Civil Rights 50: The Modern POTUS & Race Politics

This summer will mark the 50th anniversary of the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations throughout America. The passage of this legislation marked a seminal moment in progress toward ridding the country of the scourge wrought on America by the social construction of race and inherent ethnic superiority, but the law helped to transform American politics in directions not anticipated at the time.

The belief that America has become “post-racial” has widely circulated since the election of our country’s first African American president, Barack Obama, in 2008. But evidence to the contrary couldn’t be more apparent. Highlighted lately in the example of the Trayvon Martin verdict which exonerated Sanford, Florida neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, echoes of our country’s shrouded past regarding the issues of “race” and all of its political implications are embedded in the cultural fabric of America.

President John F. Kennedy originally proposed the legislation in 1963 following years of protests in Southern cities like Montgomery and Birmingham. In his final months in office, the 35th president was purposefully slow in pursuing civil rights legislation, knowing that eking out yet another electoral victory would likely be necessary to secure the presidency for a second term. The young president headed to Dallas, Texas in his final act as president, seeking votes in the home state of his vice-president, Lyndon B. Johnson. His face was sealed in one heinous act.

His successor, President Johnson, was comparatively more successful, as the powerful politician wagered his two-decade-long experience on Capitol Hill to pass civil rights laws along with his hallmark Great Society programs. But this legislation, while breaking the hold of the three centuries of socioeconomic depravity, was not entirely effective in changing systemic inequality. An article in the Journal of Policy History concludes that, in the course of his administration, Johnson’s effort to combat the poverty he knew of as a child, “went from being at the top of the [president’s] policy agenda… to one of the topics the president and White House least wanted to talk about.”i

Johnson gambled decades of accumulated political capital in aspiring to rectify the centuries of structural inequality that the social caste system of race brought with it. But he paid a high price. By 1968, LBJ’s clout faltered. The 36th president was engulfed by Republican and Dixiecrat criticism for the Great Society.

Seeing the writing on the wall, LBJ declined to fight for renomination against Senator Eugene McCarthy and against JFK’s brother, former Attorney General and presumed Kennedy heir Robert F. Kennedy, in March 1968, effectively ending a promising career of fulfilling the promises of instituting real equality in American society.

LBJ succeeded in enacting programs of social uplift like Medicaid/Medicare and food stamps. But Johnson was ultimately undone by growing discontent from his party on his ardent pursuance of unpopular Vietnam War policy, and became yet another casualty in the fight to fundamentally end American apartheid.

RFK hoped to follow in the footsteps of his assailed brother and his successor by the summer months of 1968, popularly embracing the politics of socioeconomic equality espoused by Martin Luther King, Jr. during his contemporaneous protests. For his fight toward rectifying the long-term economic impact of racism, MLK would lose his life within a week of LBJ’s career ending announcement. Two months later, RFK’s life ended with the bullet of yet another assassin. Upon the election of Richard Nixon later that year, hopes of resolving race issues in the immediate years following the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1968 faded for decades.

More than a decade after the inauguration of Nixon, Ronald Reagan was elected to office. With him came the institution that effectively brought back Jim Crow laws, under the guise of a so-called “War on Drugs.”

The “drugs” policy was brought forth as a perverse continuation of policies instituted by Nixon under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. Nixon professed a desire to stem the tide of increased drug use in the late 1960s by pushing for rehabilitation of habitual users.ii Nixon also linked possession to criminal penalties with the bill, and in a system where institutional power was skewed for centuries, the weight of those penalties in the fresh years of civil rights fell most heavily on those who had the most to lose amid ostensible gains.

Penalties for Reagan’s criminal “war” especially affected minority families, and particularly American Blacks.

With the introduction of crack cocaine into American cities in the 1980s along with Reagan’s push for stringent federal enforcement, the brunt of policies fell on poorer, inner-city, and mostly ethnic minority families who had the most to lose after countless years of societal suppression. Jails became filled with the faces of mostly Black and Latino men. The decades that followed Reagan’s war caused unquantifiable damage to depressed and fatherless minority families and communities throughout the country.

After the 1980s, Reagan’s push remained an integral part of governmental policy until the second term of America’s first Black president, Barack Obama. In the president’s second term, Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder declared the war on drugs to be a failure. For the first time, a United States Cabinet official acknowledged what was most obvious: that Reagan’s war led to system which disproportionately targeted Blacks and Latinos for most minor drug offenses and incarcerated them for 20 percent longer.iii

In the last 50 years, the playing fields have been leveled for equal access to public life, but the ingrained philosophy of racism, in all of its impacts, is still felt in minority communities. It doesn’t disappear when we elect “Barack the Magic Negro.” The scourge of racism declines as time goes on, but make no mistake, its impacts are apparent throughout everyday American life.

Some Americans may prefer to overlook the obvious and uncomfortable facts, but the impact of racism wrecked many political careers, and continues to damage the everyday life of millions of people.

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