by Joy-Ann Reid
When he ran for governor, Carter wooed rural white primary voters by striking an obliquely genial tone toward George Wallace, but once in office, he announced that segregation was finished in Georgia, which angered many of the voters who’d pulled the lever for him. By 1974, Carter had been named chairman of the Democratic Governor’s Campaign Committee and campaign chairman of the DNC, two key posts that put him in national play.
Carter entered a crowded field in 1976 armed with key allies among Georgia’s black civil rights establishment, most especially the “MLK block,” which included the father and the widow of the late Dr. King; Andrew Young, who had bailed King out of various jails; and a young civil rights attorney named Vernon Jordan, who had succeeded Whitney Young as president of the National Urban League and had served as Georgia’s NAACP field secretary at the same time his friend Medgar Evers was struggling mightily to register terrified black would-be voters in Mississippi.
Carter made a major misstep in April 1976 during a question-and-answer session in Philadelphia, when he said there’s “nothing wrong with city neighborhoods trying to maintain their ethnic purity,” referring to white ethnic areas, as well as predominantly black parts of the city. It was a classic Carter two-step: one eye on disgruntled white voters, the other on black Democrats.
One of his primary opponents, Arizona congressman Morris “Mo” Udall, immediately mused to the media, “I think Americans, particularly our minorities, should ask him just who does he want to wall out?” NBC News reported that “seventeen black members of Congress . . . sent Carter a telegram protesting his remarks.”
Vernon Jordon, too, was called on to respond: “I think you have to assume that if he in fact said these words I think these words connote a philosophy,” he said. “The problem is, is that these words seem to be in contradiction to his record in Georgia and the whole area of open housing. He desegregated the real estate commission, he came out for open housing in Georgia and then to get to South Bend, Indiana, and to use these words and to espouse this philosophy apparently . . . is one of confusion for the black community and I think that we who have national responsibility of leadership in the black community have to call the governor on this issue.”
An apology from Carter seemed to put the episode aside, but he still had Wallace and hawkish Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson to his right; to the left were Udall, the pro–civil rights liberal, Idaho senator Frank Church, and Jerry Brown, who had succeeded Ronald Reagan as governor of California. The path to the Democratic nomination was narrow for Carter, and he was triangulating out of necessity.
Liberals formed an “ABC” coalition—“Anybody But Carter”—but once he defeated Wallace in the South Carolina primary, there was little they could do to stop him. In a play for the old New Dealers of the Rust Belt and Northeast, Carter selected as his running mate Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, who had helped steer the compromise with the Mississippi Freedom Democrats in 1964. And for the first time, the coveted keynote speech at the Democratic convention was delivered by a black woman: Barbara Jordan, the former state senator from Texas and the first black congresswoman from the Deep South, whose dramatic “yes!” vote to impeach Richard Nixon had earned her national attention.
Carter presented a new version of the Democratic Party: overtly religious but modest in its social piety, and opposed to both the emphatic liberalism of the McGovernites and the social crusading of LBJ. Even Wallace eventually endorsed him.
In the closing days of the general election, Plains Baptist Church, where Carter was a deacon, rejected the membership request of quixotic black minister Rev. Clennon King Jr. (no relation to the slain civil rights leader). Carter’s campaign called Clennon King’s attempts a stunt and “politically inspired,” especially after President Gerald Ford’s campaign sent a telegram to prominent black pastors, denouncing Carter’s membership in a segregated church. But black ministers in Georgia, and even Coretta Scott King, publicly stood by Carter. Still, national headlines about this story gave anti-Carter liberals the chance to revel in the spectacle of the sanctified Holy Roller, who was challenging a half century of New Deal politics, getting his come-uppance.
On the campaign trail, Carter pointed out that Clennon King was “a Republican, not a Baptist, and not a resident of Plains.” And he refused to resign from his church, saying he could no more do so than he could “resign from the human race.”
