Monday, June 19, 2006
Righting Republican wrong turns on race
Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Tribune scribbler Clarence Page very often gets and writes it right, as in today's offering:
Our feelings about race are based on our experiences with it, which complicates matters because each and every one of us has a unique racial experience...
I've often said that my family did not leave the party of Lincoln; the party left us.
Page remembers the point of Republican departure:
... Republicans too often get a bum rap on race, considering the heroic sacrifices many Republicans have made for racial progress. The Chicago Tribune, where I work, was founded in 1847 by Joseph Medill, who opposed slavery, helped found the Republican Party 150 years ago and support the candidacy of Abraham Lincoln, who's still my favorite president.
... (T)he GOP lost black support after the glory days of Dwight Eisenhower. As an African-American child of the Eisenhower 1950s, I have fond memories of another Republican Party ... The words "black Republican" would have raised eyebrows only because the label "black" was not yet in fashion. We were still "colored" in those days.
Just about everybody "liked Ike" in my little Ohio factory town, including the "colored" folks. I recall my childhood's greatest political turning point in 1957, when our little black-and-white TV screen showed Arkansas National Guard troops with bayonets on their rifles keeping black students out of Little Rock's Central High School. The next day, I turned on the news to see those same troops escorting those same black students into the high school, past jeering white mobs.
What happened? "President Eisenhower must have made a phone call," my father explained. After that, I really liked Ike!
We also liked moderate Republicans like Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York, ... and Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the first black senator since Reconstruction.
And we really liked Illinois Sen. Everett Dirksen, who rallied enough senators from both parties to overcome fierce resistance from Southern Democratic senators like Robert Byrd of Virginia, a former Ku Klux Klansman, and Al Gore Sr., of Tennessee ... Time does heal wounds - and wounds some heels.
But, Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater's opposition to that Civil Rights Act turned black voters heavily in favor of Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and simultaneously lost Southern white voters to Johnson's party, as Johnson predicted it would. To black voters, the act of sacrificing political capital is true heroism, especially on behalf of equal rights. Soon, the Republican Party became known as the party of white flight, an image only partly redeemed in recent years by the success of high-profile black Republicans like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
With all that history in mind, I applaud Jack Kemp.... He sees (government) as a vehicle to help individual initiative and free enterprise work for everyone, even those who are still left behind in poverty, substandard housing, high unemployment and low-performing schools after the civil rights revolution.
