Jul 26, 2020

Article #5 >>>>> >Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota< >>>>> Volume VII, Number 2, August 2020


Article #5

Civil Rights Without Civil Reckoning, 1931-2020  

 

Depression, War, a New Deal

 

The Great Depression that began with the stock market crash of 29 October 1929 fell hard on African America.  Most blacks in the south toiled as sharecroppers or as laborers on other people’s farms, so when landowners ran into economic difficulty, black framers had to scramble for work.  But in the South, other work was rare, and the North did not offer much hope during the 1930s:  Whites who had come to eschew certain kinds of labor eagerly took jobs that they had formerly rejected.  Left with few options, the downcast African American worker of the South was the most economically devastated figure of the Great Depression.

 

During the Great Depression, the capitalist system seemed to many to be failing, and in that context interest in communism increased.  Leaders of the Communist Party made a special effort to recruit disaffected African Americans, and the party nominated African American James Ford as vice-presidential candidate in 1932, 1936, and 1940.  The African American laboring people of the urban North, while making some progress in gaining acceptance into unions, in general still found membership difficult to obtain, and in terms of work availability and work conditions they fared poorly.  Asa Philip Randolph emerged as a major figure in labor leadership, superintending the formation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in August 1925 that culminated a dozen years later (25 August 1937) in better wages and work conditions for the African American porters who worked for the Pullman Company, which dominated the sleeping car industry aboard railroads.

 

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal gave hope to many in the United States, African Americans included, and his administration featured notable advances in the cause of black citizenship.  The United States, though, was still a very segregated society.  As a rule, African Americans stayed in the camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) longer than whites, moved less readily into administrative positions, and were confined to 10% of total enrollment.  Approximately 50,000 African Americans were served by the CCC and another 64,000 young African Americans found work through the National Youth Administration (NYA).  The education program of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) employed over 5,000 African Americans in leadership and supervisory positions, taught basic literacy to almost 25,000 black students, and provided training in skills transferrable to jobs in business, industry, and the trades.  The WPA was led by Harry Hopkins, an enlightened individual who maneuvered to get policies established making discrimination based on race, creed, or color illegal.

                                                                                                                                                                                                               

As part of the New Deal, the Federal Writers Project (FWP) abetted the careers of African American authors Horace R. Crayton, St. Clair Drake, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neal Hurston, and Richard Wright.  The Federal Music Project, Federal Art Project, and Federal Theater Project also supported the work of creative African Americans, producing concerts, supporting hundreds of black sculptors and painters (including very notably Horace Pippin and Jacob Lawrence), and employing 500 African Americans for theater productions in New York City.  The works of Hall Johnson (Run Little Chillun) Rudolf Fischer (Conjure Man Dies:  a Mystery Tale of Harlem [an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth]) gained production under the aegis of the Federal Theater Project.  Many African American creative artists such as dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham and actor Rex Ingram went on to exciting and seminal careers in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the programs of the New Deal.  

 

Eleanor Roosevelt was instrumental in getting her husband to create a “Black Cabinet” to provide advice to the president on New Deal policies.  Roosevelt appointed African American educator Mary McCleod Bethune to head the Division of Negro Affairs within the National Youth Administration, and it was she who organized the Black Cabinet.  The group included Robert L. Vann, editor of the Pitsburgh Currier, who held a post in the office of the attorney general;  William H. Hastie, a civil rights attorney who served in the Department of Justice;  Robert D. Weaver, an economist serving in the Department of the Interior;  Lawrence A. Oxley, a social worker in the Department of Labor;  and Edgar Brown, president of the United Government Employees and an official in the Civilian Conservation Corps.  Other African Americans tapped for positions in the Roosevelt administration included E. K. Jones, on leave from the National Urban League, at the Department of Commerce;  Ira Reid on the Social Security Board; and Ambrose Carver at the Office of Education.

 

Eleanor Roosevelt served as a conduit to the president for congresspersons seeking his support for legislation, notably Walter White in behalf of his anti-lynching bill.  The spouse of the president arranged for Marian Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial when the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) denied the famous soprano the opportunity to perform in Constitution Hall.  Eleanor Roosevelt was a hugely important figure at a time when so many Americans held virulently racist views, absorbing the political heat, educating her husband on issues of racial equity, and prodding his conscience as necessary.

 

The New Deal put millions of Americans back to work and lifted the spirits of the nation, but the economic stimulus provided by the need for the material goods of warfare meant that World War II (1939-1945) was really responsible for ending the Great Depression.  About 1,000,000 African Americans served in the armed forces during World War II, including several thousand women in the women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WACS).  About 500,000 soldiers served in either the European or Asia/ Pacific theaters of the war, typically in segregated units in technically noncombat positions (quartermaster, engineer, ordinance handler, and transport provider).  But the 92nd Infantry, 93rd Infantry, 761st Tank Battalion, 614th Tank Destroyer Battalion, and 593rd Field Artillery provide examples of military units in which African Americans served with great distinction in direct combat during World War II.  Bernie Robinson became the first African American officer in 1942;  by war’s end there were 50 such African American officers in the military forces of the United States.

 

African American pilots charted some of he most remarkable achievements of World War II.  The most famous of these was the 332nd Fighter Group, better known as the Tuskegee Airmen. 

 

Graduates of the segregated pilot program in Tuskegee, Alabama, this accomplished group of aiment flew escort planes, charged with the duty of protecting heavy bombers;  in more than two hundred missions, they never lost an escorted plane to the Germans or other opponents, and they managed to sink a German navy destroyer with aircraft gunfire.  At Pearl Harbor, mess attendant Dorie Miller positioned himself at a machine gun and shot down at least four Japanese aircraft.  Miller was honored with the Navy Cross for heroism but was promoted only to mess attendant first class and, sadly, died aboard a small carrier craft torpedoed by the Japanese on 24 November 1943.

 

African American physician Charles Drew oversaw establishment of the first blood bank in New York City, following with similar efforts at the request of Great Britain and for the Red Cross back in the United States.  A sad demise, though, also was the reality for the man who had saved so many lives as an expert in hematology.  Drew died in the aftermath of an automobile accident in North Carolina, driving himself to a meeting in order to avoid segregated transportation.  The segregated hospital gto which he was admitted lacked the blood plasma that might have saved his life. 

 

African Americans did, though, see gains in many facets of American life during the last years of World War II and the years immediately following.  Executive Order 8802 prohibited employment discrimination in industries producing war goods.  Before 1948, 78% of African Americans earned under $3,800 per year.  Between1948 and 1961, that percentage would decrease to 47%, and during the same period the percentage of African Americans earning over $100,000 increased from less than 1% to about 17%.  One could also see that the efforts of the NAACP to improve the legal and social climate for African American college attendance was producing favorable results:  Whereas in 1947, the number of African American college students was 124,000, by 1964 this figure had almost doubled, to 233,000.  In politics, Adam Clayton Powell of New York City won a seat in the House of Representatives and, buoyed by a strong and devoted following back home, strode in to barbershops, dining rooms, and showers that had previously been segregated.

 

 

The Immediate Aftermath of World War II

 

During World War II and its aftermath, the NAACP pressed ahead with its initiatives to open institutions of higher learning, with the ultimate objective of bringing about total desegregation odf all public schools, whether K-12, college, or university.  Court action had successively culminated in the desegregation for Missouri Law School and set a precedent for the integration of other professional schools.

 

Under the sway of enthusiasm for the New Deal and the efforts of Eleanor Roosevelt, African American voters began to vote for most often for Democrats, distancing themselves from a Republican Party that no longer seemed very much like the party of Lincoln.  In 1954, African Americans provided the margin of victory for the candidacies of black politicians running for seats in the United States House of Representatives;  these included Augustus Hawkins of California, William L. Dawson of Illinois, as well as Clayton Powell (who was reelected).

 

And in that very year of 1954, Thurgood Marshall led a team of NAACP lawyers to landmark victory in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, ending desegregations and ushering in the Civil Rights Movement that at long last ended the Period That Never Should Have Been, that stretch of time extending from the Compromise of 1877 until the Brown v. Board decision of 1954.

 

Not until the middle 1970s, though, did various efforts to implement desegregation of the schools and federal programs advancing African American citizenship, terms of employment, and freedom of residence manifest themselves in significant changes in American society.  So we may think of the Period That Never Should Have Been for Extending one hundred years:

 

This should deepen our lament for the brutal experience of African Americans in the history of the United States, raise our respect for African American accomplishment in the midst of terrifying conditions of life, and impel us to address the many concerns that still abide for African Americans living at the urban core throughout the nation. 