“If it was a country club I would resign,” Carter said, vowing instead to remain a church leader and fight to change the whites-only policy.
In the end, the incumbent, Gerald Ford, was an awkward candidate and an awkward man, haunted by the legacy of Richard Nixon and the pardon Ford granted him thirty-one days after Nixon resigned. On election day, Carter defeated Ford by a slim popular and electoral vote margin, by sweeping the South, including Texas and the “upper South” states of Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland. The Democratic ticket won Mondale’s home state of Minnesota and the neighboring state of Wisconsin, along with the Rust Belt states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, while holding traditionally Democratic strongholds like New York, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia.
Carter improved on McGovern’s paltry 31 percent share of white voters by 16 percentage points, and claimed 83 percent of the black vote—similar to McGovern. But unlike McGovern, he won a majority of voters ages 18 to 29, and tied among those ages 30 to 44.
Carter’s victory was a schizophrenic amalgam of North and South, liberals and moderates, and religious voters (he lost white Protestants like himself, but handily won white Catholics) that would not be repeated for nearly a generation; it was a brief pause in what had become a growing Republican southern tide.
But Democratic Party leaders believed that Carter had won by running to the right, and they hoped to carry that received wisdom to the next election, presuming that Carter would hold up his end of the bargain by remaining scrupulously centrist, however much it enraged the old New Dealers. Instead, Carter’s presidency proved to be a muddle, beset by international crises ranging from oil shortages to a hostage situation in Iran, and domestic malaise amid a moribund economy racked by inflation.
For African Americans, the failure of the Carter presidency produced a kind of despondency. Carter had placed black staff in prominent roles in his campaign, and he’d elevated civil rights figures like Andrew Young and Eleanor Holmes Norton, a veteran of SNCC and Mississippi Freedom Summer, to positions of power, and placed African Americans at the helm of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and even as secretary of the army (Clifford Alexander Jr.). But Carter often seemed at the mercy of events, rather than the master of them, as in the months between April and October 1980, when thousands of Cuban refugees began streaming into Miami as part of the Mariel Boatlift. Fidel Castro had permitted a mass exodus from the island amid growing economic deprivation, ultimately sending more than 125,000 migrants to the United States, including masses of unskilled laborers and hundreds of people purged from Cuba’s prisons and insane asylums.
A month after the Cuban exodus began, Miami erupted in riots when four police officers were acquitted by an all-white jury in the death of Arthur McDuffie. The African American insurance agent and former marine had been beaten to death in a frenzied traffic stop involving more than a dozen officers in the early morning hours a week before Christmas in 1979, his skull cracked open by the force of blows from a heavy-duty flashlight. Amid four days of mayhem that left eighteen people dead, 350 injured, and nearly twice that number arrested, along with more than $100 million in property damage, Democratic governor Bob Graham deployed thousands of national guardsmen to restore order in the smoldering black enclaves of Overtown and Liberty City. The Carter administration urged local leaders to take control, while the Justice Department prepared its own indictments. By the time Carter arrived in Miami to personally review the aftermath in June, promising $40 million in federal funds to rebuild the ruined neighborhoods, the sense that t
he administration had reacted too slowly, and done too little, too late, had set in. Just months before the election, the national image of Carter had calcified into one of weakness.
THE NOTION OF A BLACK PRESIDENT HAD TANTALIZED EVERYONE from Robert F. Kennedy to Martin Luther King Jr., who stated, the first time he was asked, that there had long been black men qualified for the nation’s highest office. Surely the country that produced W. E. B. DuBois and Langston Hughes, Thurgood Marshall and Benjamin O. Davis, William Hastie and Charles Drew, Dr. King and his contemporaries had many black presidents in waiting. All that was needed was for the national imagination to see past the color of the candidate’s skin.
