approach the clamor for justice abroad as well as at home. Be sensitive to the sensibilities of the oppressor, comfort the comfortable and raise negativism to a fine art when explaining why affirmative action in the cause of human rights is a nonstarter. It failed miserably in South Africa, as it was bound to do, because it rested on a faulty premise: that those who oppress their fellow humans by habit and heritage can be changed through friendly persuasion. It is a premise the President and his men bring to bear within the nation's borders as well, and its central fallacy threatens to reverse a half century of racial progress here at home.

Near the turn of this century, W.E.B. DuBois, the eloquent black activist, lamented that "the freedman has not yet found in his freedom the Promised Land." Just 17 years ago, the Kerner Commission spoke of a nation "moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal." And that same year, another President, in another Inaugural Address, spoke even more fervently:

"No man can be fully free while his neighbor is not. To go forward at all is to go forward together.... This means black and white together, as one nation, not two. The laws have caught up with our conscience. What remains is to give life to what is in the law."

That was Richard Nixon in 1969. Now, as I write, it is the fall of 1985, and both conscience and laws seem to be fading into lifelessness. There are disturbing straws in the wind, and it is a strong wind, blowing backward. For instance, the July 16, 1985, Southern Political Report, a studiously careful roundup of political activity in the South, reported from South Carolina:

"When the sun goes over the yardarm, white conversation over drinks can reflect a hostility to blacks reminiscent of the segregationist sentiment of the Fifties and Sixties, with negative comments about the presence of blacks in public schools and universities."

A news item in The Washington Post begins:

"Baltimore, July 18--Racial discrimination and polarization persist at the polls in many of Maryland's southern and Eastern Shore counties, according to a state elections audit released today."

And, finally, there are my occasional visits home, where old friends speak despairingly of renewed race hatred on both sides, of polarization and separation to a degree unknown for 20 years. I think back on the long, agonizing and temporarily triumphant record of racial challenge and change in our land since that May day at Princeton in 1954, then try to think ahead 30 years. Will a President have to say then, as John Kennedy said in 1963, that black Americans "are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice; they are not yet freed from social and economic oppression"?

The nation betrayed them once before, betraying also its political heritage and its moral principles. Today, as surely as the sun rises in the morning, it is repeating that shameful history. Cry, the beloved country.