Thurgood Marshall’s dissent was a roaring eulogy to a once-promising landmark decision. He was astounded at the majority’s “superficial” reasoning that had now resulted in the “emasculation of our constitutional guarantee of equal protection.” Marshall balked at the notion of suburban innocence and scoffed at the contention that the Detroit public schools were locally controlled. The state of Michigan, he laid out, devised, tweaked, contorted, and, in fact, ran the K–12 system. Michigan, then, had the power to consolidate school districts and chose time and time again to keep white suburban ones separate and distinct from those in the city. Moreover, Marshall pointed out, when the city tried to exert some authority to implement Brown, the state legislature crushed Detroit’s efforts. And while Michigan provided funding for buses in suburban schools, the same law actually banned the use of state transportation funds for students in the city of Detroit. This, Marshall noted, led to the “construction of small walk-in neighborhood schools, … which reflected, to the greatest extent feasible, extensive residential segregation.” How the justices, given this firmly documented track record of discrimination, could absolve the state from responsibility for the racially divided metropolitan school system it created, Marshall had no idea: It “simply flies in the face of reality.” For Marshall, the court’s decision had less to do with “the neutral principle of law” than it did with public sentiment that “we have gone far enough in enforcing the Constitution’s guarantee of equal justice.” The consequences of this kind of cowardice for the United States, he warned, are “a course … our people will ultimately regret.”67
As black access to quality public schools drifted further and further away, entrance into colleges and universities, increasingly essential in America’s postindustrial economy, became even more difficult as well—thanks in no small part to the Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision. Allan Bakke, a white male, had applied to the University of California, Davis, medical school and was turned down twice. Bakke sued, arguing that the university’s quota system allowed the admission of blacks and Latinos who had lower MCAT scores than his. There were, of course, whites who had also gained entry into the medical school program with scores lower than Bakke’s, but their entrance was not the focus of his suit. Nor was the medical dean’s tendency to guarantee admission to a number of his friends’ and politicians’ children (despite their lack of qualifications). Admissions based on alumni connections and high-level friendships, while generally dovetailing with whiteness, were not explicitly based on race and therefore not subject to “strict scrutiny.” Instead, the university’s policy to admit sixteen blacks and Latinos in a class of one hundred, Bakke charged, had denied him equal protection under the law.68
In the highly contentious and fractious 4–1–4 decision, a plurality of judges agreed, demanding concrete evidence that black students who had been admitted had personally been discriminated against by the university. The five justices further asserted that they would only countenance the use of race in admissions for well-defined diversity purposes, while preferring the broader, more multicultural scope of “disadvantaged,” which would, for example, recognize what a “farm boy from Idaho” could bring to Harvard. Finally, they focused the court’s concern on the “reverse discrimination” heaped on whites applying to colleges and universities who, like Bakke, “bore no responsibility for any wrongs suffered by minorities.” As for admissions policies designed to atone for past discrimination against minorities, Justice Byron White was unequivocal: “I do not accept that position.”69
Attempting to observe the law while also living up to an ethos they had now taken to heart, universities frantically turned to vaguer notions of “diversity,” but the definition of that word soon became so expansive that by the twenty-first century white males would actually be the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action in college admissions.70
Even as the court rejected history, Thurgood Marshall’s dissent in Bakke recounted 350 years of “the most pervasive and ingenious forms of racial discrimination” against African Americans. He then expressed disbelief that the court would deny California the right to apply a remedy in the face of that kind of sordid history.71 Astounded as Marshall may have been, though, the decision, viewed through the opposite lens, made calculated sense. African Americans had rushed right through the barely opened door of opportunity pushed ajar by the Civil Rights Movement: From 1970 to 1978, the number of blacks enrolled in college had literally doubled. And in just a little more than a decade, the percentage of African Americans who had a college degree climbed to 6 percent from 4 percent.72 A combination of their own determination and aspiration—coupled with the protections of affirmative action, which actively sought black students rather than shutting them out, and federal student financial aid, which helped defray tuition costs for a people overwhelmingly impoverished—had significantly changed the game.73 Nixon’s policies and the Supreme Court choices had set the stage to reverse those gains. Much of this reversal, though, would not be carried out until the Reagan administration.
Hailed as one of the most popular and even greatest presidents, Ronald Reagan oversaw the rollback of many of the gains African Americans had achieved through the Civil Rights Movement. Between 1981 and 1988, conditions regressed to levels reminiscent of the early 1960s.74
Journalist Hodding Carter described Reagan as “part Wallace and part Nixon and a more effective southern strategist than both put together.”75 Reagan’s aura of sincerity and “aw shucks” geniality lent a welcoming, friendly facade to any harshness of the Southern Strategy—something that neither Nixon’s brooding nor Wallace’s angry countenance had ever been able to convey. Reagan, therefore, positively oozed racial innocence in his declaration of fealty to states’ rights at the all-white 1980 Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, site of the triple murder of civil rights workers.76 In a 1981 interview, GOP consultant Lee Atwater explained the inner logic of, as one commentator noted, “racism with plausible deniability.”77 “You start out in 1954,” Atwater laid out, “by saying, ‘nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that,” he then deflected.78
It was a role tailor-made for the former Hollywood actor. Reagan cast himself as a traditional conservative, but his disdain for supposed big government was geared not so much toward New Deal programs that had provided paid employment to millions of out-of-work Americans like his father; or social security, which had overwhelmingly benefited whites during the Great Depression. What President Reagan loathed was the Great Society that, despite its dispersal of benefits to middle-class whites and its measurable effectiveness in lifting the elderly out of poverty, he succeeded in coding as a giveaway program for blacks.79 His budget priorities reflected that contempt, as he ordered a scorched-earth policy through the Great Society from education, to housing, to employment.
Despite his profession of, and supposed obsession with, a “colorblind” society where, as he said, “nothing is done to, or for, anyone because of race,” Reagan’s budget proposals targeted very specifically those programs in which blacks were overrepresented even as he protected the other portions of the “social safety net,” such as social security, where African Americans were but a small fraction of the recipients.80 For example, almost five times as many black college-bound high school seniors as white came from families with incomes below twelve thousand dollars. The administration reconfigured various grants and loan packages so that “the needier the student, the harder he or she would be hit by Reagan’s student-aid cuts.” Not surprisingly, nationwide black enrollment in college plummeted from 34 percent to 26 percent. Thus, just at the moment when the postindustrial economy m
ade an undergraduate degree more important than ever, fifteen thousand fewer African Americans were in college during the early 1980s than had been enrolled in the mid-1970s (although the high school graduation numbers were by now significantly higher). Nor had the fallout happened only at the baccalaureate level; the plunge in undergraduate enrollment—which no other racial or ethnic group suffered during this time—cascaded into a substantial decline in the number of African Americans in graduate programs as well.81
While access to higher education was crumbling, the Reagan administration also established enormous roadblocks to quality K–12 public schools for African American children. The president cavalierly stated that he was “under the impression that the problem of segregated schools has been settled.”82 The assistant attorney general for civil rights, William Bradford Reynolds, agreed, and when he learned of an effort in South Carolina to dismantle what amounted to Jim Crow education, he was determined that black parents, whom he referred to as “those bastards,” would have to “jump through every hoop” to file a lawsuit to desegregate the public schools in Charleston. “We are not going to compel children who don’t choose to have an integrated education to have one,” Reynolds insisted.83 Under Reynolds and Attorney General Edwin Meese, the Department of Justice used virtually every legal strategy to dismantle, obstruct, and undermine the only remaining alternative to integrate schools—busing—including torpedoing a plan to finally desegregate a school district in Louisiana that had openly fought Brown since 1956.84
Already hampered by the Scylla and Charybdis of Milliken and Rodriguez, black children’s passage through the education system became even more difficult during the Reagan years. The Detroit decision meant that children were, for the most part, locked inside their cities and their neighborhoods, while Rodriguez meant that those city and neighborhood schools would remain or become even more impoverished. And now the Department of Justice seemed determined to advocate segregated schools as a “remedy,” putting its considerable weight on the side of the status quo of inequality.85 Moreover, the Reagan administration exacerbated that inequality even further as it shredded the safety net.86 Not even school lunch programs, geared toward those in greatest economic need, were sacred, the Christian Science Monitor reported, as they came under attack when “President Reagan trimmed $1.46 billion from $5.66 billion earmarked for child nutrition programs.”87 He also leveled a double-digit cut for a program designed to provide educational support for poor children in the classroom at the very moment when the share of black youth living below the poverty line had increased to almost 43 percent.88
