What Happened

by Clinton, Hillary Rodham

  At Wellesley, I tried to find ways to push the college toward more progressive positions through negotiation rather than disruption. I ran for student government president in 1968 because I thought I could do a good job convincing college administrators to make changes that students wanted. My platform included adding students to faculty committees, recruiting more students and faculty of color, opening up the curriculum, and easing curfews and other social restrictions. I won and spent the next year trying to translate the demands of restive students into measurable change on campus.

  That summer, I was in Chicago’s Grant Park when antiwar protests outside the Democratic National Convention turned into a melee that shocked the nation. My longtime close friend Betsy Ebeling and I narrowly missed being hit by a rock thrown by someone in the crowd behind us. Mayor Richard Daley’s police force was clearly more to blame for the violence than the kids in the park were. But the whole scene left me worried that the antiwar movement was causing a backlash that would help elect Richard Nixon and prolong the war. It was a terrifying, infuriating, exhilarating, and confusing time to be a young activist in America.

  In May 1970, just a few days after four unarmed college student protesters were shot and killed by National Guardsmen on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio, I spoke to the fiftieth anniversary convention of the League of Women Voters in Washington. The civic organization had invited me after my Wellesley graduation speech made national news the previous year. I wore a black armband in memory of the students who had been killed at Kent State. In my remarks, I tried to explain the tension so many young activists were feeling, wavering “back and forth between thinking that talk at this point was useless, and believing somehow that we had to continue using words.” This was a time when eighteen-year-old kids could be drafted to fight a war they believed was wrong but didn’t yet have the right to vote. Many of my peers were beside themselves with anger and despair. They had given up hope that progress was possible, at least through traditional means.

  I had read an article in the Washington Post about League of Women Voters members holding a vigil on the steps of the Capitol to protest Nixon’s recent invasion of Cambodia. Nixon had promised to end the war and now seemed to be escalating it instead. I believed invading Cambodia was both immoral and illegal. But I knew not everyone in the audience wanted to hear this. That vigil at the Capitol was controversial, even internally. One member from Connecticut who had not participated was quoted by the Post as saying she didn’t believe in protests and was afraid the vigil would tar the league’s reputation. I thought that was absurd and said so. “Not to stand up and protest today against the forces of death is to be counted among them,” I said, using the kind of hypercharged language that was common back then, at least for student activists. “People—living, breathing, caring human beings—who have never been involved before must be now. The luxury of long-range deliberation and verbiage-laden analysis must be forgone in favor of action.”

  Despite the hot (and verbiage-laden!) rhetoric, my idea of action wasn’t terribly radical. I urged league members to use their economic power—“Do you know what kind of activities the corporations that you invest in are engaged in? How much longer can we let corporations run us?”—and to help antiwar activists use the political system more effectively. I felt passionately that nobody could sit on the sidelines in a time of such upheaval.

  Considering everything that was going on, my friends and I sometimes wondered whether going to Yale Law School was a morally defensible choice or if we were selling out. A few of our classmates were indeed there just to open the door to a big paycheck and the chance to defend corporations that exploited workers and consumers. But for many of us, our legal education was arming us with a powerful new weapon as activists. The law could seem arid and abstract in our classrooms and textbooks, but we cheered for crusading lawyers across the country who were driving change by challenging injustices in court. When I started volunteering at the New Haven Legal Services Clinic, I saw firsthand how the law could improve or harm lives. I still believed there was a place for protests—and I moderated a mass meeting at Yale where students voted for a campus strike after the Kent State shootings, in part because the male students couldn’t agree which of them should take charge—but more and more, I was coming to see how the system could be changed through hard work and reform.

  All this crystalized for me when I went to work for Marian at the Children’s Defense Fund. She sent me to her home state of South Carolina to gather evidence for a lawsuit seeking to end the practice of incarcerating teenagers in jails with adults. A civil rights lawyer lent me his car, and I drove all over the state going to courthouses, meeting with parents of thirteen-, fourteen-, or fifteen-year-old boys who were stuck in jail with grown men who had committed serious felonies. It was eye-opening and outrageous.

  Next, I went undercover—really!—in Dothan, Alabama, to expose segregated schools that were trying to evade integration. Posing as the young wife of a businessman who had just been transferred to the area, I visited the all-white private school that had just opened in town and received tax-exempt status. When I started asking questions about the student body and curriculum, I was assured that no black students would be enrolled. Marian used the evidence that I and other activists gathered in the field to pressure the Nixon administration to crack down on these so-called segregated academies. It was thrilling work because it felt meaningful and real. After years spent studying social justice from a distance, I was finally doing something.

  Another early job for Marian was going door-to-door in a working-class Portuguese neighborhood in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to figure out why so many families were keeping their children out of school. One answer was that, in those days, most schools couldn’t accommodate children with disabilities, so those kids had no choice but to stay home. I’ll never forget meeting one young girl in a wheelchair on the small back porch of her house. She told me how badly she wanted to go to school. But the wheelchair made it impossible. It seemed like it should be such a simple problem to solve.

