Originally written October 5th, 2005
BY EDWIN COONEY
Alexander Graham Bell’s famous and practical invention, the telephone, has generally been a useful tool for Republicans. If you don’t believe me, ask Michael Savage, Dr. Laura, Sean Hanity, and most definitely Rush Limbaugh.
One of the most constant themes that runs through these national call-in talk shows is the resentment millions of Conservatives feel toward the black civil rights movement here in America.
Then came last Thursday. Former Reagan Education Secretary and Bush (41) drug czar William J. Bennett was on Washington D.C. radio conducting his “Morning in America” call-in talk show. He and a caller were discussing statistics as they reflect the existence and severity of crime in America.
Suddenly, Bill Bennett had an idea. He was sure that he could voice it because, after all, everyone knows that he opposes abortion. So he observed, while calling it morally reprehensible, that if we could abort a generation of black babies, crime in America would soon substantially decrease.
Suddenly Bill Bennett was swamped with hurt and angry reactions from the black and Liberal communities. Not even his fellow Conservative, the President of the United States (according to his press secretary), thought that Mr. Bennett’s observations were “appropriate”.
Like their Liberal forebears of the 1930s, modern Conservative revisionists have
managed to adopt the glories of our past as their own virtues. At the same time,
they assign the imperfections of past policies and institutions to their morally
inferior liberal antecedents as liberal New Dealers did to Conservatives during the Depression.
Although the Conservative outlook on most issues has become pretty main stream, there is one area of national concern that Conservatives have not been able to dominate. Furthermore, they seem genuinely puzzled by it. It is civil rights. How can it be, they wonder, that we can’t convince blacks that we’re as concerned about their welfare as any Liberal has been? After all, our party is the party of Abraham Lincoln and free enterprise. Together, Lincoln’s legacy and free enterprise have been both the symbol and substance that guarantee freedom for everyone including black Americans, haven’t they?
The answer to such an inquiry is “perhaps” -- but Republicans may have missed their best chance to have black Americans as fellow political constituents because of a telephone call that was never made.
On Wednesday, October 19, 1960, during that year’s presidential campaign, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested along with seventy-five other blacks during a peaceful demonstration at the Magnolia Room of Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta, Georgia. All those arrested except Dr. King were soon released. A local judge sentenced Dr. King to six months of hard labor because he was still on probation for having violated a traffic law prohibiting driving with an out-of-state license.
Coretta Scott King was concerned because her husband had twice been awakened in the night. Put in handcuffs and leg-irons, he had been driven to rural Georgia for interrogation. Might he not return alive some night?, she wondered.
Just weeks before, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, the Republican presidential candidate, had visited Atlanta and received an overwhelmingly warm reception. One of those endorsing his candidacy was Martin Luther King, Sr. The major reason for Reverend King’s endorsement of Mr. Nixon was Jack Kennedy’s Catholic faith.
But there was also the compelling fact that the Republican administration, of
which Mr. Nixon was a part, had authored and signed two civil rights bills—and, even more significant, had appointed a Supreme Court that was one of the most sympathetic to minorities in the history of America.
If the Democratic party was the party of Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, it was also the party of Dixiecrats like Georgia’s Richard Russell and South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond. In September 1960, due to their Protestant orientation and the seeming promise of the party of Abraham Lincoln, millions of blacks were ready to vote for Richard M. Nixon.
For Mrs. King, the question was which of the two presidential candidates might care enough to use his influence to save her husband’s life?
Nixon was already in trouble with Conservatives in his party due to a public promise by his Vice-Presidential running mate Henry Cabot Lodge that “…if Nixon is elected there will be a qualified Negro in the cabinet.”
Kennedy worried that if he got involved in the King matter, he might lose his already delicate Southern support.
Former baseball hero Jackie Robinson caught up with Vice President Nixon in the Midwest and urged him to call Mrs. King or the judge in the case or both. To Robinson’s frustration, Nixon responded that if he did something like that it might be seen as “merely grandstanding,” and thus there would be no call. Fear of inappropriateness, it would seem therefore, short-circuited even Vice President Nixon’s most genuine concerns.
John F. Kennedy would make that call and reap the subsequent political benefits in 1960. He seemed to care about the welfare of someone who meant a lot to many people while Vice President Nixon appeared cautious and calculating as well as indifferent.
Whatever opportunities may have been missed back in 1960, the question now is what will it take to remove the personal hurt and shame from the domain of race relations in this, the freest land in the world?
It seems that even a strictly rational discussion on racial issues breeds resentment by its sheer lack of emotion unless the participants are reasonably close on their ideology. Too often, whites try to minimize the issue here in America by pointing out that five-sixths of the world population is nonwhite. Therefore, racial discrimination is a human failing, not a problem particularly germane to white America.
Blacks counter by observing that slavery and post slavery discrimination in American society is more virulent than anywhere else in the history of humanity because of its ties to our economic values. Elsewhere in the world, they argue, slaves were people -- not property.
While there is much truth in both of the above observations, the key to solving nearly 500 years of racial turmoil in America is in both the existence and the nature of a very real and special phenomenon. That phenomenon is greater and much more powerful than either Liberal or Conservative doctrine.
Someone once pointed out that America is the only nation on earth with a birth certificate. We call it the Declaration of Independence. This imperfect society populated by imperfect people created a promissory note for itself at its very outset as a nation.
That promissory note which pledges us to realize the full potential of our own strength, dignity, and morality can never be fulfilled as long as we minimize and even humiliate one another.
If we insist to anyone that society might be “improved” if the next generation were eliminated, as Bill Bennett did when speaking of black Americans last Thursday, we are really commenting on our own limitations and ignoring our God-given potential.
And any time someone diminishes rather than empowers us, no matter what his or her political or religious doctrine may be, that’s sad!
Forty-five years, nine presidencies and three major civil rights bills have passed since Vice President Nixon decided not to call Mrs. King or the judge. Had that call been made by Richard Nixon, it is just possible that America's demand for forward movement in civil rights might have had a Conservative rather than a Liberal stamp on it.
Perhaps frustration over a sense of missed opportunity rather than racism is what fuels mean and non-constructive ideas such as those advanced by Mr. Bennett on his radio talk show last Thursday. History indeed might have been very different had Richard Nixon just picked up that phone.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY