[Mb-hair] Kerner on Race 1968

[Michael Butler]

The Jim Burns posting of Herbert's article created this reaction about a
hero of mine.
Also the Kerner Commission had quite historical connection to me. For more
on that go again in my website:
--http://www.michaelbutler.com
There; Secrets>Journal>Productions>Hair>'How and Why I Got Into Hair'
Michael
 


------ Forwarded Message
From: "Anton Kerner" <antonkerner at msn.com>
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 12:33:39 -0500
To: "'Michael Butler'" <michael at michaelbutler.com>
Subject: RE: [Mb-hair] Race, 1968, Beyond... Bob Herbert in the TIMES....

Dear Michael,

Thanks for copying me with your insightful correspondence with Jim Burns.
Attached is a piece I wrote that was published in the Chicago Tribune March
19, 2000 which touches on the racism so long underwritten in Republican
politics. The most pertinent excerpts may be these:

    "The Kerner Report was as much a watershed for America's civil
liberty as it was for Kerner's. In January 1969, Richard Nixon--the nation's
first critic of the Kerner Report--was sworn in as president, and his
campaign
manager, John Mitchell, launched his masquerade as attorney general. The
intangible civil rights of minorities advanced by Kerner were set on a
collision course with a specious theory of intangible rights invented by
Mitchell's prosecutors to allege Kerner failed to give citizens of Illinois
"good and faithful services" as governor. With Kerner's conviction, Nixon
and Mitchell managed to destroy one of America's most respected civil rights
Advocates... 

    "The authors fail to recognize the enormity of the injustice Kerner
suffered when they dismiss strong evidence of the political inspiration
behind his prosecution. They recount the famous November 1970 meeting in
which Nixon, Mitchell and cohorts plotted their 1972 re-election campaign
strategy to attract southern and northern white Democratic voters
disgruntled by their party's national civil rights and integration
initiatives of the 1960s. They also repeat Mitchell's boast that Illinois
Democrats wouldn't be so powerful after his grand jury got through in
Chicago. They even admit that Mitchell's Justice Department officials had
briefed Chicago prosecutors about Kerner only a month earlier, in October
1970. But they doubt that Mitchell's boast pertained to Kerner because no
grand jury was then convened, overlooking the Kerner grand jury Mitchell
seated in Chicago just a month after the 1970 holidays. To whom do they
think Mitchell was referring, if not Kerner?

    "Kerner's U.S. appellate court opinions in defense of civil liberty
and his persistent advocacy of Kerner Report recommendations were widely
known to frustrate, embarrass and enrage Nixon and Mitchell. Not only did he
block their draconian approach to law and order, he called them to task for
impeding racial progress. In Nixon's Oval Office tapes, Mitchell is heard
complaining about Kerner just two weeks before he called him in front of the
June 1971 Grand Jury: "Now he's out talking about his Kerner Commission
Report when he should be keeping his damn mouth shut as a judge." The
question is not whether Nixon and Mitchell possessed the motive, means and
opportunity to get Otto Kerner, but whether a smoking gun eventually will be
found in the Nixon tapes."

Keepin' eyes on the prize always,

Anton 



-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Butler [mailto:michael at michaelbutler.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2005 11:56 AM
To: SPECIAL from Michael Butler
Subject: Re: [Mb-hair] Race, 1968, Beyond... Bob Herbert in the TIMES....

Jim,
Thanks, You have some real points here and with the article from Bob
Herbert.
I'd like to add some pertinent part of HAIR history:
In my website go to Secrets>Journal>Politics>MEMORIES BROUGHT WITH THE
COMING OF THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION.
Michael

