No one should need to be reminded of what kind of obstacles African slaves and their descendants have had to struggle against in the hope of achieving economic and political power in the United States. It is therefore a tragic irony that at the exact point when opportunities finally became available in the wake of the civil rights movement, they disappeared in the malaise that accompanied the black leadership’s and liberal politicians’ obsession with social justice in the latter half of the 1960s. While certainly not as malevolent as slavery, lynching, or segregation, the welfare state has been able to corrupt the very fabric of the black community in ways those other evils never could. Although their stated intention was to help poor blacks suffering from years of repression and apathy, the liberal Great Society programs have had almost the diametrically opposite effect on this most neglected and deserving group of Americans.
The civil rights era had brought with it a multitude of well-meaning mandates such as affirmative action, minority hiring quotas, and a massive expansion of welfare. All of this was done with full approval from the black leadership. After the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his peers found new jobs as crusaders for social justice, seeking to provide vocational and educational opportunities to the citizens for whom they had labored so hard to liberate. King believed that economic disparities among blacks could be solved by a government-sponsored, “broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged” (128). [1] So confident was King that he virtually guaranteed its success:
“I would challenge skeptics to give such a bold new approach a test for the next decade. I contend that the decline in school dropouts, family breakups, crime rates, illegitimacy, swollen relief roles and other social evils would stagger the imagination.”(128)
President Johnson shared King’s sympathies, and shortly after he assumed office the federal programs that would comprise the Great Society were underway. Lamentably, the results in all of those areas mentioned were indeed staggering but not in the way the immortal civil rights hero would have been proud of.
It was precisely at the point when the government took the largest role in trying to improve the lives of poor blacks that, by almost every imaginable metric, their quality of life began a sharp decline. Perhaps no other researcher has documented the aftermath of the Great Society initiatives better than sociologist Charles Murray. His work, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, details the tragic outcome of the War on Poverty [2], with the years leading up to it thrown in for context. Murray’s criticism of the liberal initiatives is limited solely to how they have affected the poor, and poor blacks in particular. His verdict is simple and brutal. Murray writes:
“Basic indicators of well-being took a turn for the worse in the 1960s, most consistently and most drastically for the poor. In some cases, earlier progress slowed; in other cases mild deterioration accelerated; in a few instances advance turned into retreat.” (8)
Specifically regarding blacks and poverty, Murray claims their progress had actually been steady in the early sixties, boosted by a booming economy and the civil rights movement (63), but he adds that “Progress stopped coincidentally with the implementation of the Great Society’s social reforms [Emphasis in the original]” (63). In the fifteen years from 1965 until 1980, the situation of poor blacks had deteriorated to levels that would have been unbelievable to even the most pessimistic social scientist from before the Great Society era (Murray 136). The Rev. King has already outlined five specific areas in which he anticipated improvement for blacks: education, the family, unemployment, crime, and welfare. Let us examine each one in turn and see how close the outcomes came to the lofty expectations.
In the educational realm, the results were atrocious. Education officials brought the standards down to the level of the most deprived students instead of seeking to elevate everyone to excellence, and after fifteen years the regression among black students was impossible to ignore. Murray laments that “...[A]s of 1980 the gap in educational achievement between black and white students leaving high school was so great that it threatened to defeat any other attempts to narrow the economic differences separating blacks from whites” (105). He cites that in a national aptitude test of 18- to 23-year-olds conducted in 1980, the average white score was 2.3 times higher than that of blacks (Murray 105). Murray adds that, in the same survey, “The average white was reading at nearly a tenth grade level, while the average black tested was reading at a seventh-grade level” (105-106). SAT scores revealed further troubles. Murray reports that “As of 1980, the mean SAT score of blacks was....more than 100 points lower....than the mean for whites” (106), and that an alarming number of black students were receiving abysmally low SAT scores, meaning those of less than 300: as of 1980 this group included an astounding 25 percent of black test-takers, compared with only 3.5 percent of white test-takers (Murray 106). As far as enrollment was concerned, Murray believes that “Underestimates of dropout rates are....very high” (98), and adds that attendance in inner-city schools is often overestimated (98). This is not what the Rev. King had hoped for.
The War on Poverty had left the black family utterly decimated. Even in the early days of President Johnson’s tenure, it was becoming painfully clear that welfare was having an injurious impact on many black households. Kay S. Hymowitz explains:
“In the past, policymakers had assumed that if the male heads of household had jobs, women and children would be provided for. This no longer seemed true. Even while more black men....were getting jobs, more black women were joining the welfare rolls.” (Hymowitz)
In effect, AFDC [3] had replaced the working family man with a government subsidy, so it should have come as no surprise that many black fathers had either a diminished or nonexistent role when it came to raising their children. John McWhorter writes that “Between 1964 and 1976, the number of black children born to single mothers doubled, to 50 percent, and by 1995 the percentage was more than three-quarters” (125). There was not a surge in out-of-wedlock births before the War on Poverty; only after 1964 did the problem become widespread. According to Murray, the black illegitimacy rate rose only slightly, from 17 percent in 1950 to 23 percent in 1963 (126). If the rise had been proportionate to how it had been prior to the War on Poverty, only around 29 percent of black births would have been illegitimate in 1980; instead the figure was 48 percent, nearly four times the expected increase, and more than four times the rate for whites (Murray 126). That number was even higher in the inner city; in New York the rate of black illegitimacy was reported to be as high as 66 percent (Hymowitz). Illegitimacy is a more than just a sign of moral decay; the purposeful breakup of slave families, in conjunction with the prohibition on slaves owning property, was one of the main reasons why, many generations after emancipation, blacks were still far behind whites financially. Without a complete family, wealth cannot be accumulated and passed down to the next generation. A fatherless child is one who inherits nothing.
The black unemployment statistics were bizarre. Jobs were not the issue; in the 1960s they could be found everywhere. McWhorter tells us that black unemployment was cut almost in half in the midst of the Great Society, from 7.8 percent in 1960 down to 4.2 percent [4] in 1970 (117), but for some odd reason, young blacks were not working. The problem was that while older blacks were finding employment relatively easily, younger workers were rapidly dropping out of the job hunt. Murray explains that labor force participation [5] among black working-aged men had been about the same as for whites through the civil rights years, but the late 1960s began a precipitous decline in black LFP, especially among the youngest workers, while at the same time white LFP was either holding steady or increasing (Murray 76-77). Regarding the federal job-creation and job-training efforts, Murray asserts that “...[F]ailure was nearly universal” (36). Murray concludes that “It was difficult to take much satisfaction in the legal edifice of black rights when black teenage unemployment was approaching 40 percent” (145). Simply stated, the results show that all of the programs, quotas, and other federal initiatives had not only failed to increase the amount and quality of career opportunities for young blacks, they had actually reduced their employability to a level far worse than from before the civil rights movement.
The effect of the War on Poverty on crime was horrifying. From 1963 to 1980, the murder rate had more than doubled, the rates of forcible rape and robbery had each gone up almost 300 percent, and various other types of crimes had risen tremendously (Murray 115). While the increase in crime was not unique to the black race, and probably not entirely attributable to the liberal reforms, Murray is adamant that in the Great Society years,“[B]lack behavior toward crime changed in a way that is qualitatively different from the way that white behavior changed” (116). 91 percent of the increase in black arrests between 1960 and 1980 occurred in the small window from 1965 to 1970 (Murray 118), and Murray adds that “The increase in arrests for violent crimes among blacks during the 1965-70 period was seven times that of whites [Emphasis added]” (118). To avoid the accusation that critics of liberalism are blaming the surge in crime on one particular race, it should be revealed who the victims were: Murray’s statistics point out that blacks in general, and lower-income urban blacks in particular, were victimized at a far greater rate than whites in the years subsequent to the War on Poverty (119).
