Some of My Best Friends Are Black (32 page)

When assembling his new administration in the fall of 1968, President-elect Nixon appointed longtime confidant H. R. Haldeman to serve as his chief of staff. To staff up the West Wing, Haldeman and Nixon turned—where else?—to their old boys’ network. Haldeman chose as his deputy a young man named Lawrence Higby. Dwight Chapin came on as special assistant to the president, responsible for appointments and television appearances. Ken Cole served as assistant to the president for domestic affairs. Most prominently, Ron Ziegler was tapped to serve as the administration’s press secretary. Higby, Chapin, Cole, and Ziegler had all worked under H. R. Haldeman during the twenty years he’d spent as an account executive and vice president at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency.

The Mad Men were running the White House. They’d also run Nixon’s campaign, the messaging of which had been tailored perfectly for the Republican Party’s new core demographic: the white suburban majority. Nixon didn’t need black votes to get elected, but he still needed a solution to their problems. Implied in his pitch to suburban voters was the idea that “this Negro thing” could be managed without whites having to be bothered with it. And with the cities besieged by riots, something had to be done, as Nixon put it, “not to have the goddamned country blow up.”

The country was blowing up because the one thing black people aspired to most was the one thing they hadn’t gotten so far: results. To function in a capitalistic economy, owners need access to capital and
workers need access to jobs. Nixon needed the country to function. So in April of 1968, with the country flailing in response to Martin Luther King’s assassination, candidate Nixon rolled out the first of his new product pitches for black America. He took to the radio to lay out a comprehensive urban economic program. “Bridges to Human Dignity,” his campaign called the address. In it, Nixon proposed a cornucopia of programs that spoke directly to the rising feelings of nationalist sentiment in the black community. He called for massive investments in depressed urban neighborhoods and schools, support for historically black colleges, job training that produced actual jobs. Nixon also outlined what would become known as his “black capitalism” initiative, government loans and incentives to foster “black ownership… black pride, black jobs, black opportunity, and, yes, black power, in the best, most constructive sense of that often misapplied term.”

In a country where blacks were once owned, the idea of black ownership was a powerful one. Many black nationalists believed that a self-contained, self-determined black economy was the only way to escape exploitation at the hands of whites. That notion ran up against certain realities of the free market, but it still held considerable sway. Through the Booker T. Washington Business Association, conservative black leaders endeavored to build a strong entrepreneurial class. In the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns of the thirties and forties, black economic solidarity had played an important role in opening up what limited opportunities existed at the time. During the early sixties, Malcolm X more than anyone had championed the notion of “buying black,” not letting whites own all the stores, keeping black dollars in black hands. The problem for black business was that even the most practical of these ideas had never delivered substantial, sustainable access to jobs and capital. It wasn’t until 1966 that someone finally figured out how to use black pride to make the cash register ring.

During Martin Luther King’s failed Chicago housing campaign, he’d established an economic development program called Operation Breadbasket, a grab bag of various tactics the movement had used in the past—boycotts, labor walkouts, selective-buying campaigns—all oriented toward wringing concessions out of white manufacturers and
employers. In cities across the country, these tactics had produced minor, fitful gains. In Chicago, the program was run by a young, charismatic preacher named Jesse Jackson. Alternately described as a savior or a shakedown artist, Jackson took on corporate America with a savvy and a fearlessness that brought CEOs to the bargaining table. His first major victory, after a fourteen-week boycott against the A&P grocery store chain, yielded dozens of jobs, an agreement to stock products from black-owned companies on shelves, a guarantee to place ads in local black-owned media, and a contract to hire black-owned sanitation firms for the company’s garbage collection.

Given the era, Jackson’s success on the jobs front was bewildering. It was alchemy. In less than two years, Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket had netted black Chicagoans more than three thousand jobs, increased their personal income by $22 million, and roped in $15 million in deposits for black-owned banks. Blacks rallied to Jackson’s Sunday services by the thousands. Martin Luther King had inspired a generation with his sermons, but all his lofty talk of Promised Lands and mutual garments of destiny hadn’t yet put bread on anyone’s table. Jackson preached a gospel that resonated in the here and now: “
Say it loud! I’m black and I’m proud—and I buy Grove Fresh orange juice!
”

The product launch for Nixon’s Bridge to Human Dignity was perfectly timed. Once in office, on the matter of protecting his white suburban voting base, the new president made little pretense about his intentions. In fact, his entire domestic agenda on integrationist civil rights policies can be neatly summed up in the instructions he gave his attorney general in selecting the administration’s first Supreme Court nominee. The candidate had to be “a conservative Southerner” who was “against busing, and against forced housing integration in the suburbs.” Beyond that, Nixon said, “he can do what he pleases.”

