In Black America; The U.S. Commision on Civil Rights

Am. In Black America, reflections of the Black experience in American society. Ultimately, Black America and other disadvantaged groups are going to have to rely upon the ballot. The ballot is, after all, as I was so frequently said, a sword to get what you want and a shield to prevent things being done to you that you don't want. And with the ballot, many things are accomplishable, which cannot be accomplished strictly by courts. Moore's Abram is vice chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

In 1983, Mr. Abram was appointed to the Civil Rights Commission by President Ronald Reagan. From 1979 to 1983, he served as chairman of the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research. I'm John Hanson, and this week I focus on civil rights in U.S. society in Black America. I think racial preferences are the moral. My firm had a very fine black lawyer from a top law school as an associate. And I thought he was quite happy. And one day I woke up and I saw in the New York Times an up-ed page piece written by him in which he does not state the firm with which he's associated. But he says, every day I get up in the morning and I am really torn. Am I at this great law firm because I'm good or because I'm black? He's not to be tortured. It's wrong because it fails to treat needy persons equally.

Equally needy persons equally. And that's wrong. Morris Abram is the former president of Brandeis University. He is the native of Georgia and received this law degree from the University of Chicago. Mr. Abram was first general counselor to the Peace Corps. Under appointment of President Johnson, he served as U.S. Representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Morris Abrams, as Vice Chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, believes that the civil rights movement in this country has to become confused because its leaders have wanted to tack on social and economic proposals to such constitutionally guaranteed rights as pertaining to voting, due process of law, access to the courts and equal protection of the law. I think the major thing we're doing is conducting for the first time a very in-depth study. Of the degree to which the sad, still sad condition of much of black America is due to racism. And to what extent it is due to factors other than racism.

I think it's very difficult to address a problem of this complexity without sorting out the deep underlying issues rather than simply dealing in epithets and slogans. This is going to be an extremely important study, and I'm delighted to be participating in it. How many people or fastest factions are participating in the study besides the commission? Are you already receiving information from other sources? Yes. Undoubtedly we will have to commission substantial number of experts who will give scholarly input to the study. I have no doubt that we will hold consultations and hearings and do a lot of fact-finding. And I suspect that when all is said and done we will find that there is a good deal of racism as we all know left in America. But we will also find there has been a great deal of progress since the 1960s and that some of the problems that afflict black America and Spanish America and maybe to a lesser degree Oriental America are problems that are not necessarily racial problems but are you going to make structural problems of that character?

In recent months there has been a lot of controversy about the Commission on Civil Rights Summit called it the Commission on Uncivil Rights with the new makeup of the Commission. Has the Commission's attitudes or is particular objective change in your opinion and some have said that President Reagan has tried to stack the Commission to favor his philosophies? Well, I'm a Democrat, a liberal Democrat. President Carter offered me the seat that President Reagan finally conferred upon me in 1979. And I said that the President Carter should know that while the Commission as it was then composed favored quotas unanimously. I did not favor racial quotas, believing them to be bad for the person to get preferment and bad for the country and threatening to turn America into a group of contending people rather like level and groups. So President Carter withdrew my nomination before he didn't make it.

So so much for the idea that President do not appoint people whose views are roughly the equivalent of their own. Now this Commission differs from the previous Commission in that it is not unanimously in favor of quotas and it is not unanimously opposed to quotas. There's a good deal of balance on this Commission, but I would say this every person on this Commission has a strong civil rights record. As you may or may not know, I was I was a very close friend of Martin Luther King, Jr. His father endorsed my nomination when President Reagan sent it up. I have been the chairman of the United Negro College Fund for nine years. I represented some of Martin King's kids when they were held without bail in America's Georgia under a sedition statute of capital crime. I am I'm not bragging, but I'm just telling you I am the author of the one man one vote principle which is freed the polls from a degree of racism that you know about. And I think everyone who serves with me who has been appointed recently has the same dedication to civil rights.

We are not unanimously in favor of quotas and unfortunately whether or not you favor quotas has become the touchstone in the minds of some is to whether or not you're in favor of civil rights. Now, I think if one believes in the preferences to be accorded a race, I think that is a hideous doctrine. You know, in my day, the only people who favored racial preferences were known as white supremacists. Today, they sometimes are called civil rights leaders. How can we as Americans are redress that problem of discrimination without with our quotas? Well, you get rid of discrimination. How do you address ignorance by education? How do you address poverty by advancing the opportunity for people to make money? You get rid of the past by stopping the conditions that have started or have created the past. Let me give an illustration.

