The Gray Society
PROGRESSIVE "YOU shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" The Gray Society Some years ago, Saul D. Alinsky, who pioneered in organizing power blocs among the poor, wrote a...
...John Gardner, head of the Urban Coalition, found it "full of ambiguities and inconsistencies...
...It espouses arms limitation and finances arms procurement...
...And this time we will all pay for it...
...The press, understandably confused by the contradictory words and deeds of the Administration and by the widening gap between the rights enunciated by the Federal courts and the enforcement of those rights by the Federal bureaucracy, built up an aura of anticipation—even suspense—for the President's policy paper...
...Nixon's position was noted in prominent quarters...
...The ambiguity of Mr...
...But as Professor James S. Coleman, a leading scholar in the field of educational inequities, has pointed out: "School integration is vital not merely for some vague generalized social purposes, but because it is the most consistent mechanism for improving the quality of education of disadvantaged children...
...Moral neutralism permeates the policies of the Gray Society...
...And he retreated in full flight from any suggestion that the Federal Government might provide moral leadership in the difficult process of eliminating racial imbalance in Northern schools...
...There are limits to the amount of Government coercion that can be reasonably used" in further desegregation, the President said—ironically on the same day that he dispatched troops to break the Post Office strike...
...Having identified his constituency as Middle America—the Great Silent Majority— the President is attempting to middle through by striking an impartial balance between good and evil, between progress and decay, between liberty and repression...
...He set the gray tone last year with his news conference comment that his Administration had embarked on "a middle course" between "those who want instant integration and those who want segregation forever...
...In an illuminating combination of unconscious racism and bureaucratic obscurantism, he talked of all-black schools—but not all-white schools—as "racially impacted...
...Nixon has taken his political soundings and produced the policy that he presumes will please...
...At home, it favors reform provided only that nothing be changed...
...The gray in your gray area has nothing to do with the race of its inhabitants," he explained...
...PROGRESSIVE "YOU shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" The Gray Society Some years ago, Saul D. Alinsky, who pioneered in organizing power blocs among the poor, wrote a memorandum to his staff on the terminology to be used in dealing with philanthropic foundations...
...Nixon intends to offer the nation no leadership on the issue of race...
...We search in vain for any such promise in the statement...
...We need only vigorous action by the Departments of Justice and Health, Education and Welfare...
...Opposition to all busing as undesirable is clearly racist in nature...
...The foundations have long since run through their gray period, but the gray people are aljve and well in Washington, D.C...
...But it turned out to be a murky, 8,000-word recitation that managed, despite painstaking attempts to achieve "balance," to cheer the bigots and appall the blacks...
...There are no gray people except in foundations...
...Nixon's assertion that de jure segregation still persisting in defiance of the law must be eliminated "root and branch" was vitiated by a context that gave every indication of tolerance for the tactics of evasion and delay that have characterized the Southern response to the Supreme Court's 1954 decision...
...But the gray document that issued from the White House late in March made only one thing clear: Mr...
...The quest for safe, expedient solutions finds its ultimate expression in the Administration's approach to the nation's most pressing domestic problem, the festering sore of racial exploitation...
...This means black and white together, as one nation, not as two...
...Gray is the color scheme of the Nixon Administration as it attempts, by slide rule application of opinion polls and market research data, to pick a course of careful equivocation through the complex and urgent issues that require affirmative Presidential leadership...
...Supposedly, the purpose of the President's recent, long-awaited statement on school desegregation was to clarify the Administration position...
...As The Washington Post observed, this comment "was, in one way, just this side of insulting and, in another, evidence of how far he has permitted confidence in his Administration's interest in this subject to slip, evidence of how much we have to recover...
...Father T. M. Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame University and Mr...
...Nixon has attempted to stake out an impartial stance between the racists and their victims...
...Alinsky's first rule was that poor neighborhoods should always be referred to by the then-fashionable term, "gray areas...
...Smothered under a blanket of rhetoric were the promises of the past...
...President Nixon's statement on school desegregation, March 24, 1970...
...Instead, the President fell back on code words, cliches, and images—such as "busing"-—that frighten Middle Americans...
...Nixon's statement, the White House announced, was the product of weeks of deliberation and extensive consultation...