In cataloging the myriad ways in which the black community had retrogressed after the Great Society, and our search for a single root cause, the constant refrain is welfare. Welfare did not begin with the Great Society, but in the 1960s the government relaxed the eligibility requirements (McWhorter 121), and the number of recipients grew dramatically. The Rev. King would have been disheartened by the size of the increase: McWhorter tells us that from 1960 to 1970 this figure rose by 169 percent (116), and that “Even in 1961, 43 percent of welfare recipients were black, even though at the time only about one in ten Americans were black” (116). After a decade, things were even worse. McWhorter goes on to say that “...[I]n 1970, in New York City, 47 percent of the people on AFDC were black...” (117). When the eligibility rules were relaxed for other social safety nets, they too saw a massive spike in enrollees: The number of recipients of disability compensation increased by well over five hundred percent from 1960 to 1975 (Murray 47). The variables are many in each of these cases, but the one constant is accessibility was increased, which has to explain at least some of the surge in the number of claims.
Aside from the hollow charges of racism or ‘social Darwinism’, which are baseless and not worth wasting time refuting, apologists for the welfare state generally counter with three kinds of arguments, not one of them disputing the fact that the War on Poverty was a failure. The first is that the decline in the general condition of blacks which began in the mid-1960s was the fault of other elements, not the enticement of the anti-poverty programs, and this view is shared by Christopher Jencks. For example, welfare payments had started becoming less valuable in real dollars after 1973, yet black illegitimacy rates continued to climb (McWhorter 133). Jencks claims that “Since making welfare less attractive did not discourage single parenthood after 1973, it no longer seems likely that raising benefits encouraged it before 1973” (qtd. in McWhorter 133). The flaw in Jencks’ logic is that, at least in this case, he is using a relatively late date as a divider. In order to convince us that the War on Poverty was not the gate through which flowed all of the social ills we have documented, he must explain why, in the middle of the racial repression of the 1950s, blacks were socially healthier than they were after the government arrived on the scene in 1964 with of all its ‘help’. It is supremely difficult to argue that blacks had an easier time in America before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than after it. If anything, blacks should have made strident gains during the post-civil rights years with their newly-acquired advantages, yet their fates began to take a turn for the worse beginning at that exact moment. Whether it was definitely the government intrusion that reversed the progress is up for debate. The timing is not.
The second type of argument is that, while again acknowledging the harm done to the black citizenry by the Great Society, the presumption is made that the damage would have been even worse if the government had not intervened with all of its aid programs, however Quixotic they turned out to be. Sympathetic to this view is Douglas G. Glasgow, author of The Black Underclass, who gives a first-hand account of ghetto youth ostensibly trapped in the kind of poverty the Johnson-era reforms were targeting. This is why Murray’s contextual period from 1950 to 1964 is so vital. If the trend lines had suggested a rise in black societal problems in the pre-1964 period and then a sustained reduction after the liberal reforms, then this argument would be valid. Unfortunately, that is the polar opposite of what actually happened; Murray reminds us that “The numbers go the wrong way at the wrong time” (56). If Glasgow is looking for a causal condition for his ghettoes and the deprived individuals who are trapped in them, he might want to consider listening to Kay Hymowitz:
“According to....Moynihan and economist Paul Offner, of the black children born between 1967 and 1969, 72 percent received Aid to Families with Dependent Children before the age of 18. School dropout rates, delinquency, and crime, among the other dysfunctions that Moynihan had warned about, were rising in the cities. In short, the 15 years since the report was written had witnessed both the birth of millions of fatherless babies and the entrenchment of an underclass [Emphasis added].” (Hymowitz)
Glasgow’s conclusion does not take into account the debilitating effect of welfare, and this economic law cannot be ignored. His conclusion is typical: an appeal for government to assume even more control over poor blacks via many of the same agencies which got them into such a mess (Glasgow 194), but this solution is as asinine as an observer noting the deplorable condition of Southern blacks in, say, the year 1865, and recommending that what is needed to help these people is for the same policy the government had toward them fifteen years prior to be re-implemented, only with more vigor.