 

 

The Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1972

 

The Cases and Incidents tht Galvanized a Movement

 

In the town of Topeka, Kansas, in 1950, there were two elementary schools, one for African American children, the other for white children.  Seven year-old Linda Brown , African American of ethnicity, lived just four blocks from the school for white for children but across town from the school for black kids.  Linda Brown’s father lost a case filed in behalf of his daughter in the lower courts, but his attorneys persisted with an appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States, which accepted the case and assigned its appellation in joint consideration of similar cases that had been referred on appeal to the Supreme Court.  In 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the case for the unanimous opinion in favor of Brown and by extension those who had filed the other cases, asserting that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.  Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal  

 

In August 1955 a fourteen year-old African American Emmett Till of Chicago, visiting relatives in Mississippi, sustained a fatal shot to the head from two white men who claimed that the youth had “talked fresh” to a white woman.  Till was beaten so badly that his face was unrecognizable, as gained wide notice when photos were fun in Jet magazine, the Chicago Defender (a prominent and venerable black-owned newspaper), and in time the mainstream white media.

 

On 1 December 1955, a department store seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat at the front of the black section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, as requested by a white person.  When she was arrested, her connections as a local civil rights worker sent forth a concatenation of responses, including those from African American community leader E. D. Nixon, attorney Cliffor Durr, and Alabama State College English Professor Jo Ann Robinson.  Montgomery pastor Martin Luther King, who led Dexter Avenue Baptist Church responded reluctantly to the call to head a movement that burgeoned into a 12-month boycott that culminated in the 13 November 1956 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that determined that Montgomery’s segregated bus system was unconstitutional.

                                                                               

Martin Luther King, who had been satisfied with developing himself professionally as a local pastor, knew that his gifts now had to be employed in a wider effort that became the Civil Rights Movement.  He assumed the position at the helm of the southern Christian Leadership Conference, employing a disciplined nonviolent approach adapted from the satyagraha movement of Mohandas K. Gandhi that had played a major role in winning independence for India from Great Britain in 1947.

 

Multiple Assertions of African American Rights, 1957-1963

 

The years 1957-1963 were replete with nonviolent actions meant to induce changes in practices that had continued for at least eighty years in the Jim Crow South, as well as for many decades in the urban North:

 

In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower called in the National Guard to protect the entry of nine African American high school students (Minniejean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrance Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, and Carlotta Walls) into Central High School of Little Rock, Arkansas.  Hatemongering whites had mounted a massive intimidation effort that called forth heroic feats of courage on the part of local NAACP president Daisy Bates and others, but not until Eisenhower sent in the troops did the white antagonists have to relent.

The students who came to be known as the Little Rock Nine entered the halls of Central High School,  and senior Ernest Green moved forward to graduation in spring 1958.

 

Martin Luther King continued to be the most prominent Civil Rights leader, but other organizations formed to work for the cause of African American Rights: 

 

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, formed back in 1942 by James Farmer) worked out of a head office in Chicago and was at the forefront of many sit-ins for the desegregation of public lunch counters, restrooms, parks, theaters, and schools.   

 

In 1960, 300 students came together at the behest Ellas Baker, a militant member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).  By 1962, a Harvard-educated SNCC teacher by the name of Robert Moses came was heading SNCC, organizing a highly effective and disciplined staff working to ensure the right to vote in the South.

 

Late in 1960, Martin Luther King was arrested on a charge of disturbing the peace in Birmingham, Alabama.  A call from Robert Kennedy, brother of John Kennedy, made a call that culminated in King’s release.  This action did a great deal to swing the black vote in the 1960 presidential election toward Democrat John Kennedy in his race against Republican Richard Nixon, thereby garnering the support of needed votes in a close contest.   

 

In 1961 came the Freedom Rides that produced such a dangerous showdown in Birmingham, Alabama, and impelled Robert Kennedy, Attorney General in his brother’s administration, to pressure southern bus companies and state governments to comply with federal law so as to comply with follow desegregated and nondiscriminatory policy regarding public transportation

 

In 1962 the National Guard in  Mississippi was called in to protect the right of African Amerin student James Meredith to enter the University of Mississippi.  Meredith had National Guard escorts to classes, and at their peak troops stationed on the university’s campus totaled 20,000.  Troops were still necessary when Meredith (who arrived as a transfer student with numerous previously earned credits) went through the graduation ceremony in August 1963.  

 

Then in that very month, on 28 August 1963, came the March on Washington which catapulted Martin Luther King to even higher national prominence.  Following the original vision of A. Philip Randolph, the various groups working in the Civil Rights Movement worked with meticulous effectiveness to bring forth 250,000 people, who gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to hear a litany of speakers on the cause of civil rights.  Of the many eloquent speakers, Martin Luther King shown brightest of all with his ringing oratory in what has come to be known as the “I Have a Dream” speech.  This piece of oratory moved many people in the United States who were watching on television or listening on the radio.  The speech was a mighty call for the logical extension of morality and justice embedded in both the Bible and the United States Constitution to the realms of law and human relationships, envisioning among many other stirring images that day when “right down there in Alabama, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, little black boys and black girls will join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk as sisters and brothers.”

                                                                                                                                

These many events from the momentous years 1957-1963, culminating in the enormously powerful March on Washington inspired Lyndon Baines Johnson to use all of his political skills to induce the United States Congress to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, giving statutory enforcement power to guarantees of citizenship in the 14th Amendment;  and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, similarly making clear the imperative for all states to follow the 15th Amendment guaranteeing voting rights for all citizens.  The assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963;  and Fannie Lou Hamer’s unsuccessful but heroic effort to seat black members among the Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention;  each in its own way impelled Congress to act favorably on the vigorous requests from President Johnson.  

 

Additions to Legal Foundation for African American Rights, 1966-1972

 

In the course of the late 1960s, the Johnson administration moved to establish the basis for a Great Society in which poverty would be radically reduced and racism would recede.  Johnson secured passage of legislation to establish the Medicaid program to provide health care for people of low

income, and Medicare to take care of the health needs of elderly people.  He oversaw  the provision of food stamps to people of low income for the purpose of purchasing nutritious food;  additionally, the program for Women, Infants, and Children (W. I. C.)  provided milk and other items vital to the health of pregnant women, infants, and young children.

 

Fair housing laws also went into effect, making residentially accessible areas in cities that had previously operated under restrictive housing covenants denying home purchases to people of certain national origins and races.  And the Johnson administration founded the Job Corps to provide training

in work skills to people of low income.  Johnson had won decisively against republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 but took stock of his political situation in the context of an increasingly unpopular Vietnam War and declined to run for president in 1968.  Action to found social programs ebbed during the years of the President Richard M. Nixon administration, but in 1972 a Democratic-controlled Congress to enact the Equal Employment  Opportunity (EEO) Act and the Equal Opportunity Act, the “affirmative action bills” that had the effect of vigorously promoting job and higher educational opportunity for all United States citizens.  The affirmative action bills immediately resulted in the appearance of many more women and people of color in the companies and colleges of the United States, and many more at the head of their own business establishments.

 

In the course of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, there came a voluble call for the assertion of Black Power.  Out of the mouths and in the action of some African Americans this was a testimony  of strength and solidarity that resonated with the call of the Godfather of Soul, James Brown to ,”Say it aloud:  I’m black and I’m proud.”  For others such as Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Toure) as head of CORE; and Bobby Seal, Huey Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers;  the assertion of Black Power came with a suggestion of violent means for establishing African American control over  both established institutions and new, revolutionary organizations.  This attitude had been present in the movement of the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) whose demonstrations and promulgations in the early and middle 1960s had added to the political and social pressures that culminated in passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  Malcolm X, after a pilgrimage to Mecca that turned him away from extreme racial antipathy for white people and toward a more conventional form of Islam, formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity that nevertheless also held out the possible use of violence under an “any means necessary” assertion of African American rights. 

 

The Black Power Movement coincided with the Black Arts Movement, a leading articulator of  which was Imamu Amiri Baraka, the name taken by the poet and essayist who was born Leroi Jones.  Through the media of his several volumes of poetry, numerous essays, and plays staged in Berlin, Dakar, Paris, and the United States (his drama, Dutchman, was an Obie Award winner in 1964), Baraka became a leading proponent of Black Nationalism and Afro-Islamic culture.   

