Most reporting on George W. Bush’s recent efforts at minority outreach have faulted the Texas governor for insufficient contrition regarding alleged GOP insensitivity toward non-whites. Never mind that Gov. Bush has repeatedly opined that "the party of Lincoln has not always carried the mantle of Lincoln," which sounds like contrition to this writer.

What he did not do is repeat the historical inaccuracy many pundits were calling on him to reiterate: To wit, that the Republican Party opposed the Democrats’ noble efforts on behalf of the civil rights movement. If there was no apology from Bush on this score, perhaps that is because those demanding it do not know what they are talking about.

In fact, higher percentages of Republicans in both houses of Congress supported every major piece of civil right legislation than Democrats. In the Senate alone, 27 out of 33 Republicans supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 while 21 Democrats opposed it. Only 69 percent of House Democrats supported this landmark legislation, compared to more than 80 percent of House Republicans.

It is true that there has been a long history of disagreement between civil rights leaders, who have tended to support activist government, and the conservative movement, which is committed to preserving America’s constitutional order. It is also true that at as the civil-rights debate reached its climax in 1964, the Republicans nominated a senator who had just voted against that year’s Civil Rights Act. The Republican share of the black vote was literally decimated between 1960 and 1964, as Barry Goldwater got as little as 3 percent of the black vote compared to Richard Nixon’s 33 percent four years earlier.

Robert George, a conservative commentator who was appointed to the US Commission on Civil Rights by Bush’s father, blames Goldwater’s disagreements with Martin Luther King for today’s GOP troubles among minorities. George faults Goldwater for a 1962 comment that Republicans should "go hunting where the ducks are," i.e., seek the votes of conservative white Southerners rather than increasingly Democratic blacks.

Even this is not an entirely accurate rendering of history, however. Goldwater wanted to vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and supported nine of the bill’s eleven sections. He concluded, however, that the other two were unconstitutional and reluctantly voted against the bill. However, he had supported the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, both signed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Lyndon Johnson had filibustered the 1957 act and also opposed a federal anti-lynching law and integration of the armed forces; he switched sides of the civil rights debate when he began to have national aspirations. Yet by some measures, Goldwater had the better pre-presidential civil-rights record.

Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen was a conservative who supported Robert Taft for president over Eisenhower in 1952 and led the early draft-Goldwater movement in 1963. It is likely that neither the Civil Rights Act nor the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would have passed without his efforts. Gerald Ford, a Republican congressman who would become president, voted for both bills. So did Bob Dole. The elder George Bush voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which banned housing discrimination, as a young House member. He did so despite the opposition of a majority in his district and the fact that his 1966 Democratic opponent had even attempted to make an issue of Bush’s sponsorship of a black girls’ softball team.

For all the talk of how Ronald Reagan supposedly wanted to gut the Voting Rights Act, he in fact signed a 25-year extension of the law in 1982. He also signed the Martin Luther King holiday into law and presided over an expansion that reduced black unemployment by a greater amount than white unemployment.

Newt Gingrich, who for better or worse is the politician most clearly identified with the right since Reagan, supported the civil rights movement in the 1960s. He even backed Nelson Rockefeller over Richard Nixon in 1968 because he felt the former was more supportive of civil rights. Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, the most powerful organization of today’s religious right, also supported the civil rights movement and was integrating his churches in segregated Virginia (although his father was a segregationist US senator). Former Congressman Bob Dornan marched with Martin Luther King and registered black voters in the South during the Freedom Summer. NRA President Charlton Heston is also a veteran of the civil rights movement.

This isn’t to say conservatives and Republicans have a perfect racial history; they most assuredly do not. Nor is it to say that conservatives who opposed the claims of the civil rights movement on the grounds that it would enlarge the coercive powers of the state at the expense of traditional constitutional federalism were entirely wrong; history now shows they were not. But why aren’t Democrats called on to apologize for their shortcomings?

Al Gore’s father, as a senator from Tennessee, was one of the Democrats who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So was Arkansas Sen. William Fulbright, who would go on to be a mentor to Bill Clinton. As recently as the 1980s, the Senate Democrats chose current senator and former Ku Klux Klan member Robert Byrd as their floor leader. Why is there no call for apologies from the Democrats?

Important as this history is, ultimately what Republicans and Democrats do in the future matters more at this point. One of the biggest impediments to minority achievement today is poor education they receive at low-performing, dilapidated and often dangerous schools. Those most concerned with racial progress would seek to get them out of this system. Thus, Gov. Bush is right to take aim at "the soft bigotry of low standards" in education. Furthermore, minorities need capital to create businesses and jobs, because as Bush has said, "ownership is freedom."

Bush may not be the NAACP’s candidate. But that doesn’t mean he does not have anything to offer minorities in America, or that he should apologize himself and his party out of existence.

You can e-mail your comments to W. James Antle III at Jimantle@aol.com.

Copyright © 2000 by W. James Antle III.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission