What Is He Saying?

Fifteen percent of black Americans cannot find jobs--twice the rate for white Americans. One of three blacks lives in poverty. For black children under the age of 6, that rises to one of two. Too many black students find schools useless as escape routes from lives of mere survival, let alone avenues to real achievement.

These are real conditions, well known to the U.S. Census Bureau, to any inner-city schoolteacher and to blacks. But for two weeks running President Reagan has complained that unspecified civil-rights leaders are exaggerating the problems of blacks. They have, he says, “a tendency to keep the people stirred up as if the cause still exists.” They do so because they are “reluctant to admit how much they’ve achieved, because it might reveal then that there’s no longer a need for that particular organization, which would mean no longer a need for their job.”

It is bad enough that the President refuses to identify the leaders by name. It is far worse that by criticizing the leadership he seems to be denying that blacks have as many legitimate complaints as their leaders claim. The most militant civil-rights leader would agree that blacks are better off today than they were 100 years ago or, in most cases, 10 years ago. But is Reagan trying to say that things are as good for blacks in America as they are going to get?

Is he reviving President John F. Kennedy’s promise that a “rising tide lifts all boats,” that as the nation prospers so will blacks? The tide is rising, and too many black boats are still aground.

Few black Americans voted for Reagan in 1980 or 1984; the second time around they voted on his record. It took the U.S. Supreme Court to make his Administration see the justice in a federal policy that prohibits tax breaks for schools that discriminate. His Administration initially opposed the extension of the Voting Rights Act. Because blacks are disproportionately poor, they were harder hit by the recession and by budget cuts in programs that help the sick, feed the hungry and pay tuition.

Is what he is saying purely political, a response in kind to indifference or rejection on the part of black voters? If so, he owes it to blacks to reject their case for further help directly rather than attacking unnamed black leaders on such obviously shaky grounds as those that he offers.

If that is indeed what he is saying, it also would be tragic because Reagan in his second term could play a healing role domestically as important as his efforts globally to cool off the arms race.

The President can change with the times just as civil-rights leaders and organizations have changed. They now direct much of their energy to economic advances for blacks, an area that needs more than so-called enterprise zones that would be based on the very kind of tax incentives that the President’s own tax-revision package wants to do away with.

During his second inaugural the President outlined lofty goals for Americans: “We must think anew and move with new boldness so every American who seeks work can find work, so the least among us have an equal chance to achieve the greatest things--to be heroes who heal our sick, feed the hungry, protect peace among nations and leave this world a better place.” Those are healing words. But they are hard to square with his attacks on black civil-rights leaders.