 

The assassinations of Malcolm X (1965) and Martin Luther King (1968) seemed to energize the Black Power Movement.  But by 1972, the energy of the movement had lost fervor.  Conservative America seemed resurgent in the victory of Richard Nixon over George McGovern in the 1972 presidential contest.  The shooting and death of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in his

own apartment at the hands of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) came at a time when the Black Panther organization was suffering from internal contentiousness and strain.  Gains had been made and would be forthcoming in the political halls of the establishment and in community organizations for addressing the practical needs of people;  African Americans Shirley Chisolm, Jessie Jackson, Carl Stokes, Thomas Bradley, Maynard Jackson, and Andrew Young would all rise to prominence in such mainstream political and social contexts.

 

But the advocacy for revolutionary change had waned by 1972, and year ahead, despite the advances for the African American middle class and establishment figures had left an angry and restive contingent of people still languishing in poverty, violence, and desperation at the urban core, the inner cities of the United States. 

 

A Time of Unfulfilled Expectations, 1973-1992

 

People in the United States were in the doldrums for much of the 1970s.  The oil crisis hit during 1973-1974, Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam War came to an ignominious conclusion in 1975, stagflation hit the economy by the middle years of the decade, and Iranians seized American hostages in 1979.  The gains for women and people of color in the halls of business, higher education, and political representation were palpable.  But the gains realized as a result of legislation of the 1960s and early 1970s seemed to take the nation only so far, stalling at the attempt to secure an Equal Rights Amendment;  and leaving the underclass of the central city mired in poverty, ill-educated, and susceptible to all manner of pressures impinging on family and community.

 

In the 1980s those pressures impinged with a vengeance.  Crack cocaine hit the streets about 1980, moving profitability of the drug from the noses of the mostly white wealthy to the pipes of the mostly black poor.  Into this market swept gangs, oftentimes moving into previously unoccupied or lightly-trod areas such as Denver, Omaha, Kansas City, Des Moines, and Minneapolis.  As the white and black middleclass moved to the suburbs, those left behind included the mostly African American poor, the residentially mobile, the recent migrant who knew little about the heritage of the community to which she and he sought more tolerable terms of existence.  School systems that had seemed acceptable when serving substantially middle class populations were now exposed as terrible, particularly in meeting the needs of highly challenged populations.

 

Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 and again in 1984;  his vice-president George H. W. Bush won in 1988.  Jessie Jackson, who headed Operation Breadbasket and the Rainbow Coalition, exerted a forceful presence as a candidate in the Democratic primaries and caucuses in 1984 and 1988, giving voice to the concerns of the underclass, especially those of his fellow African Americans.  But this was mere counterpoint to Reagan’s talk of “welfare queens” who drove Cadillacs and to the policy stupor of the Bush term, 1988-1992.  These were not people to whom African Americans at the urban core could relate, and there was a distinct feeling that both their own leaders and those of white society were failing them, bringing little in the way of new ideas to the table that could address the degrade, violent, and ever-worsening conditions of their own lives.   

 

Democrats seemed more benign but no more effective.  Long after the Great Society programs screamed out for reevaluation, Democrats stood by Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) that helped families get by but did little to show a way for extraction from the conditions of poverty;  furthermore, because income ceilings were pierced when an acknowledged male income was included in the familial coffers, an unfortunate effect of AFDC was often to drive fathers away from the family or to encourage nondurable and exploitative relationships with males who took much but gave little to a household.

 

By 1992, then, there were two Americas.  Some people characterized these in terms of black and white, but the much greater distinction was between the middle class and the underclass.  Many African American people, as was the case with women of all races, were becoming people of considerable economic means, rising to assume the leadership of major corporations and taking positions in law firms as attorneys and in hospitals and clinics as physicians.  But the contrast with African Americans at the urban core, joined there by other impoverished people of color and by poor whites, was extreme.  The problem ached for a solution;   that solution never came, but the rise of a  politician who talked in cadences that resonated with African American people and delivered a message that at least seemed to convey a caring disposition did make possible of the vision of a more hopeful future for African American people and others living in the inner city.