Pivoting to the urban economic front, Nixon just as swiftly made good on his promise of results. Same as with school busing, real results demanded statistical proof of significant progress. Racial balance. Quotas. As hard as Johnson had pressed on racial balance in schools, jobs were a different matter. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, it expressly forbade “preferential treatment to any individual or to any group”
based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” For Democrats, this was a stance made out of political necessity. Since most blacks were blue-collar wage earners, labor unions were the first groups to face the threat of racial preferences in hiring. Blacks were becoming a solid Democratic constituency, but Big Labor was still the backbone of the party; government procurement contracts were a fat, pork-laden pipeline for kickbacks and political patronage. Big Labor didn’t want quotas, and whatever the Democrats’ commitment to racial equality, they were going to let the plumbers and the electricians slide for as long as they could.

If Democrats opposed racial preferences out of self-serving pragmatism, civil rights leaders opposed them on ethical grounds. Martin Luther King had never ruled them out entirely, but felt it would be tragic if America reached a point where such a system were the only option left. Other black leaders agreed. When the subject of racial quotas was raised at the 1966 White House Conference on Civil Rights, one NAACP spokesman said flatly, “This is the very thing we have been fighting against.” America’s civil rights leaders still had their eyes on the prize: full civic, social, and economic inclusion in society. To come all this way and settle for a few thousand jobs here and there, they’d be taking the short money. They weren’t in it for the short money—that is, until the money was actually on the table.

Affirmative action as we know it today was born out of a stalemate between civil rights leaders and labor unions in Philadelphia. As in most cities, black construction workers were consigned either to nonunion jobs or to the low-wage jobs of the unskilled labor unions. The skilled-labor unions—the ones with high-paying jobs and good pensions, such as the plumbers and electricians—excluded blacks almost entirely. At the time, construction was booming. Federal dollars were pouring into urban renewal and suburban housing and highway sprawl. The government should have had considerable authority to impose fair employment practices on the unions working those projects. It didn’t.

The problem, again, was the old boys’ network. Philadelphia’s unions were controlled by an airtight network of family, church, and community. Forty percent of licensed plumbers in Philadelphia had sons who were also plumbers. In 1964, every apprentice accepted to the electricians’
union had been either the son or nephew of a current member. The tile layers were Italian. Sheet metal workers were Scottish, Irish, or German. Every group had a lock on a particular union, and they all took care of their own. Between 1963 and 1967, pressure from the government and the NAACP had produced a total of thirty-four black construction jobs in Philadelphia.

To break the impasse, federal contract compliance regulators had tried to impose goals and timetables for hiring—the “Philadelphia Plan,” this was called. But before it launched, Lyndon Johnson’s comptroller general shut it down; the “goals and timetables” were really race-based quotas and therefore unconstitutional. However, President-elect Nixon and his domestic aides saw the plan as not only legal but potentially lifesaving. Republicans had no political stake in protecting Big Labor, black unemployment was at the root of the urban unrest, and good construction jobs were just the sort of results he’d promised to deliver to make the problem go away.

Nixon made the Philadelphia Plan a centerpiece of his very first address to Congress, calling it “historic and critical.” By early 1970, the Philadelphia Plan was declared such a success that similar programs went into effect in nineteen cities across the country. Dozens more would follow. Affirmative action—meaning goals and timetables for hiring—was now in place.
*

During its first nine months in office, the Nixon administration would fundamentally overhaul and redefine the relationship between race and the workplace. That spring, it amended the mandates President Johnson had established in government contracting. Before, the law had applied only to procurement contracts; now it was expanded to include any institution that received any federal funds of any kind, including universities, research institutions—everyone, almost, since so many institutions interact with the government on some level. In August, Nixon followed this up with Executive Order 11478, which called for swift and immediate
affirmative action in all government employment. Any idealistic notions about color blindness had gone out the window. Now the hiring, firing, promoting, and recruiting of minorities was all to be documented and detailed in every particular. The big racial accounting system we’d built to monitor our schools had expanded to cover nearly every corner of the workplace as well.

Nixon’s signature civil rights initiative would be his “black capitalism” plan. Under the Johnson administration, blacks and other minorities had been eligible for special loans under the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) program, but it was not a major legislative initiative. Nixon thrust it front and center, skipping congressional approval by putting his program under the wing of the executive branch. On March 5, 1969, Nixon signed an executive order establishing the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE) to much celebrity fanfare. Jackie Robinson (the actual Jackie Robinson) was a big booster of black-owned businesses, and he publicly endorsed the plan as precisely the kind of assistance the government should be offering. The OMBE set aside millions in federal dollars to fund black-owned businesses and Minority Enterprise Small Business Investment Corporations, venture capital funds run by private interests that would also invest in black business independently. These programs, Nixon promised, would give black America “not dependency” but “a piece of the action.”

Nixon’s sweeping affirmative action mandates had an immediate impact. By the end of 1970, 20 percent of all black workers were employed by government agencies—a number that included 72 percent of college-educated black women and 57 percent of college-educated black men. Between 1969 and 1972, total black income rose from $38.7 billion to $51.1 billion, and by 1973 deposits in minority-owned banks had gone from $400 million to $1 billion. Between 1970 and 1975, federal procurement from all minority-owned businesses rose from $9 million to $250 million. And on Madison Avenue, UniWorld and the business of black advertising finally had the foundation to start growing.