by Joy-Ann Reid
Clinton’s welfare reform concessions to liberal lawmakers, including the billions of dollars in job training and child care assistance, were flowing directly to big, urban municipalities, which were suddenly flush with federal housing vouchers that would help some two hundred thousand recipients move out of dilapidated public housing projects and into mixed-income rentals. There were earned income tax credits for the working poor, and tax credits for businesses to hire the underemployed who lived in designated “enterprise zones.”
“In terms of income inequality, especially for black Americans, the Clinton years, especially his second term, were a golden age,” said analyst David Bositis, with “major gains in terms of black household income, college attendance, unemployment. . . . On a whole variety of economic indicators it was really good times.”
Indeed, by the end of the president’s second term, the number of recipients of federal welfare programs would decline, from more than 14 million to fewer than 6 million, the lowest level since 1961. The number of Americans in poverty, which had grown by 7.4 million under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, would drop by 6.4 million. And the national unemployment rate, including the historically double-digit rates for black Americans, would fall to record lows, lifted by the creation of 22 million jobs, housing expansion, and an ominous but temporarily euphoric “dot-com” bubble.
Clinton even reached out to the man who had, at various times, been both ally and antagonist, naming Jesse Jackson, who by 1997 was hosting a weekly talk show on CNN, as a “roving ambassador” to promote democracy on the African continent. White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said Jackson, who had played a nongovernmental role in negotiating the release of American prisoners from Cuba, Iraq, and Syria, would undertake unnamed “special projects” in Africa “to encourage greater respect for human rights and the improved functioning of democratic institutions throughout the continent, and build bridges to further cooperation with Africa.” It was an undefined role that would allow Jackson to travel to African nations with the imprimatur of the president. “It was kiss and make up,” said one long-time Jackson aide of the president’s gesture, “because they had some really strained relationships during the 1992 campaign.”
For black Democrats, Bill Clinton was a singular puzzle. Clinton the man seemed quite clearly a friend. He had the affect and the understanding, and the friendships, with Vernon Jordan and with members of the “Arkansas Diaspora,” like Danny K. Davis, born in Parkdale, Arkansas, and by then a congressman from Illinois; and John Stroger, the colorful first black president of the Cook County, Illinois, board of commissioners. Clinton had been friends for years with Congressman John Lewis, and that gave him a kind of credibility rarely afforded to white politicians. He plied and charmed his friends and enemies alike with invitations to dinner at the White House and junkets to golf. Former aides described a joke between Clinton and Jackson that if Jackson had been white and Clinton black, Clinton would have been the preacher, and Jackson would have been president of the United States.
“Bill Clinton could sit in a church pew and sing the songs along with the choir,” Jamal Simmons, an African American former Clinton aide, said. “ ‘Lift Ev’ry Voice’ would come on, at a program at Howard University or somewhere, and he would know the words to the second and third stanzas that black people don’t even know, like ‘stony the road’—who knows that part? So there was all that emotional stuff that mattered.”
Clinton the politician was more complicated. He’d gotten elected by proving to white suburbanites that he was unafraid to speak hard truths to black leaders—“truths,” it turns out, that certain white voters believed intuitively, about the “black racism” of Sister Souljah and about the creeping danger of urban violence and riots. In 1996 he sailed to reelection by co-opting conservative themes on crime and welfare that revived the age-old caricature of black Americans as a kind of alien infection in the American host—one that had to be constantly isolated and treated with irradiating doses of austerity and “personal responsibility” to allow the body to live on in contagion-free neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces free from viral competition for jobs and advancement. Some, like Rev. Al Sharpton, privately worried that Clinton’s cultural ease with the civil rights establishment caused the latter to give him too broad a pass on vital issues.
This may also have been because black Americans felt that with Clinton the policymaker they finally had a friend in the White House, which many had not felt for a very long time. “On a policy basis, people felt that he was looking out for them,” Simmons said. “And they felt that way because he made sure to talk about it. And he didn’t just talk about it at election time. He made sure to talk about it all the time.”
“During the health-care fight,” Simmons recalled, “Clinton gave a speech to the [Church of God in Christ, or COGIC] convocation in Memphis. The COGIC headquarters is located near a housing project. And it was the pulpit where Dr. King gave his last speech before he was killed. And [Clinton] gave this speech about ‘Dr. King didn’t die so that black kids could kill other black kids for their sneakers,’ which some in the traditional civil rights community took offense at, like, ‘what is he doing lecturing us about what we’re doing?’ But in the room, and I think in a lot of church rooms, there were ‘Amens’ and shouts, that here was somebody telling the truth about what was going on in the community.
“When he left that church he got into his motorcade,” Simmons said, “and we drove about two blocks away, through the project, where there were people lining the streets waving at him. I’m in the press van, and all of a sudden we hear on the radio, he’s out of the car! Bill Clinton gets out of the limo and is shaking hands with people at a housing project in the rain. I remember the Secret Service agent losing his mind, and I turned to him and said don’t worry about it, he’s fine here.”
