A Cry for Leadership on Civil Rights
By Mary Frances Berry
Saturday, December 18, 2004; Page A27

In 1980, when I was appointed to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights by President Jimmy Carter, the glass of equal opportunity was half full. Today it's teeming with new and intractable challenges that keep it half empty.

In the early days of my tenure, the unemployment rate for blacks was twice that of whites, and the black youth jobless rates -- teetering at 60 percent -- compelled Carter to start a youth unemployment initiative. There was much talk of how awful urban K-12 education was. The uneasiness surrounding the Supreme Court's Bakke ruling on higher education was balanced by the more hopeful Weber decision leaving in place affirmative action in employment.

Fear persisted about the clock being turned back by creeping prejudice and erosion of the reforms of recent decades. But blacks were becoming admirals and generals, and they were visible in the service academies. An African American middle class was becoming reality.

By the time President Ronald Reagan took office, however, there was an atmosphere in this country in which civil rights could be branded as a special interest. I joined the chorus that declared resolutely that civil rights were in fact in the national interest. The battles intensified at the commission, punctuated by fights, firings and court-ordered reinstatements.

With Reagan and the supposedly kinder, gentler Bush I administration came an assault on "racial quotas," as well as cuts in the budget for civil rights enforcement. Some insisted that sex and race discrimination -- if they even existed -- had nothing to do with the economic plight of women or racial minorities. Comparable worth was regarded by such people as a loony idea. But voices persisted, perhaps in the background, to insist otherwise.

By the time President Bill Clinton took office, affirmative action was almost on its deathbed -- labeled "reverse discrimination" against white men. Clinton threw in a lifeboat called "mend it, don't end it." Meanwhile, family and medical leave were coupled with an end to welfare as we know it, giving disadvantaged women dead-end jobs that trapped them and their children in poverty. The black unemployment rate went down in the economic boom.

Highlighting the major problem of health care disparities, Clinton talked the talk about ending invidious discrimination in every area of American life. Racial profiling against blacks and Latinos was in the national spotlight. African American incarceration rates soared, making the United States the world leader in imprisonment. Thanks largely to the "war on drugs" and draconian sentencing, more young black men were enrolled in the prison system than in institutions of higher education.

Enter the years of Bush II with a wave of voting rights complaints that led us to the Florida election battle of 2000. Despite the detractors, our recommendations on the civil rights commission contributed to the national debate on election reform. The Help America Vote Act -- a good try in its conception but lacking sorely in implementation -- attempted to deal with the problem.

During President Bush's first term, we witnessed a retreat on environmental justice, accelerated racial profiling of the traditional targets and expanded targeting of other people of color who "look Arab." And in the post-Sept. 11 world, civil liberties and freedoms were compressed in a chilling quest for national security. A new surge in unemployment among black youth and high Latino dropout rates have gotten only passing attention. At the same time, opposition to affirmative action, and nominations of judges with a stunted vision of equal opportunity, have fostered loud and heated controversies as the administration draws its battle lines.

Today's half-full glass has led to new conversations never considered two decades ago: New Americans bring before us the realities of life for Latinos, Asian Americans, Arab Americans and the attending issues of immigration rights and English as a second language in our public schools. Diversity is evident in appointments to positions never before held by women, blacks or other people of color. So too is the certainty that there is no policy victory in merely putting diverse faces in high places.

Today the nation is crying out for presidential leadership on intractable issues of race, opportunity and rights. A watchdog is still needed: that is the job the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has done.

The president can either squander or seize the moment. His stiff resolve to quiet critics and defeat those he believes may pose a threat to his notion of liberty and justice -- both here and abroad -- can only distance us from the values he has pledged to protect.

The writer, outgoing chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.