Should former President George H.W. Bush be remembered as an ally of Black Americans and an advocate for civil rights?
Let’s review the record of Bush, who died last week at the age of 94 and had a political career that spanned decades.
Bush was a “vastly under-appreciated friend” of historically Black colleges and universities, longtime Hampton University President William Harvey said in an interview with Philadelphia Tribune staff writer John N. Mitchell.
HBCUs received $776 million in federal funds in 1989 and $894 million in 1990, an increase of $118 million in just two years, said Harvey, who served on the President’s Advisory Panel on HBCUs. He said Bush encouraged the development of the 15-member HBCU consortium, which had been awarded $4.3 million to increase the number of African-Americans scientists, engineers and other professionals in the growing fields of environmental restoration and waste management.
As president, Bush appointed Blacks to high-ranking positions. He appointed Gen. Colin Powell as the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Dr. Louis Sullivan, founding president of the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, as secretary of health and human services.
However, as Associated Press reporter Errin Haines Whack pointed out in an article last week, the nation’s 41st president has a conflicted legacy on race issues.
“Lionized upon his death as a man of decency and civility, Bush has a mixed and complicated legacy which it comes to race,” said Whack.
“Intellectually and emotionally, he was somebody who was civil-rights minded,” said Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley in the report by Whack. “Bush wanted to see himself as being a man devoid of racism. But the reality is that Bush often had to do dog whistles and appeal to less enlightened Americans on race.”
Bush got elected president after a campaign marked by the infamous Willie Horton ad, about a Black murderer who raped a white woman while on a weekend furlough from prison.
The TV spot about the Massachusetts inmate was produced by Bush supporters during his 1988 presidential campaign against Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. It was widely condemned as racist and is regarded three decades later as one of the most extreme attack ads in modern political history.
The Bush campaign disavowed the ad at the time, but Bush’s chief strategist, Lee Atwater, successfully exploited its message to paint Dukakis as soft on crime.
Bush replaced civil rights hero Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court with Clarence Thomas, a Black conservative whose views are at odds with those of much of Black America. Thomas has ruled against affirmative action and voted to end key protections in the Voting Rights Act.
Throughout his long political career, Bush was inconsistent on civil rights issues. His father, Prescott Bush, however, showed remarkable political courage and consistency. Prescott Bush was a moderate Republican senator from Connecticut who championed desegregation of schools and expanding civil rights.
As a student at Yale University, George H.W. Bush started a chapter of the United Negro College Fund and helped to raise money for the scholarship program benefiting African-American students.
Yet during his first, losing bid for Congress in Texas in 1964, he criticized his opponent’s support for the Civil Rights Act, legislation many in his home state opposed.
“The new Civil Rights Act was passed to protect 14 percent of the people. I’m also worried about the other 86 percent,” Bush said after the measure became law.
He won election to Congress two years later and went on to support the Fair Housing Act of 1968, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson a week after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
In 1990, Bush vetoed a civil rights bill. Advocates of the measure argued it would help combat employment discrimination. The White House contended it would have incentivized “hiring and promotion quotas.”
The following year, Bush signed a scaled-back version of the legislation.
Harvard University historian Leah Wright Rigueur is right in saying said that, ultimately, Bush is hard to pin down on race.
“Bush helped pave the way for the modern Republican Party we see now,” she said. “He gives us Clarence Thomas, but he also gives us Colin Powell. That’s his signature, that he plays both sides of the game.”
https://www.phillytrib.com/commentary/george-h-w-bush-s-mixed-legacy-on-race/article_aeb8d405-1bf2-5300-9a92-71c88fd7785a.html
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