“So on the one hand you had this ‘New Democrats’ theme from Bill Clinton,” said Bertha Lewis, who worked on the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign and who would go on to lead the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, a political- and social-advocacy group for the poor that got its start as a welfare rights organization in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1970. “But on the other hand, you had this younger couple in the White House in the nineties and black folks really did feel as though, if nothing else, these folks could actually see us. Bill Clinton would make appeals to black folks directly.”
Clinton avoided the direct legislative confrontations on racial matters that his Democratic predecessors had faced during the height of the civil rights movement. He resisted entreaties from Sharpton and other civil rights leaders to proffer racial profiling legislation, and shunned a June 1997 effort by Congressman Tony P. Hall—a white, born-again Christian from Dayton, Ohio, whose devotion to the cause of alleviating world hunger led him to fast for three weeks in 1993 after his select committee on hunger was disbanded—to offer a congressional resolution in which the United States officially apologized for slavery.
Hall thought this could heal the nation’s ongoing racial wounds, and he modeled it on Roosevelt’s apology to Japanese Americans interred during World War II and Clinton’s May 1997 presidential apology for the infamous Tuskegee experiments, which ensnared hundreds of black men between 1932 and 1972. But Hall’s idea unleashed a torrent of angry phone calls and letters, and the measure attracted scant support from the Black Caucus, many of whose members called it a distraction. Even Jesse Jackson dismissed the idea as “race entertainment,” likening it to a car wreck in which “you drive over somebody with a car, leave the body mangled, then you decide to come back later to apologize with no commitment to help them get on their feet.”
While the idea did attract support from African Americans outside of Washington, Hall’s resolution went nowhere. Clinton offered it no lifeline, while Speaker Gingrich dismissed it as “emotional symbolism” with no practical meaning. The president had in the preceding days empaneled an ambitious commission to study race in Am
erica, led by eminent black historian John Hope Franklin. Gingrich dismissed that, too, saying, “Any American, I hope, feels badly about slavery. I also feel badly about genocide in Rwanda. I also feel badly about a lot of things. . . . Finding new, backward-oriented symbolic moments so we can avoid real work doesn’t strike me as a strategy that’s going to solve the country’s problems.”
But Clinton could not avoid a collision with his political opponents on the matter of America’s racial legacy.
The next March, siting on a 66 percent approval rating, Clinton left for an historic, twelve-day, six-country visit to Africa. The trip’s focus was to create closer commercial ties with African countries. And it would be capped by a state dinner with South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, who had gone from insurgent, to prisoner, to president. Clinton would also visit Gorée Island, where ships carrying frightened, captive human cargo once set sail for the Americas.
On his second stop, in Uganda, Clinton drew the ire of his conservative foes at home with a seemingly innocuous statement. “Going back to the time before we were even a nation, European-Americans received the fruits of the slave trade,” Clinton said, as he and Hillary Clinton stood in a pastoral meadow, speaking to more than a thousand schoolchildren at a rural school. “We were wrong in that as well, although I must say, if you look at the remarkable delegation we have here from Congress, from our cabinet and administration, and from the citizens of America, you can see there are many distinguished African Americans who are in that delegation who are making America a better place today.
“It is as well not to dwell too much on the past,” he said, “but I think it is worth pointing out that the United States has not always done the right thing by Africa.”
Back home, conservatives were quick to react, with House whip Tom DeLay denouncing the president as “a flower child with gray hairs doing exactly what he did back in the 60s: . . . apologizing for the actions of the United States,” and accusing Clinton of attacking his own country while on foreign soil. Writing on his own website, Pat Buchanan derided Clinton for “groveling” in Africa, while refusing to apologize “for his own sins” or to his sexual harassment accuser, Paula Jones.
It got worse in Rwanda, when Clinton expressed regret for U.S. inaction to stop the slaughter during that country’s civil war; he essentially apologized for his own administration’s reticence to intervene. Conservatives began dubbing this “Clinton’s apology tour” and it didn’t help when some on the left criticized the president for apologizing to Africans overseas, rather than to the descendants of the enslaved at home.
Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was traveling with the president, came to Clinton’s defense by chastising the traveling press corps for failing to understand the emotional resonance of the trip for African Americans, before straying into a treatise about Martin Luther King’s contributions to American democracy versus Thomas Jefferson’s, which prompted a grim Susan Rice, then the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, to follow tersely with “As an African American, I would like to say that I think slavery is largely irrelevant to what we are about here.”
By the fall the media had become fully engrossed in Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, which capped a years-long frenzy of investigations and increasingly lurid allegations of sexual scandal, real estate chicanery, drug running, and even murder, which Clinton’s foes hoped would drive him from office. Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist, took to the pages of The New Yorker and gave voice to the whispers coursing through black America.