  This became a clarifying moment for me. I had been raised to believe in the power of reason, evidence, argument, and in the centrality of fairness and equality. As a campus liberal in the foment of the sixties, I took “consciousness raising” seriously. But talking about fairness alone wouldn’t get a ramp built for this girl’s wheelchair at the local public school. Raising public awareness would be necessary but not sufficient for changing school policies and hiring and training new staff to give students with disabilities an equal education. Instead of waiting for a revolution, the kind of change this girl needed was more likely to look like the sociologist Max Weber’s description of politics: “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” I felt ready to do it.

  Under Marian’s leadership, we gathered data to document the scope of the problem. We wrote a report. We built a coalition of like-minded organizations. And we went to Washington to argue our case. It took until 1975, but the Children’s Defense Fund’s work eventually helped convince Congress to pass the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, requiring all public schools to make accommodations for students with disabilities.

  This kind of work isn’t glamorous. But my experience with CDF convinced me that this is how you make real change in America: step by step, year by year, sometimes even door by door. You need to stir up public opinion and put pressure on political leaders. You have to shift policies and resources. And you need to win elections. You need to change hearts and change laws.

  Although I never imagined running for office myself, I came to see partisan politics as the most viable route in a democracy for achieving significant and lasting progress. Then, as now, plenty of progressive activists preferred to stand apart from party politics. Some saw both Democrats and Republicans as corrupt and compromised. Others were discouraged by repeated defeats. It was soul crushing to watch Democrats lose every single presidential election between 1968 and 1988 except
one. But despite it all, I was attracted to politics. Even when I grew disillusioned, I knew that winning elections was the key that could unlock the change our country needed. So I stuffed envelopes for Gene McCarthy in New Hampshire, registered voters for George McGovern in Texas, set up field offices for Jimmy Carter in Indiana, and enthusiastically supported my husband’s decision to run for office in Arkansas.

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  My identity as an advocate and activist remained important to me as I grew older. When I myself was lobbied and protested as a public official, it was a little like stepping through the looking glass. Whenever I grew frustrated, I’d remind myself how it felt to be on the other side of the table or out in the street with a sign and a megaphone. I’d been there. I knew that the activists giving me a hard time were doing their jobs, trying to drive progress and hold leaders accountable. That kind of pressure is not just important—it’s mission-critical for a healthy democracy. As FDR supposedly told a group of civil rights leaders, “Okay, you’ve convinced me. Now make me do it.”

  Still, there was an inherent tension. Some activists and advocates saw their role as putting pressure on people in power, including allies, and they weren’t interested in compromise. They didn’t have to strike deals with Republicans or worry about winning elections. But I did. There are principles and values we should never compromise, but to be an effective leader in a democracy, you need flexible strategies and tactics, especially under difficult political conditions. I learned that the hard way during our battle for health care reform in the early nineties. Reluctance to compromise can bring about defeat. The forces opposed to change have it easier. They can just say no, again and again, and blame the other side when it doesn’t happen. If you want to get something done, you have to find a way to get to yes.

  So I’ve never had much respect for activists who are willing to sit out elections, waste their votes, or tear down well-meaning allies rather than engage constructively. Making the perfect the enemy of the good is shortsighted and counterproductive. And when someone on the left starts talking about how there’s no difference between the two parties or that electing a right-wing Republican might somehow hasten “the revolution,” it’s just unfathomably wrong.

  When I was Secretary of State, I met in Cairo with a group of young Egyptian activists who had helped organize the demonstrations in Tahrir Square that shocked the world by toppling President Hosni Mubarak in early 2011. They were intoxicated by the power of their protests but showed little interest in organizing political parties, drafting platforms, running candidates, or building coalitions. Politics wasn’t for them, they said. I feared what that would mean for their future. I believed they were essentially handing the country over to the two most organized forces in Egypt: the Muslim Brotherhood and the military. In the years ahead, both fears proved correct.

  I had similar conversations with some Black Lives Matter activists during the 2016 campaign. I respected how effectively their movement grabbed hold of the national debate. I welcomed it when activists such as Brittany Packnett and DeRay Mckesson pressed me on specific issues and engaged constructively with my team and me to make our platform better and stronger. And I was honored when they endorsed me for President. But I was concerned when other activists proved more interested in disruption and confrontation than in working together to change policies that perpetuate systemic racism.

  This was on my mind during a memorable encounter with a few young activists in August 2015. They had driven up from Boston to attend one of my town hall meetings in Keene, New Hampshire. Well, attend is not quite the right word. Disrupt is more accurate. The town hall was focused on the growing problem of opioid abuse that was ravaging small towns across America, but the activists were determined to grab the spotlight for a different epidemic: the young black men and women being killed in encounters with police, as well as the broader systemic racism that devalued black lives and perpetuated inequities in education, housing, employment, and the justice system. In short: a cause worth fighting for.