As America reached the mid-1980s, black political leaders wondered if a singular figure existed, then and there, who could satisfy the yearning of a people and also survive the gauntlet of national politics. With the Gary Declaration a distant dream and Shirley Chisholm’s bid for the nomination having gone nowhere, the answer seemed to be a definitive no.
Ronald Reagan had captured the presidency in 1980, relegating Jimmy Carter to a single term in an election that saw the lowest voter turnout since 1948. Carter’s 83 percent share of the black vote was a significant climb down for his party, offsetting even the 2 percent rise in black voter turnout resulting from a national push by civil rights organizations and labor unions, called “Operation Big Vote.”
African Americans continued to laud the Carter administration’s attention to job training programs, low-income housing, and urban revitalization, and his appointments of African Americans to prominent roles. But in the end, the laggard economy, a lingering energy crisis and the depressing, ongoing drama of the Iranian hostage crisis proved too much for the Democratic president.
Reagan was elected governor of California in 1966 on a platform that included opposing desegregation through open housing. As governor, he battled the Black Panthers over the open carrying of firearms and vocally opposed “socialist” Medicare, which, he’d warned in 1965, would destroy America. On the stump during the 1976 Republican presidential primary campaigns, Reagan often talked about how hard it must be for Americans to watch an able-bodied man in the grocery store using food stamps. In the South, the story morphed from “able-bodied man” to “strapping young buck.”
Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the bodies of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney had been unearthed a generation before. Reagan lamented the “humiliation of the South” via the Voting Rights Act and bemoaned the “Cadillac-driving welfare queen.” He appeared onstage with former Mississippi governor John Bell Williams, an unrepentant segregationist, and his state campaign chair Trent Lott, who like Reagan was once a Democrat, openly declared during the campaign that Democrat-turned-Dixiecrat-turned Republican Strom Thurmond would have prevented America from being “in the mess we are today” had he won the presidential election of 1948.
But Reagan promised a return to a robust economy and the restoration of American confidence and pride. And for all of Carter’s attempts to dismiss him, Carter himself had failed to inspire the country, or his party. It was Reagan who managed to field a broad coalition that included a swath of white voters once loyal to the Democrats, plus 37 percent of Hispanics, and even 14 percent of African Americans. A Joint Center analysis noted that black Republican voter registration rose from just 2 percent in 1976 to 10 percent by 1979, and Carter received just 55 percent of the votes of black independents in 1980, two points lower than his share of the Hispanic vote.
Once elected, Reagan wasted no time putting his agenda to work.
Within his first two years in office, he had broken the national air traffic controllers union, slashed away at income tax rates, and eviscerated what was left of Johnson’s Great Society programs. An assassination attempt in 1981 led the Democratic Congress to largely stand down, allowing much of Reagan’s economic program to pass, and the country was soon mired in a deepening recession.
Reagan opposed U.S. sanctions against apartheid South Africa, a key plank for the Congressional Black Caucus. The administration argued that economic sanctions would hurt ordinary black South Africans and that Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress was a terrorist organization. The new president was personally disarming and he was attracting his share of unexpected admirers (including soul legend James Brown), but liberal and African American Democrats were having difficulty abiding him.
In June 1982, Frank Watkins, a senior aide to Rev. Jesse Jackson, traveled to Indiana to meet with Mayor Richard Hatcher at his home in Gary. Watkins had written a detailed memo, directed at black political leaders, outlining why Jackson should run for president.
Watkins had been one of just two white attendees at the 1972 Gary conference, and he had Rev. Jackson’s ear and trust. But Jackson had been cool to the idea of a presidential bid. Watkins hoped to enlist Hatcher’s help, arguing that a Jackson presidential campaign could reignite the political consciousness of African Americans, who were foundering under the twin burdens of Reaganomics and a moribund national Democratic Party.
Hatcher knew Jackson well. They’d met in April 1966, as the young preacher launched Operation Breadbasket at the behest of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), in a chilly Capitol Theater on Chicago’s South Side. Jackson had emerged from the embers of the civil rights movement with a national media profile and a growing following, through a combination of fortuitous timing and unabashed self-promotion.