“Years ago,” Morrison wrote, “in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”
Morrison argued that Clinton had been subject to unending hysteria from the Right, his privacy stripped away and his “un-policed sexuality . . . the focus of the persecution.” He had been “metaphorically seized and body-searched” like any average black man within sight of a police car. The message, delivered even to the president of the United States, was as familiar to black America as the umbrage-laden argument that slavery no longer matters because its practitioners are dead. “No matter how smart you are,” Morrison wrote, “how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved.”
For all the complications of his relationship with black Americans, Bill Clinton seemed to represent the oft-imposed limits on their own collective voice, which, when used to name black suffering, in the present or the distant past, was quickly stifled by a conservative culture that demanded forgetfulness. Even the white president of the United States couldn’t escape the commandment that unsanitized American history was never to be put on display. For many African Americans, Clinton’s ready embrace of them, even in the thick of the fight over welfare reform, and his programmatic answers to their policy objections, which had palpably aided black households, were the “real” transgressions that triggered the relentless hunt through his sexual closet, in a bid to silence, destroy, and delegitimize a president who was doing good by black folk.
Clinton would survive impeachment and leave office at the height of his popularity, with the vast majority of Americans rejecting Republicans’ attempt to do with the supreme act of congressional censure what they had failed to do in two elections: rid themselves of the Democratic president. But the impeachment saga would linger in the campaign of Clinton’s vice president, as Al Gore sought to distance himself from the air of scandal as his party’s nominee for president by running on his own merits. Despite separating himself from the still-popular Clinton, Gore’s presidential bid did attract furtive support from black voters—with Gore earning a higher percentage of African American votes than even Clinton himself, and at 90 percent, a higher share than any Democrat except Lyndon Johnson—while George W. Bush’s 9 percent matched Ronald Reagan’s meager showing in 1984. For black voters, the sole issue was continuing the Clinton prosperity, and extending the policies that were bearing fruit in black communities.
Generations of historical experience had proven to African Americans that it really does matter who is in the White House, and how much they can influence him or her. It matters concretely in the lives of black Americans, who even at the turn of a new century continued to suffer disproportionate unemployment, poverty, and want, but who for a few short years in Bill Clinton’s term had enjoyed, at long last, a deep breath of hope.
But the U.S. Supreme Court, and the state of Florida, had other ideas.
Gore won the popular vote by more than 500,000 ballots over Texas governor George W. Bush, but the five conservative judges on the Supreme Court, including David Souter and Clarence Thomas, both appointees of Bush’s father, intervened to stop the recount in Florida, where Bush was clinging to a narrow 538-vote lead, giving him an Electoral College victory margin of a single vote.
The national media and Democratic circles were swarming with claims of voting irregularities and disenfranchisement in Florida. Emotions rocketed from rage to numb disbelief. Senior citizens—many of them Florida’s Jewish retirees—were confused by the state’s unwieldy “butterfly ballot” and wondered if they’d mistakenly voted for right-wing firebrand and World War II skeptic Pat Buchanan. Black voters complained of random traffic stops, of names disappearing from the rolls, and of outright police intimidation. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the fruit of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, was vowing to investigate. It was discovered that Bush’s younger brother, Jeb, the Florida governor, had initiated a purge of the state voter files, carried out by Katherine Harris, Florida’s secretary of state (and a state co-chair of the Bush campaign), that had removed from the r
olls thousands of eligible voters whose names merely bore a similarity to those of convicted felons.
Florida was one of a handful of states—all of them in the South—that permanently stripped the voting rights of those convicted of felony crimes unless the governor individually restored them. The law was a vestige of the Black Codes enacted at the end of Reconstruction, when Union troops withdrew from the southern states on the condition that those states permit their black male citizens to vote.
Southern legislatures and governors responded with an array of laws to get around the Fifteenth Amendment and push the freedmen back into their place. The new southern constitutions created various exemptions from the voting mandate: for felons and vagrants and those deemed morally or mentally unfit, and for those unable to pay a fee or recite an arcane stanza of state law. And they invented a host of new felonies (even loitering could result in a prison camp stay!) that state police applied with abandon, sweeping up black men like kindling and filling southern jails with those who would forever be separated from the vote.
When the Florida Constitution was reaffirmed in 1968, with felon disenfranchisement intact, the state, like most in the region, had been embroiled in years of sit-ins, marches, arrests, “wade-ins” to desegregate Florida beaches, and even spasms of rioting, which brought Dr. King to St. Augustine in 1964 to enjoin young activists that “violence is not the answer.”
Jeb Bush had frequently clashed with black state legislators, including Kendrick Meek, whose mother, Carrie P. Meek, was elected to Congress with the “Clinton Class of 1992”—the first black member of Congress from Florida since Reconstruction. When the governor decreed the end of affirmative action in the state, the younger Meek backed massive student protests and even staged a sit-in at Bush’s Tallahassee office with a fellow state legislator, Representative Tony Hill.