The last arrow in the liberals’ quiver is the inevitable emotional appeal. Typically, these critics deploy a real, live struggling single mother and her offspring to be used as human shields, and declare that anyone suggesting their benefits be curtailed is an ogre. A complementary tactic is to exaggerate the degree to which welfare opponents insinuate that the dependency culture fosters lasciviousness, corruption, and vice. After his excursion into the ghetto to write Myth of the Welfare Queen, [6] David Zucchino proclaims that “If there were any Cadillac-driving, champagne-sipping, penthouse-living welfare queens in North Philadelphia, I didn’t find them” (13). Unfortunately for his worldview, what Zucchino did find, no matter how he tries to spin it, were people and communities victimized by the welfare-driven status quo he isn’t comfortable with changing. Zucchino’s fears about the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 might have been assuaged if he had known then what McWhorter would happily report a few years after its enactment: “...[T]he predictions so common in 1996 that poor blacks would be starving on the streets have shown themselves dead wrong” (135). McWhorter is also pleased to report that the percentage of black children born into poverty “[W]as just 30 percent by 2002, and the fall from 44 percent in 1993 was sharpest after...1996” (135). If the intimation is made that some people are getting rich off welfare, it does not apply to AFDC recipients but bureaucrats and corrupt middle-men. Economist Thomas Sowell notes that “Even in specifically poverty-oriented programs....the bulk of the money does not actually reach the poor but rather is paid to the predominantly middle-class suppliers of professional services designed to ‘fight poverty’” (197). Sowell might have summed up all of the criticism of the strategy employed by the Rev. King and President Johnson with this statement:
“Government programs....have their benefits and their disadvantages. Those best able to maximize the benefits and minimize the disadvantages are those already well off, financially and socially, and those most likely to end up with the smallest benefits and the largest losses are the poor, the less educated, the less organized, and the less prestigious. Disadvantaged minorities are clearly in the latter category.” (199)
This leads us to the most insidious aspect of welfare: the Cloward-Piven strategy. Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were radical white university professors who in 1966 devised a plan to turn the United States into a dictatorship by abusing the welfare system. They sought to create as many welfare dependents as possible, hoping to overwhelm the system and collapse the entire American economy (McWhorter 120). Their organization lobbied to reduce the restrictions on welfare to the point where almost anyone could get it (McWhorter 120-121). They disrupted civic affairs and held rallies, sometimes alongside the Black Panthers, to discourage the poor, especially poor blacks, from seeking jobs and working (McWhorter 120). Ameliorating poverty had absolutely nothing to do with it; blacks were merely pawns in their anarchistic game. McWhorter remarks that “Rarely in American history have people with such an openly radical, and even destructive, agenda had such power over the daily lives of innocent people” (120).
The point will be made that the 1980s’ trend toward conservative thought and ultimately the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 have made the debate over open-ended, sixties-style welfare policy obsolete. However, the brief period of rationality ended with the election of President Barack Obama. He appears all too willing to encourage one of the most destructive aspects of black radical thought, which is the cultivation of a mindset where blacks look to the government as their only escape from problems created by, ultimately, that same government. Peter Nicholas of the L.A. Times writes:
“The Republican Ronald Reagan once quipped that the most ‘terrifying words’ in the English language were ‘I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.’ Democrat Bill Clinton proclaimed in a State of the Union speech 13 years ago that ‘the era of big government is over.’
“But in an address here Thursday, President-elect Barack Obama said government was the solution.” (Nicholas)
Apparently, someone did not get the message. Fred Lucas of CNS News reports that “Obama’s spending proposals call for the largest increases in welfare benefits in U.S. history....This will lead to a spending total of $10.3 trillion over the next decade on various welfare programs” (Lucas). The country is now in the hands of a man who believes that capitalists are inherently wicked (Obama 126), that America is “a racial caste system” (Obama 317), and has been influenced by radicals of every stripe, including black marxists (Obama 129), black nationalists (Obama 182), and a “Black Power” militant (Obama 90). This comes as no surprise to James Simpson, who worries that the Cloward-Piven strategy is reflected in the Obama administration’s priorities:
“The real goal of ‘healthcare’ legislation, the real goal of ‘cap and trade,’ the real goal of ‘stimulus’ is to rip the guts out of our private economy and transfer wide swaths of it over to government control....These initiatives are vehicles for change. They are not goals in and of themselves, except in their ability to deliver power, and will make matters much worse, for that is their design.