Jackson had joined King’s movement in Selma at age twenty-four after hearing the civil rights leader on the radio and was with King when he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. Left behind at the Lorraine Motel, clad in a sweater on which he’d wiped his hand, stained with King’s blood, Jackson was the first to address the media after the shooting, and he flew home to Chicago still dressed in those clothes. And while he elicited the constant skepticism of King’s former associates, including Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and King’s widow, Coretta, Jackson did represent for many young African Americans an affirmation of black hope and self-love that was akin to what James Brown sang about in “I’m Black and I’m Proud.”
Still as tall and as athletic as in his high school football days, Jackson had let his Afro grow long and his rhetoric had sharpened in the years after King’s death. He used his years in the wilderness after King’s assassination—having resigned from Breadbasket in 1971 in a disagreement with SCLC leaders over his fund-raising tactics and neglect in reporting Breadbasket’s intake—to build his own organization: Operation PUSH, based in his adopted city of Chicago.
Jackson’s weekly Saturday morning meetings at the Capitol Theater regularly drew a capacity crowd. The media—local and national, black and white—gravitated to the young, charismatic preacher in its hunt for a new “leader of black America.”
Watkins believed Jackson was a natural candidate to vie to become the nation’s first black president. Unlike Shirley Chisholm, he wouldn’t dilute black enthusiasm with entreaties to women, and he was much better known on the national stage than Carl Stokes. Jackson’s hybrid organization, Rainbow/PUSH (an amalgam of Operation PUSH and the Rainbow Coalition, named from a phrase Jackson borrowed from assassinated Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton), knew how to register voters. Even if he didn’t stand a chance against Reagan’s reelection machine in 1984, Jackson would raise the national consciousness and make a future black president possible, Watkins argued.
Hatcher was persuaded and would sign on as Jackson’s campaign chairman. But the greater leverage may have been exercised by Harold Washington, who had been a popular presence at the Saturday PUSH meetings and counted Jackson as an ally. Washington’s November 1982 announcement that he was running for Chicago mayor came after he’d challenged his supporters to register a hundred thousand new voters. And they’d done it, with no small amount of help from Jackson’s organization.
But leaders of the national Democratic Party seemed immune to the signs of growin
g black self-confidence in Chicago. As Jackson and Watkins awaited a flight at Washington’s National Airport in January 1983, Jackson placed a call to PUSH headquarters to check in and learned that former vice president Walter Mondale and Senator Ted Kennedy were on their way to Chicago to endorse Richard M. Daley, the son of the late Richard J. Daley, and Jane Byrne, the incumbent mayor, respectively, who were challenging Washington in the three-way February primary.
An angry Jackson prepared a telegram, signed by dozens of black political leaders inside and outside Illinois, imploring the national Democrats to remain neutral so as not to imperil Washington’s historic bid. But Byrne had been an early endorser of Kennedy’s primary challenge against President Carter in 1980, while Mondale insisted he’d been committed to Daley long before Washington announced back in November.
In Chicago, Mondale and Kennedy faced tense meetings with black leaders, during which they described their friendship and loyalty as the reasons for their endorsements of Byrne and Daley. “So we’re not your friends?” Jackson snapped. Later he told aides, “If that’s what liberal number one and liberal number two will do to us . . . if our ‘closest friends’ would run over Harold Washington in Chicago, we have to go in another direction.”
Washington was elected mayor of Chicago in April 1983, driven by the wave of newly registered black voters and a Daley-Byrne split among white Chicagoans. Jackson quickly embarked on a national voter registration tour of his own, primarily targeting southern states, with their rich cache of unregistered African Americans. His nascent presidential bid had Hatcher’s support, but not that of most other prominent black leaders, including Andrew Young and Coretta King, who publicly warned that Jackson wasn’t viable.
