O Washington
Jones, Arthur
O WASHINGTON Arthur Jones On the Plantation Afamiliar face flashed recently across the networks' nightly news screen. It was Coretta Scott King announcing there would be a twentieth-anniversary...
...Here are just two of the Heritage report's examples of hatred and bitterness...
...It took a court order to win promotion for black police officers in New Orleans...
...The main feature of the golf club in this public park was that blacks were never admitted as members...
...Discrimination should...
...Yes, it's been twenty years since Martin Luther King's historic "I have a dream" speech, in which he sketched his vision of a day when the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights would apply to all Americans in spirit as well as in law...
...There, says Heritage, whites will be laid off to sustain the level of minorities on the force...
...once on, there still was no promotion...
...Let's take that last statement at face value (though, obviously, Heritage has its own reasons for claiming close links to the White House...
...When the Reagan Administration instituted its reduction-in-force policies to cut the Federal payroll, blacks were "riffed" in greater proportion to their numbers than whites...
...The Foundation contends that affirmative action is discriminatory, that it "legitimizes the very tactics we hoped to eliminate and engenders a new generation of hatred and bitterness...
...These days, according to the Foundation, when students on campus hurl racial epithets at minorities, they add taunts relating to affirmative action...
...Sometimes racism is so pervasive that when you're right in the middle of it, you have a hard time making it out...
...Now hear this: "Affirmative action [is...
...Don't look now, but there's no net there...
...If blacks did get on the force at all, they were lucky...
...so does the city's police department...
...In a letter he signed, "Penney," Pendleton told Reagan in January that "your Administration [must] develop, distribute, and market a civil rights policy that produces positive results...
...Where in Washington can one divine the spirit of the law...
...That could happen to the new marchers who will converge on Washington in August...
...If the statehood bill went to the vote right now in Congress, says Guinan, "it would be slaughtered...
...abhorrent...
...But the Reagan Administration doesn't like racial quotas, and the Justice Department has been ordered to fight this affirmative action in the courts...
...H The Justice Department charged that school officials in Big Spring, Texas, had developed a novel busing program...
...Congress...
...Those words are...
...Pro-statehood forces in the District are hoping to work up a nationwide coalition which, by next fall, can apply pressure on Congress to bring the statehood bill to a favorable vote...
...So what is there to complain about...
...That's hard on the whites, but the case is not much different from the one in New Orleans...
...How has the Reagan Administration honored that dream...
...Admission to the force and the right to promotion came only when the law was invoked and enforced...
...A look at Justice Department activities in recent months provides one kind of check list on the letter of the law: f Justice's Civil Rights Division had 287 Federal observers at polls in seven Alabama counties where there were major contests between black and white candidates...
...In the "Department of Justice" segment of its report, the Heritage Foundation states there are "authors" who "cannot be named" because they "hold sensitive positions in government...
...The top priority for legal policy in the Reagan Administration is to establish a new definition of discrimination...
...What a peculiar way to run a government...
...from the Heritage Foundation's recently released recommendations for Reagan's next two years in office...
...The Administration's indifference to the spirit of the law...
...The city bought the land and, after the 1884 Cotton Centennial, added an excellent golf course...
...The other example is the Boston police situation...
...11 The Department decided to sue the Chicago suburb of Cicero for excluding blacks from living or working in the town...
...Even Clarence Pendleton can't ignore that reality...
...The bank also was accused of maintaining lunch facilities segregated "formally by sex and informally by race...
...Certainly some better way has to be found to take care of our people," said the Urban League in its "State of Black America" report...
...For them, says Guinan, "the statehood measure is too liberal, too urban, and too black...
...New Orleans provides one more example: It has a fine public park, Audubon Park, some 248 acres of what was once Etienne de Bore's sugar plantation...
...And, according to the National Urban League, blacks ended 1982 "in worse shape than in 1981," as the recession took its crudest toll on the black population...
...The Reagan Administration and the Heritage Foundation insist we must rely less on law and more on good faith...
...The planned August march on Washington should give statehood supporters an opportunity to work the crowd in behalf of the measure...
...That march is needed not just to press for gains, but to stanch the losses...
...The Justice Department's own Civil Rights Division has periodically erupted in protests against the Administration's footdragging...
...be clearly defined as a practice having a discriminatory intent, as the results of identifiable policies of practice limiting opportunity, and with clearly identifiable victims...
...The suit contends the bank refused to hire blacks on the same basis as whites and restricted blacks' and women's opportunities for promotion...
...officials are secretly voicing policy disagreements in a private right-wing publication in order to influence the President to change his position...
...H The Department gained a consent decree from the lily-white Connecticut town of Glastonbury that would provide low- and moderate-income housing...
...They might just as well have been working in a New Orleans bank for all the difference the last twenty years has made...
...Imagine being labeled a "preferential compensatory treatment beneficiary...
...People come down on it in many ways...
...o whom is Ronald Reagan listening...
...H The Department filed suit against the owners of a North Virginia dance club that barred blacks and racially mixed couples...
...The President no longer pals around publicly with the Right the way he used to, but Reagan's pals still pal around...
...For instance, it's not just the Whitney National Bank in New Orleans that needs to be pushed toward nondiscriminatory promotion practices...
...Washington area blacks know all about the Federal plantation...
...The Government's civil rights lawyers know that the cases they have been allowed to bring are just the tip of the iceberg...
...Once they pass the invisible check point that brings them into the District of Columbia, they will have entered the Federal plantation...
...It was Coretta Scott King announcing there would be a twentieth-anniversary March on Washington in August...
...Congress is to the District of Columbia what Pretoria is to Soweto...
...Not even right until the end, a few months ago, when the club was ordered closed—at just about the time Coretta Scott King announced a new march on Washington...
...The U.S...
...The policy must contain a racial 'safety net' that allows people to believe that they will not perish en route from a color-conscious to a colorblind society...
...Twenty years ago, none of these cases would have been prosecuted...
...But when it comes to race, good faith is often absent...
...The Reagan appointee who heads the Commission, Clarence Pendleton, dissented from that statement...
...People like Ed Guinan, one of the prime movers behind the statehood bid that would change the District into the state of New Columbia, most clearly perceive the plantation mentality on Capitol Hill—not, it must be said, in the House District of Columbia Committee, where Representative Ron Dellums, California Democrat, is fully committed to home rule for the District, but in Congress as a whole...
...11 In Louisiana, the Justice Department pushed the indictment of a prison farm superintendent when two black prisoners died after fifteen hours' confinement in a metal "hot box...
...Civil Rights Commission, for one, insists that "by opposing race-conscious relief," the Justice Department continues to "chart the Administration's course for ending judicial approval of affirmative action...
...they bused white kids around one elementary school to keep its enrollment entirely black and Chicano...
...H In New Orleans, Justice even took on the city's largest bank, Whitney National, charging it with discrimination against blacks and women...
...The traditionalists say it's unconstitutional because Article I, Section 8 gives exclusive legislative authority for the District to the U.S...
...But it's another sort of traditionalists— those Guinan calls the "unspoken traditionalists"—who will be exerting the greater pressure against statehood...
Vol. 47 • March 1983 • No. 3