 

Greater Hope, Greater Frustration, 1992-2020

 

The leader with the more amenable cadences and hopeful vision was William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton, who defeated George H. W. Bush in 1992 and won reelection (against Republican nominee Robert Dole) in 1996.  Clinton caught the economy rising on a tide of technological innovation and did much to abet a favorable trend.  He negotiated a responsible budget deal with Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in 1994 and actually produced a balanced budget in 1996.  Clinton firmly supported the key entitlement programs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicare, which got consistent COLA (Cost of Living Adjustment) boosts;  and he prevailed upon Congress to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for the working poor.  But Clinton also made strategic budgetary cuts and streamlined the governmental bureaucracy. 

 

And he Clinton made a significant change in the character of welfare.  Clinton superintended, and cooperated with Republicans in Congress on, the termination of AFDC in favor of a new program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).  This program put a five year time-limit on the receipt of welfare payments, inducing women who had stayed at home to seek additional education and employment for the long-term support of their families.  The goal was to move the key welfare delivery system from long-term assistance that could be a dependent way of life, toward a system that encouraged work and sought to end cycles of poverty.

 

In the context of expansion of EIC, a booming economy in which people of all economic classes were faring better, an unprecedented number of appointments of African Americans to federal government positions of both greater and lesser status, and the image of a president who spoke a language that radiated warmth and concern---  welfare reform moved through Congress and came law without very much opposition from  the people of the inner city most affected by the dramatic change.

 

George W. Bush was hit with the bombing of the World Trade Center Twin Towers in 2001, making the response to terrorism the chief focus of his presidency, which he gained with victory in 2000 over Democratic candidate Al Gore and again in 2004, this time of over Democratic nominee John Kerry.  The Bush response to terrorism led him to make troop commitments in Iraq and

Afghanistan that were costly and produced very slim results at a huge cost of lives.  Bush did, though, superintend one promising initiative, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Program that promoted the disaggregation of data to determine educational outcomes for a bevy of demographic categories, including those pertinent to ethnicity and economic status.  But the program was eventually undermined by forces of both the Democratic left and the Republican right, entailing a catering to teachers unions in the former case and a retreat to rhetoric advocating local control in the latter.

 

In 2008 came the striking event of the election of the first African American president and the entry into the residential halls of the White House an African American family.  Barack Obama achieved a formidable task in significantly altering the nation’s health care system, securing passage of the Affordable Health Care Act.  This law most notably made denial of health care insurance coverage for previously existing conditions illegal;  established insurance exchanges (to be run by states or, upon the inaction of a state, by the federal government) at which consumers could select insurance plans and companies, with costs on a sliding scale according to economic means;  expanding coverage for offspring to the age of 25;  raising the income limitations and therefore expanding coverage under Medicaid;  and establishing penalties for not having insurance.  The expansion of Medicaid and the elimination of coverage denial for preexisting conditions especially helped African Americans of the impoverished inner city, so that the terms and availability of health coverage for blacks and others living at the urban core improved.

 

Obama’s foreign policy has been conducted with the expressed goals of extracting troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.  This has been done in Iraq, with mixed results and calls in many quarters for reentry to stabilize the nation amidst sectarian Sunni-Shi’ite division and the regional threat of the ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria]).  And in Afghanistan, the central government seems inept in formulating a plan for quelling the threat from the Taliban, so that some presence of United States troops and advisers seems likely.  But Obama has maintained considerable focus on domestic policy even amidst grave foreign policy concerns, thereby leaving a domestic policy legacy that George Bush cannot claim. 

 

Obama’s education initiative, Race to the Top, gained priority over the eviscerated No Child Left Behind Program , offering waivers from NCLB requirement to states that could gain approval for alternative programs for the achievement of educational equity.  None of these, though, have yet had the projected favorable impact, and education in the K-12 systems of the inner city is still as wretched as it has been for at least 35 years.

 

But Barack Obama, with a redefinition of marriage that includes same-sex unions, an immigration policy that offers a route to citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, and the appointment of many African Americans and other people of color to both major and minor government posts---  communicates a spirit of cultural inclusion that has captured the affective support of most African American people.  And for African Americans, the symbolism of seeing someone at the pinnacle of power whose looks are recognizably those of their own ethnicity is huge and a historical occurrence with permanently favorable prospects.

    

 

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