  They arrived too late to get into the town hall, but my staff suggested that we meet afterward so the activists could raise their concerns directly with me. Maybe we could even have a constructive back-and-forth. It started well enough. We were standing backstage in a small circle, which gave the discussion an intimate directness.

  “What you’re doing as activists and as people who are constantly raising these issues is really important,” I said. “We can’t get change unless there’s constant pressure.” Then I asked a question that I’d been wondering about for some time: how they planned to build on their early success. “We need a whole comprehensive plan. I am more than happy to work with you guys,” I said.

  But these activists didn’t want to talk about developing a policy agenda. One was singularly focused on getting me to accept personal responsibility for having supported policies, especially the crime bill that my husband signed in 1994, which he claimed created a culture of mass incarceration. “You, Hillary Clinton, have been in no uncertain way, partially responsible for this. More than most,” he declared.

  I thought these activists were right that it was time for public officials—and all Americans, really—to stop tiptoeing around the brutal role that racism has played in our history and continues to play in our politics. But his view of the ’94 crime bill was oversimplified beyond recognition.

  The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act was passed during the crack epidemic that ravaged America’s cities in the 1980s and early 1990s. It included important and positive provisions, such as the Violence Against Women Act and a ban on assault weapons. It set up special drug courts to keep first-time offenders out of prison, funded after-school and job opportunities for at-risk young people, and provided resources to hire and train more police officers. Unfortunately, the only way to pass the law was to also include measures that congressional Republicans demanded. They insisted on longer federal sentences for drug offenders. States that were already increasing penalties were emboldened. States that weren’t doing so, started to. And all that led to higher rates of incarceration across the country. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Joe Biden helped write the compromise legislation. Bernie Sanders voted for it. So did most congressional Democrats. It was also supported by many black leaders determined to stop the crime wave decimating their communities. As Yale Law School professor James Forman Jr. explains in his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, “African Americans have always viewed the protection of black lives as a civil rights issue, whether the threat comes from police officers or street criminals.”

  So, yes, the crime bill was flawed. It was a tough compromise. And it’s fair to say, as Bill himself has done in the years since, that the negative consequences took a heavy toll, especially in poor and minority communities. “I signed a bill that made the problem worse,” Bill said at a national conference of the NAACP in July 2015, referring to excessive incarceration. I agreed with him, which is why I was the first candidate to call for “an end to the era of mass incarceration” and proposed an aggressive agenda for criminal justice reform. It’s painful now to think about how we’re going backward on these issues under President Trump, with an Attorney General who favors longer sentences for drug offenders and less oversight of police departments, and who is hostile to civil rights and voting rights across the board.

  So I understood the frustration of the Black Lives Matter activists, and I respected their conviction. I knew they spoke from a lifetime of being ignored and disrespected by authority figures. But I kept trying to steer the conversation back to the question of how to develop and advance a concrete agenda on racial justice.

  “There has to be some positive vision and plan that you can move people toward,” I said. “The consciousness raising, the advocacy, the passion, the youth of your movement is so critical. But now all I’m suggesting is—even for us sinners—find some common ground on agendas that c
an make a difference right here and now in people’s lives.”

  We went round and round awhile longer on these questions, but it felt like we were talking past one another. I don’t think any of us left the conversation very satisfied.

  I took seriously the policies some of the Black Lives Matter activists later put forward to reform the criminal justice system and invest in communities of color. I asked Maya and our team to work closely with them. We incorporated the best of their ideas into our plans, along with input from civil rights organizations that had been in the trenches for decades. In October 2015, my friend Alexis Herman, the former Secretary of Labor, hosted a meeting in Washington for me with another group of activists. We had an engaging discussion about how to improve policing, build trust, and create a sense of security and opportunity in black neighborhoods. They spoke about feeling not only like outsiders in America but intruders—like someone no one wants, no one values. As one woman put it, “If you look like me, your life doesn’t have worth.” It was wrenching to hear a young American say that.

  Finding the right balance between principle and pragmatism isn’t easy. One example of how hard that was for me was the effort to reform welfare in the nineties—another tough compromise that remains controversial. Bill and I both believed that change was needed to help more people get the tools and support to transition from welfare to work, including assistance with health care and childcare. But Republicans in Congress were determined to rip up the social safety net. They wanted to slash funding and guarantees for welfare, Medicaid, school lunches, and food stamps; deny all benefits even to documented immigrants; and send children born out of wedlock to teen mothers to orphanages—all while offering little support to people who wanted to find work. It was cold-blooded. I encouraged Bill to veto the Republican plan, which he did. They passed it again with only minimal changes. So he vetoed it again. Then Congress passed a compromise plan. It was still flawed but on balance seemed like it would help more than it hurt.