Leading Means More Than Just Talking About Race

WASHINGTON —  When President Bill Clinton unveils his “race initiative” in his commencement address at UC San Diego this Saturday, he’ll have his eyes on more than one prize.

As a Southerner who grew up during the civil-rights era, Clinton brings a lifetime’s commitment to healing the racial rifts he calls “America’s constant curse.” But he’s also preoccupied with his place in history. As he thumbs through the issues in his in-box--a budget deal, China trade, expansion of the North Atlantic Trade Organization, campaign finance and alleged scandals--he has concluded that only racial reconciliation is a problem of historic heft.

From Abraham Lincoln to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, presidents have made history when they orated and acted on racial issues. Will Clinton also rise to the occasion when he takes the podium in San Diego?

Only if he melds speechifying with substance. Unfortunately, substance seems in short supply in his race initiative, which reportedly includes little more than an advisory board, town meetings, a compilation of existing research and a report to be signed by Clinton himself. It all seems more suitable for a scholar at a think tank than a president seeking to secure his place in history.

Clinton is capable of more. As a child, he was raised by grandparents who ran a store in the black part of town. As a teenager, he memorized Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. As a law student at a time of black frustration and white fear, he sat at the “black table” in the school cafeteria, making friends and conversation easily. As president, he is aware that the nation he leads resembles today’s California, with its large Latino and Asian American communities, more than the Arkansas of his youth, where whites and blacks seemed buried beneath the burdens of history.

Thus, when the subject is race, Clinton soars to his greatest rhetorical heights, and he has the confidence to tell tough truths to audiences of every background. In his first year as president, his finest speech was an extemporaneous talk to African American ministers in a hall in Memphis, Tenn., where King gave his last address. Asking how King would view today’s America, Clinton ventured where few white liberals would dare to tread, “I fought for freedom, he [King] would say, but not for the freedom of children to have children and the fathers of children to walk away and abandon them.”

Since then, Clinton has been equally eloquent in prepared speeches, including his pledge to “mend, not end” affirmative action and his talk in Austin on the day of the Million Man March. Moving beyond standard civil-rights rhetoric, Clinton urges whites to realize that blacks share mainstream values, and blacks to recognize that white anxieties, from violent crime to vanishing education and economic opportunities, need not be racist.

But, to earn a place in history, Clinton needs more than insight and eloquence. He’ll need to offer answers to the social and economic divisions that he himself warns are making America “come apart when we should be coming together.”

Presidents have been most eloquent when they made moral appeals for the nation to take action against the injustices that are America’s original sin. In his second inaugural, Lincoln called the Civil War God’s punishment for the sin of slavery, declaring: “If God wills that . . . every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn by the sword . . . so it still must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ ”

For 25 years after the Civil War, as the nation halfheartedly helped former slaves become first-class citizens, several presidents pleaded for racial equality.

In his 1881 Inaugural Address, James Garfield declared: “Fifty years hence, our children . . . will surely bless their fathers and their fathers’ God that . . . slavery was overthrown, and that both races were made equal before the law.” And, in 1889, Benjamin Harrison asked: “When and under what conditions is the black man to have a free ballot? When is he in fact to have those full civil rights which have so long been his in law?”

With the abandonment of Reconstruction came more than a half-century of silence, as almost every president from Rutherford Hayes through Franklin D. Roosevelt avoided racial issues.

Roosevelt’s plain-spoken successor, Harry S. Truman, became the first president in this century to address race. Speaking at the Lincoln Memorial, at a mass meeting called by the NAACP in 1947, Truman said: “When I say all Americans, I mean all Americans. Many of our people still suffer the indignity of insult, the narrowing fear of intimidation, and, I regret to say, the threat of physical and mob violence.” Truman desegregated the armed forces, pushed anti-lynchings law and appointed a blue-ribbon commission on civil rights.

During the 1950s, the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation and President Dwight D. Eisenhower used federal troops in Arkansas to protect black students integrating Little Rock High School. But while Eisenhower used presidential power, he failed to use the presidential pulpit to build support.

That task was left to his successors. Addressing the nation in 1963, after he had told Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace not to obstruct desegregation of the state university, Kennedy said civil rights was “a moral issue . . . as old as the scriptures and as clear as the Constitution.” Even more movingly, in 1965, Johnson urged Congress and the country to support the Voting Rights Act. In his slow drawl, he echoed the anthem of the civil-rights movement: “All of us . . . must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

Since then, the nation has been divided about morally ambiguous remedies for racial injustice, from school busing to affirmative action. President Richard M. Nixon exploited white resentment of policies, such as numerical goals in employment, that his own administration promoted. And Ronald Reagan offered genial endorsement of the crudest prejudices, with apocryphal anecdotes about “welfare queens.”

The promise of Clinton’s presidency was to move America beyond white resentment and black rage. He offered not only appeals to national unity but support for race-neutral programs to help working people of all backgrounds. In the 1992 Michigan primary, he gave almost the same speech to two very different audiences--whites in suburban Macomb County and African Americans in Detroit. He offered both groups improved education, job training and job opportunities. Then he challenged each to reach out to the other and help America become “one country.” This appeal won votes from working-class voters of all races, and applause from scholars, such as the sociologist William Julius Wilson.

Five years and many policy shifts later, Clinton is better positioned to plead for national unity than to propose programs to make that unity a reality.

Facing a hostile Congress and signing on to a bipartisan balanced-budget agreement, Clinton suffers a serious agenda gap. In his first term, he raised the minimum wage and increased tax credits for the working poor. Six months into his second term, he has had to scuttle $5 billion in repairs on public schools he once said are “literally falling down.” He has lobbied senators against a plan to expand health coverage for children from poor families. And former Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich writes in his recent memoir that Clinton has largely scuttled their ambitious job-training program.

So the question is whether Clinton can act effectively on the issues he addresses so eloquently. Or will political realities and budgetary restrictions make his powerful rhetoric more hype than history?