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.
No comments:
Post a Comment