“This time, in addition to overwhelming the government with demands for services, Obama and the Democrats are overwhelming political opposition to their plans with a flood of apocalyptic legislation.” (Simpson)
That is strong language, but not misplaced. In his first year in office, President Obama submitted a gargantuan budget of 3.6 trillion dollars, the largest in U.S. history by far, with no explanation of how it will be paid for. It is impossible to ascertain what kind of damage these atavistic economic policies will do to the black community, but if the president is as radical as Simpson thinks he is, that will be the least of our problems. In any case, the immediate results do not inspire hope. Black unemployment has already risen to a devastating level: 15.2 percent in November, up from 11.2 percent after the election one year prior (U.S. Dept. of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics).
Based on the evidence, there are two incontrovertible statements which can be said of the liberal reforms of the mid-sixties and their impact on black Americans. The first is that the economic status of black Americans had, in fact, been improving before the War on Poverty despite glaring racial disparities and the lack of quality education. Without federal aid, black poverty was cut in half: The percentage of the black population considered poor dropped from 90 percent in 1940 to less than 50 percent in 1960, even though the number of blacks receiving government assistance during this time period was negligible (McWhorter 117). The second truth is that the overall condition of the black community in America had deteriorated substantially after the federal government had put forth a monumental effort to improve it. The conclusion drawn, therefore, is that the government, which had established and enforced slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation, cannot be the means for correcting these historical injustices. The solution is to remove the government as far as possible from the natural constructive forces in the black community, these being families, businesses, churches, and educational institutions, and let them develop on their own. Had the government taken this approach in the 1960s, the rise in black progress may have been slow, but steady; and the catastrophic side-effects of the War on Poverty never would have materialized.
If black Americans are ever going to achieve comparable economic status with whites, they are going to have to evolve out of the swamp of liberalism, sever ties with the Democrat party, and embrace conservatism. Blacks are understandably leery of any philosophy that takes it cue from America’s past, for it has not been kind to them, but conservatism is a belief system based on the core principles of the abolitionists and anti-segregationists; the self-aggrandizing myths promulgated by racial demagogues notwithstanding. The despicable strategy used during the 1964 presidential campaign to portray Senator Goldwater as a racist is the epitome of the misinformation disseminated by the liberal establishment. This was said of a man who had spent his entire life among the native peoples of Arizona, had himself been the victim of anti-Semitism, became the first minority to run for president forty years before anyone had even heard of Barack Obama, favored school integration [7], voted for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, and whose only reason for opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was that it wasn’t good enough! [8] Similar calumnies have been hurled in the direction of President Reagan and House Speaker Gingrich, the two men who may have done more to eliminate economic disparities among blacks than the entire apparatus of the War on Poverty. Unfortunately, if blacks continue to conform to the liberal establishment’s ideal rather than risk being derided as ‘race traitors’ and ‘sellouts’ [9], economic progress will be limited to those courageous few who care less about skin pigmentation than what is beneath the surface, which, incidentally, is the whole point.
Those who think that blacks are perpetually disadvantaged and incapable of doing the hard work necessary to succeed in America do not have history on their side. Frederick Douglass, who was all too familiar with the welfare system of the plantation (26), said of his first wage-job that “It was a happy moment, the rapture of which can be understood only by those who have been slaves” (119), and that “It was to me the starting-point of a new existence.” (119). There was a man who was not looking for a handout. Booker T. Washington said “...I have never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed” (46). Those aren’t the words of a man who would be clamoring for affirmative action. All Americans should follow the example of these great men to work to fulfill the noblest plank of the civil rights movement: using all of the opportunities inherent in free-market capitalism to create the color-blind society where no one is barred from access to education, gainful employment, or anything else, for a reason so frivolous as race.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Avlon, John. “The New Welfare Queens.” The Daily Beast: Blogs and Stories, 21 March 2009.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, An
American Slave, Written by Himself. 1845. Introduction Peter J. Gomes. Afterword Gregory Stephens. New York: Penguin 2005.
Glasgow, Douglas G. The Black Underclass: Poverty, Unemployment, and Entrapment of
Ghetto Youth. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1980.
Goldwater, Barry Morris. The Conscience of a Conservative. New York: Victor, 1960.