The 1980s revealed just how fragile the economic recovery of African Americans was in the wake of 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow. From the 1960s to the 1970s, the black unemployment rate had declined, and the gap between black and white unemployment rates had actually narrowed. By the time Reagan’s policies had taken effect, however, not only had the black unemployment rate increased, but also the unemployment gap between blacks and whites had widened to unprecedented levels.89 During the early 1980s, the overall black unemployment rate stood at 15.5 percent—“an all time high” since the Great Depression—while unemployment among African American youth was a staggering 45.7 percent. At this point Reagan chose to slash the training, employment, and labor services budget by 70 percent—a cut of $3.805 billion.90 The only “ ‘urban’ program that survived the cuts was federal aid for highways—which primarily benefited suburbs, not cities.” In keeping with Lee Atwater’s mantra that “blacks get hurt worse than whites,” Reagan gutted aid to cities so extensively that federal dollars were reduced from 22 percent of a city’s budget to 6 percent. Cities responded with sharp austerity measures that shut down libraries, closed municipal hospitals, and cut back on garbage pickup. Some cities even dismantled their police and fire departments.91
Reagan further destabilized the economic foundation for African Americans by ordering massive layoffs in federal jobs while deliberately weakening the enforcement of civil rights laws in the workplace. Blacks are disproportionately employed by the government, not least because the public sector suffers demonstrably less discrimination in hiring and compensation than private industry.92 More than 50 percent of the growth in employment for black workers in the United States between 1960 to 1976, in fact, was in the public sector. But that avenue into economic stability, even for the college educated, was now threatened by two key developments: First, the federal government’s layoffs were concentrated in the social service agencies, where many African Americans worked. Reagan had exempted the Department of Defense, for example, while making it clear that “other divisions of Government would be hit especially hard by the employment reductions.” When one agency was abolished in 1981, jobs for nine hundred workers, 60 percent of them black, were wiped out. Then, the Department of Health and Human Services, a major agency for black employment, absorbed about half of the six thousand layoffs scheduled for 1982.93
The second development assaulting the job security of black civil servants was the administration’s decision to put the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which was the federal watchdog for employment discrimination, “on ice” by making the agency utterly ineffective.94 Reagan appointed inadequate and often incompetent leadership. He was especially keen to select African Americans, such as future Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, who believed there was no group discrimination against minorities or women, certainly nothing that would warrant class-action lawsuits.95 Under this new management, the agency slowed down to a crawl its investigation and processing of complaints. The result was a growing backlog whose legal shelf life expired before the EEOC even got around to investigating.96 The watchdog had been effectively muzzled.
With the rollback now in full force, the “civil rights gains of the past,” as National Urban League president Vernon Jordan remarked, were “now under attack and in danger.”97 The median family income for African Americans had been higher in the 1970s than it was under Reagan, even as the white median income, despite the economic downturn, continued to grow. As a result, the actual spending power of blacks decreased while that of whites rose, increasing the gap by 12 percent. “In virtually every area of life that counts,” wrote David Swinton, future president of the United Negro College Fund, “black people made strong progress in the 1960s, peaked in the 70s, and have been sliding back ever since.” The Reagan administration’s “deplorable” policies and efforts “to turn back the clock” ensured it. Indeed, by 1990, blacks in the bottom 20 percent were poorer in relation to whites than at any time since the 1950s. Not surprisingly, the National Urban League labeled the president’s policies “a failure” that has “usher[ed] in a new era of stagnation and decline” for the “vast majority of average black Americans.”98 Reagan’s job cuts, retooling of student financial aid to eliminate those most in need, and decimation of antipoverty and social welfare programs “virtually ensured that the goal of the African American community for economic stability and progress would crumble and fade.”99
In March 1981, Reagan assured reporters that “he would offer a national drug-abuse program that would put its main effort into warning young people about the dangers of drug use rather than into attacks on narcotics smuggling.”100 But by October 1982, the president had obviously changed his mind. In a gripping address, he explained that a scourge had invaded the nation’s borders, taken hold of American families and children, and was laying siege to cities across the land. Hardest hit, the president conveyed, was the “garden spot” of South Florida, which had “turned into a battlefield for competing drug pushers who were terrorizing Florida’s citizens.” The president then laid out a potent multi-agency strategy using military intelligence and radar that could hone in on drug traffickers and execute brilliant interdiction strikes “to cut off drugs before they left other countries’ borders.”101
There was just one problem. There was no drug crisis in 1982. Marijuana use was down; heroin and hallucinogens use h
ad leveled off, even first-time cocaine use was bottoming out.102
But, as Reagan well knew, such a crisis was certainly coming, for it had been manufactured and facilitated by his staff on the National Security Council (NSC) along with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In these last throes of the Cold War, Nicaragua was the target. But the collateral damage would spray South Central Los Angeles and then radiate out to black communities all across the United States.
In 1979, after a coalition of moderate and Marxist Nicaraguans overthrew longtime U.S. ally and ruthless dictator Anastasio Somoza, communist Sandinistas came to power in Managua. Reagan did not see this as a homegrown revolution borne out of intolerable conditions of greed, torture, and human rights violations. Instead, he was sure that the Sandinistas were no more than Soviet stooges ensconced by Moscow to foment revolution in America’s backyard.103 The president was, therefore, obsessed with eliminating the Sandinistas.104
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