...Color the society Confederate Gray...
...Nonetheless, some commentators welcomed the President's reaffirmation as a sign, at least, that he was not prepared to nullify the Court's decree...
...Busing and Integration "I have consistently expressed my opposition to any compulsory busing of pupils beyond normal geographic school zones for the purpose of achieving racial balance...
...There was ample justification for both reactions...
...Whatever its intent, the President's position represents a reversion to the discredited Nineteenth Century doctrine of "separate but equal" schools...
...The President sought the advice of scores of public officials and private citizens—including seven black clergymen rounded up for the purpose by the redoubtable Reverend Billy Graham...
...The use of the term 'coercion' when the issue is the protection of constitutional rights of black children is just another example of rhetoric which rarely reduces prevailing confusion on the question of school segregation," commented Jack Greenberg, the director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund...
...Commission on Civil Rights...
...The laws have caught up with our conscience...
...The search is vain because vigorous action is not programmed into the Gray Society...
...The Administration has reverted, too, to that perennial refuge of racist members of Congress, the notion that "you can't legislate morality...
...This is indicated by the high proportion of white students in rural areas, suburbs, and Catholic big-city school systems who have used buses for years to get to school—and still use them—without arousing any such complaints...
...From the day he took office as the beneficiary of a successful Southern Strategy—one that his party obviously intends to promote still further in the future—Mr...
...Nixon looks forward to presiding in 1976 over the bicentennial of America's independence...
...Its economic program rests on the assumption that some men—not too many, mind you—must be unemployed so that the rest may prosper...
...The first Reconstruction was hell," he said, "and we had to pay for it...
...The Nixon Administration seems bent on halting even the small, faltering steps toward racial justice that the nation has taken in recent years...
...He talked of the "burden" of desegregation, the limits of "coercion," the "threat" to the schools...
...It was revealing that in it, sixteen months after assuming the Presidency and sixteen years after the Supreme Court held, in Brown v. Board of Education, that racial segregation of the schools was inherently unjust, Mr...
...Some years ago in these pages we quoted a Southern official on the effects of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which provided Federal assistance as well as constraint to advance the process of desegregation...
...It is one form of the adamant white refusal to integrate that is driving most Negroes to abandon integration as a goal, and instead turn to Black Nationalism...
...The fine words of January, 1969, are utterly belied, little more than a year later, by the gray document...
...White House aides have passed the word that Mr...
...Racism in America and How to Combat It, a publication of the U.S...
...Another anniversary will be celebrated in that year—the centennial of the Great Betrayal that brought an end to the Reconstruction Era—and this, perhaps, will be a commemoration more appropriate to the Nixon Administration...
...No one is asking for troops to take over school boards...
...It is committed neither to war (which is unpopular) nor to peace (which is unthinkable...
...This Reconstruction is hell, too, but this time the Government is paying for it...
...Nixon found it necessary to "reaffirm" that the Court's decision "was right in both constitutional and human terms...
...Civil Rights Commission, said, "I wish I knew what his policy is...
...Abroad, it lowers its profile while raising its commitments...
...It is not surprising then that a recent poll disclosed a sharp rise in the percentage of young blacks who believe they cannot secure their civil rights without violence...
...Yet white opposition to publicly supported busing schemes aimed at integrating schools has effectively stymied this route to improved educational quality for Negro children...
...He implied that desegregation and quality education are, somehow, incompatible, and pledged his support to "innovative new ways of overcoming the effects of racial isolation...
...What remains is to give life to the law...
...There is no room for vigor— on this front, at least—in the politics of expediency...
...A leading conservative Republican, Senator John J. Williams of Delaware, complained he had "difficulty in finding out what the Administration policy is...
...Into the ashcan went a multitude of fine phrases, including this ringing passage from his inaugural address: "To go forward at all is to go forward together...
...Black children whose hope of a decent future depends on gaining entrance to quality education provided by white schools now find Richard Nixon, rather than George Wallace, standing in the schoolhouse door...
...Nixon's chosen chairman of the U.S...
...We seem to be heading for a new era of neglect—not the "benign neglect" proposed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his famous memorandum, but the malign neglect that produced today's racial crisis...
Vol. 34 • May 1970 • No. 5