Hymowitz, Kay S. “The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies.” City Journal, Summer 2005.
Kennedy, Randall. Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal. New York: Random House, 2008.
King, Jr., Martin Luther. Why We Can’t Wait. 1963. Afterword Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000.
Lucas, Fred. “Obama Will Spend More on Welfare in the Next Year Than Bush Spent on Entire Iraq War, Study Reveals.” CNSNews.com. 23 September 2009.
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McConnell, Campbell R., and Brue, Stanley L. Economics: Principles, Problems, and
Policies. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005
McWhorter, John. Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America. New York: Gotham Books, 2005.
Murray, Charles. Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
Nicholas, Peter. “Obama to seek support for nearly $1-trillion recovery plan.” Los Angeles Times. 9 January 2009.
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Obama, Barack. Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. New York: Times, 1995.
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. The Public Papers & Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Samuel Rosenman, ed., Vol XIII. New York: Harper, 1950, 40-42.
Simpson, James. “Cloward-Piven Government.” DC Independent Examiner. 22 November 2009. .
Sowell, Thomas. Race and Economics. New York: David McKay Co., 1975.
U.S. Department of Labor. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Economic News Release. Table A-2: Employment Status of the Civilian Population by Race, Sex, and Age.” 4 December 2009.
Voegeli, William. “Civil Rights and the Conservative Movement.” Claremont Review of Books. Summer 2008.
Washington, Booker Taliaferro. Up From Slavery. 1901. Introduction Ishmael Reed. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000.
Zucchino, David. Myth of the Welfare Queen: A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist’s
Portrayal of Women on the Line. New York: Scribner, 1997.
NOTES:
[1] King claims that his “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged” was modeled after the G.I. Bill for veterans (128), but it appears more like President F. Roosevelt’s “Second Bill of Rights” spelled out in his January 1944 State of the Union address, which would have been virtually impossible to implement without a total government takeover of the economy. For a complete list of FDR’s ‘rights’, see The Public Papers & Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 40-42.
[2] To refer to the years 1964-1967 when the most drastic changes took place, Murray uses the terms ‘War on Poverty’, ‘Reform Period’, and ‘Great Society’ interchangeably (24-25). This report will do the same.
[3] Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, was the preeminent form of welfare and usually synonymous with the term. Prior to 1963 it was known as Aid to Dependent Children (ADC).
[4] This statistic is even more telling when taking into account the fact that economists usually consider an unemployment rate of around 4 percent to be full-employment (McConnell and Brue 137-138).
[5] The ‘labor force participation rate’, or LFP, is an economic statistic which expresses the percentage of the total working-aged population that is in the labor force (McConnell and Brue 310). Disincentives to work, such as welfare, cause this percentage to go down.
[6] The term ‘welfare queen’ originated in a 1976 speech by Ronald Reagan: “She has 15 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands....She is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names” (qtd. in Avlon). When pressured to identify this woman Reagan either could not or refused to do so, giving his critics the ability to say the story was fabricated. Whether Reagan’s anecdote referred to an actual person or was a metaphor is unclear to this day, but according to John Avlon, “It turns out the story, while mostly apocryphal, did have one actual antecedent—a woman from the South Side of Chicago who was busted in 1976 for using four identities to defraud the government out of $8,000” (Avlon).
[7] Goldwater writes: “...I am in agreement with the objectives of the Supreme Court as stated in the Brown decision. I believe that it is both wise and just for negro children to attend the same school as whites, and that to deny them this opportunity carries with it strong implications of inferiority [Emphasis in the original]” (Goldwater 38).
[8] While he was in agreement with most of the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, William Voegeli writes that Goldwater “...could find ‘no constitutional basis for the exercise of Federal regulatory authority’ over private employment or public accommodations, Goldwater called the law ‘a grave threat’ to a ‘constitutional republic...’” (Voegeli).
[9] Randall Kennedy confirms that “Scores of black conservatives have been derided as sellouts” (65), including Sowell (65) and McWhorter (66). Justice Clarence Thomas, the most prominent black conservative ever is, according to Kennedy, “...the most vilified black official in the history of the United States” (87-88).