> 
> I always find it interesting how we, correctly, remember how close the
> 1968 election between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon was. (For you
> young'uns--they couldn't call the election, til the next day.) And if
> Humphrey could only have stated that he would not wage the Vietnam War
> in the way LBJ was doing--Humphrey's sense of loyalty prevented his
> personal code of honor from besmirching his colleague, I have no doubt
> Humphrey would have won. (Often unreported today are the vast number of
> votes Nixon gained--particularly among the young!-- by claiming he had a
> "secret plan", to end the War.)  But forgotten is how large the chances
> are that the popular vote numbers would have been vastly larger for
> Nixon, had George Wallace not siphoned off a ton of votes that would
> never have swung to the Democrats...
> 
> Which leads us into this interesting piece in THE NEW YORK TIMES, by Bob
> Herbert--whose stint at THE DAILY NEWS, I still recall, with pleasure...
> 
> Jim Burns
> _____
> 
> 
> Bob Herbert Op Ed ,October 6, 2005
> Impossible, Ridiculous, Repugnant
> By BOB HERBERT
> 
> A lot of people are upset over comments made on the radio by the former
> education secretary and guardian of all things virtuous, Bill Bennett.
> A Republican who served in the Reagan cabinet, Mr. Bennett told his
> listeners: "I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime,
> you could - if that were your sole purpose - you could abort every black
> baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."
> 
> After making the point that exterminating blacks would be a most
> effective crime-fighting tool, he quickly added, "That would be an
> impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your
> crime rate would go down."
> 
> When I first heard about Mr. Bennett's comments, I wondered why anyone
> was surprised. I've come to expect racial effrontery from big shots in
> the Republican Party. The G.O.P. has happily replaced the Democratic
> Party as a safe haven for bigotry, racially divisive tactics and
> strategies and outright anti-black policies. That someone who's been a
> stalwart of that outfit might muse publicly about the potential benefits
> of exterminating blacks is not surprising to me at all.
> 
> Listen to the late Lee Atwater in a 1981 interview explaining the
> evolution of the G.O.P.'s Southern strategy:
> 
> "You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you
> can't say 'nigger' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like
> forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so
> abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these
> things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct
> of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
> 
> "And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But
> I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we
> are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow
> me - because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is
> much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more
> abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.' "
> 
> Atwater, who would manage George H. W. Bush's successful run for the
> presidency in 1988 (the Willie Horton campaign) and then serve as
> national party chairman, was talking with Alexander P. Lamis, a
> political-science professor at Case Western Reserve University. Mr.
> Lamis quoted Atwater in the book "Southern Politics in the 1990's."
> 
> The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the
> G.O.P.'s relentless appeal to racist whites. Tired of losing elections,
> it saw an opportunity to renew itself by opening its arms wide to white
> voters who could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of
> civil rights and voting rights for blacks.
> 
> The payoff has been huge. Just as the Democratic Party would have been
> crippled in the old days without the support of the segregationist
> South, today's Republicans would have only a fraction of their current
> political power without the near-solid support of voters who are hostile
> to blacks.
> 
> When Democrats revolted against racism, the G.O.P. rallied to its
> banner.
> 
> Ronald Reagan, the G.O.P.'s biggest hero, opposed both the Civil Rights
> Act and the Voting Rights Act of the mid-1960's. And he began his
> general election campaign in 1980 with a powerfully symbolic appearance
> in Philadelphia, Miss., where three young civil rights workers were
> murdered in the summer of 1964. He drove the crowd wild when he
> declared: "I believe in states' rights."
> Bill Bennett's musings about the extermination of blacks in America (it
> would be "impossible, ridiculous ... morally reprehensible") is all of a
> piece with a Republican Party philosophy that is endlessly insulting to
> black people and overwhelmingly hostile to their interests.
> 
> But that white racist vote, once so important to the Democrats and now
> so important to the G.O.P., has been steadily shrinking. The U.S. is
> less prejudiced than it was 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, which is why
> George W. Bush had to try so hard to disenfranchise black voters in
> Florida in 2000; and why Jeb Bush had to call out the state police to
> try to intimidate black voters in Orlando, Fla., in 2004; and why
> Republicans in Georgia have come up with the equivalent of a poll tax
> (requiring people without a driver's license to pay $20 for a voter
> identification card), which will hurt poor, black and elderly voters.
> 
> Bill Bennett's twisted fantasies are a malignant outgrowth of our
> polarized past. Our job is to keep them from spreading into the future.
> 
> 
> C Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
> 
> 
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