A Man Beyond Race

Among the tributes that poured in to Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown last week, few mentioned race relations as the area where his loss would be most greatly felt. Asian leaders wondered where they would next find such a strong ally to balance his friend U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor’s hard line on trade. Corporate America mourned the most vigorous advocate for U.S. business ever to serve as commerce secretary. In Bosnia, there was concern that his loss might doom prospects for economic development to secure peace.

By the time of his death, Brown had moved well beyond the issues of black politics that defined his early career. But he never left them behind. In his life, Brown did what our country must do: He bridged the racial divide.

Brown spent 12 years at the Urban League before joining Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1979, as a deputy campaign manager. There was also a deputy campaign manager who happened to be a woman, and one who happened to be Latino. If they looked like tokens, it should be said that three tokens were three more than many campaigns had, then or now. Still, there were the deputy campaign managers, and there were the guys who ran the campaign--initially known as the “little white boys.” Brown began as a member of one group, and ended as a member of both. He integrated the white boys. He started out running black politics, and ended up running California and the Democratic National Convention--and still ran black politics, but with more clout. That’s how he did it.

He succeeded because he was so good he could not be denied. When he ran for party chairman in 1989, the conventional wisdom was that the last thing the Democratic Party needed was a liberal, black, Kennedy-Jackson loyalist as chair. He would have had a far easier time winning if, like most of his predecessors, he were a white, Washington lawyer.

Some of Brown’s own supporters sold his candidacy to concerned Southerners with one of those “Nixon goes to China” approaches--as if Brown would someday repudiate his friends on the left or in the black community. Absurd. What he did do was find a way to put a coalition together that included them--and that could elect a president. After he was elected party chairman, Brown told Democratic National Committee members, “The story of my chairmanship will not be about race, it will be about the races we win.” It was. Brown set out to be the party chairman who recaptured the White House--and was. He was also the first and only black to chair a major party.

After Bill Clinton was elected president, Brown had choices. “I had a couple of options in the administration,” he told a reporter, “and the one I chose to pursue was the one that I thought would make the most difference as far as removing old ceilings and barriers and stereotypes and obstacles.” He went to head the Commerce Department. Liberalism can’t win, and can’t work, if it’s perceived as anti-business. In Brown’s version, liberals are the ones who help provide more and better jobs for ordinary Americans, and international trade and exports were his answer. In the man from the Urban League, American business found its most powerful advocate.

To succeed on others’ terms without losing yourself, without beginning to think you’re different from the rest, is no small accomplishment. In a speech last January, Brown attacked Republicans who were trying to use affirmative action as a wedge issue. “We know the truth,” he said, “that discrimination is alive and well in America. What makes me angriest of all is the right wing’s sanctimonious embrace of colorblindness and meritocracy to defend the rights of white men. About three decades too late, they’ve discovered fairness and equal opportunity. Where were these people during our struggle? Do any of you remember Phil Gramm coming along on the Freedom Rides? Was Newt Gingrich going door-to-door to register black voters in Mississippi?” It was how Brown used his anger, not its absence, that made him different.

Ron and I got to be friends in that 1980 Kennedy campaign. We traveled together, went to endless meetings together. I, often the only woman in the room, would watch him, often the only black, looking for clues as to how to maintain balance, how to cross bridges, how to do it with dignity and integrity.

In 1988, Jesse Jackson found out from a reporter, not Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, that he had not been chosen as Dukakis’ running mate. I was off arranging Sen. Lloyd Bentsen’s arrival in town when an emergency call came in from Ron, who was Jackson’s campaign manager. He was furious. Jackson felt he’d been insulted, and that was all he needed to do what many of us feared he wanted to do: tear the convention apart, producing a picture for the nation of a party that couldn’t govern--the sort of convention we’d had in 1980, with race tossed in to make it even worse. I couldn’t explain to Ron how it was that the phone number he’d given me--and that I’d given the secretary to make sure something like this didn’t happen--somehow hadn’t gotten dialed. They had called a different number. All I could do was ask for his help. That was it: Don’t let it get torn apart. “All right, sweetie,” he said to me, “let’s see how we can put this back together.”

It will be harder without him.