The decision in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia the other day by a very liberal judge is called Kill Go versus Bowman Transport. Let me tell you what happened. He applied true affirmative action, something I was always for. When President Johnson made me the co-chairman of the preliminary conference on the White House conference on civil rights, I guess it was then that I began to use the term affirmative action. What I meant was that you stopped discriminating. Stop it dead in its tracks. And if it's a court, you forbid it with a threat that anyone who practices is in contempt of court with certain penalties attached. Then you go out and try to find the people black and white and of all colors and descriptions who have been overlooked by the old boy networks. You advertise for them. You recruit them. And when you find people who want to take employment in areas they have not previously been employed in, you give them training and counseling and remedial education and qualify them. And then you don't discriminate against them either in appointment or promotion.

Now in this case in Georgia last month, Judd Shoe found that the transport company had absolutely barred any women from over the truck route. You know, it's a man's field. In the state transportation. He found them in pernicious and flagrant violation of the law and he said more over their stubborn in their attitude. But he said, I am going to stop it dead in its tracks. I'm going to put a court monitor over them to see this never happens again. I want them to advertise where drivers, training schools are to which these women may go and get qualified. It's going to stop. And he said they want to retain jurisdiction to see that it is stopped. But he says I'm not going to put in quotas because I'm not going to substitute one form of racial discrimination for another. Now that is the way I would deal with it. The exact way is Judd Shoe dealt with it. As a whole, has America comes to grips with the problem of civil rights in America without legislation being morally right?

Well, you see, I don't think we would have come to the plateau that we're on now. I don't think things are by any means as they should be. But let me tell you this. From the days that I grew up in segregated Georgia, to the days that I come here from Atlanta, from the day when in 1960 only a quarter of a million black kids were in college, to this day in which they are million 250,000 in college or kids in college who are black in this country. Then there are kids in college in the whole of Great Britain. From the day in which there were so few blacks in the middle class today in which middle class and qualified blacks everywhere. From a day in which blacks really were barred from voting by fear and by law. From a day in which the courts did not protect their rights. From a day in which they could not go into places of public accommodation and even semi-public accommodation, because of their color, we have come an enormous distance.

As a matter of fact, I do not know, maybe I will, maybe I'm ignorant, but I do not know of a single piece of civil rights legislation which the most advanced and knowledgeable civil rights leaders have laid before the Congress that has not been enacted. Now this is a remarkable achievement. The civil rights revolution has succeeded. Some of the problems that we see and some of the bitterness and some of the fussing is the result of the fact that the movement has succeeded so well that it has begun to fuss about other things. Now you may ask me, ask me, what other things are they fussing about? I will tell you. What other things are they fussing about? What they're fussing about are things that may be quite desirable as matters of social policy, but they're not civil rights. You see, I was very much in favor of the food stamp program still am, but I never regarded the level of food stamps as a civil rights matter.

It isn't. Or whether or not there is a level of housing as a civil rights matter, it's a matter of sound public policy for blacks and whites alike. I never regarded unemployment the level of it as a civil rights problem. I think it's a very grave problem, but it's not a civil rights problem. And what we have found is that the civil rights leaders, having gained all of the legislation and all the court enforcement they could have wanted, and more than ever dreamed of, have now like other movements gone into other business. And their business now is a vast array of social programs, which is perfectly all right, but don't call it civil rights, because Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals ought to be able to salute civil rights just like you salute the flag. But don't expect everybody to salute $100 billion dollar appropriation for public housing, or whatever the program of the civil rights movement is at the moment. That's not a civil right. That's a matter over which honest men may disagree.

I can't help in this city and at this university where they'll be Johnson, I'll be Jay Laiber is located. I can't help but tell you that at the Great White House conference on civil rights that he called in 65 at the height of his crusade to bring to bring civil rights to this country. A proposal was laid before the conference by the late great A Philip Randolph, you remember him? Right. And by a restaurant, it was called the $100 billion freedom budget. Now it made President Johnson pretty angry. And no one was more for civil rights than President Johnson, but he felt he had enacted the legislative program, and he thought this $100 billion was a matter that was going to mess his budget up. And he didn't think that anything would do with civil rights. It may have to do with making people's lives better than he was for that too. But he was not for the freedom budget. Now let me say this to you.

When A Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin proposed that freedom budget, they didn't propose $100 billion for black folks. They proposed $100 billion for poor folks, white and black and whatever else they were. Those were the days in which the civil rights movement, black and white marched hand in hand and arm and arm. We were looking for the day in which color would be irrelevant, in which the Constitution would be color blind, in which every man would be judged on the basis, not of his skin. But as Martin Luther King said on the nature of his character. Justice Stewart, in a recent case, said the following. No race in this country has a monopoly on disadvantage. In 1978, 83.4% of persons who had not completed high school were white. 99% of all households under $5,000 a year income were white. It's true that in the black community the proportion is higher. But the absolute need is not limited to any race color. I'm opposed to it because it is very destructive of initiative and incentive.

I'm opposed to it because the giving of a quota always ignores the fact that they are vast median age differentials and educational level differentials in the United States population. It treats people who do not need, as for example, the daughters of the daughter of Vernon Jordan, over and above the daughter of a coal miner in Appalachia, it is so manifestly unfair. But people say to me, well, your heart, because it will only be a temporary measure to which I say repeal a principle of the Constitution equal protection, repeal it on a temporary basis. Why not the first amendment? Why not some other amendment? And if you do, how long? And who says when the time is up? And who said you may do it in the first place?

Not the Congress of the United States because if you read the Civil Rights Act, you will not find a single word that speaks of racial preference. Why has the issue of civil rights been such a political issue, Republicans vote one way, Democrats vote the other way? And as you were stating, it should be sound public policy, good public policy. I don't think on the issue of civil rights is much a counter voting by numbers of either party. I think you put your foot on it. I mean, your finger, what you said is that there are vast disagreements between so-called conservatives, economic conservatives, and so-called economic liberals. And the economic liberals choose to sometimes make their programs a civil rights program like the level of food stamps, or like the level of grants to colleges and universities. Now, I happen to be for a very high level, but I wouldn't tell you that's a civil right.

Look, I just finished serving as chairman of the President Carter's Commission for the study of the ethical problems of medicine. For the first time in the history of this country, the presidential commission said that the society has a responsibility to see to it that everybody and it has an adequate level of health care without excessive burden to any. Now, you realize what a revolutionary statement that is? Notice, I didn't say that the government owes it or that there's a right to it. I said there's an ethical responsibility. For the level of health care is not a civil right. Civil right in this society means equal protection of the law, due process of law, equal opportunity, civil rights of free speech and free press, and freedom of assembly. And above all, the access to the ballot. Those are civil rights. And you can't find from me any responsible politician who will disagree with any of that. You mentioned due process, due process. Has our judicial system somewhat failed in guarantee the rights of the Constitution?

Are you the Baki case and the Hyde Amendment? Well, I think the Baki case was well decided. It simply said that one could, if one were at University of California at Davis Medical School, one could take race into account in determining which person to a qualified you select to go on medical school, but there could not be any set of such. He couldn't set aside 16 places for blacks. That was wrong. I agree with that. And so I think that case was correctly decided. Now, what was your other? The Hyde Amendment. The Hyde Amendment. Well, I think the Hyde Amendment is wrong. I don't care how one cuts the cookie. If you have the right in this country, as you do under constitutional law, to an abortion under certain circumstances, seems to me it's stupid to deny that opportunity to people who are poor. And that's what is on the stand of the Hyde Amendment does. I think it's bad public policy.

You think the IRS should grant tax exempt status to colleges and universities who segregate or discriminate? Well, I don't think tax exempt institution should. Is that a fine line that we're walking between your right and my right as being an entrepreneur or an educator of deciding who I want to attend my college or university? Let me sort this out. I think anything that receives federal money. Perforce is obligated to carry out federal policy. That's one of the dangers of taking federal money. It's one of the dangers of having too much federal largest because with it comes control. We knew that when we began aid education and it's proved to be true. One of the glories of this country is a wide diversity of viewpoint and wide diversity of institutions and therefore a wide diversity of practices. But I cannot support any institution that segregates as a matter of public policy.

Now, I think that's for Congress to decide and I think the IRS ought not to be making these decisions. For example, if you were to cut out tax exemption to institutions that discriminate, the IRS should have cut off the tax exemption to Wellesley College which discriminates against men and goucher which discriminates against men and Mount Holyoke which discriminates against men. I don't want that to happen. But if the IRS is making the rules, that's the way to make it equal. So I think the president and his administration shot himself in the foot in the Bob Jones case because I think they took something that may have had a possible intellectual argument and made it appear to be a sort of a special piece of anger against the IRS and favoring this particular college. I think it was badly handled but the principle is too.

I don't believe that institutions that receive state funds should discriminate and if they're permitted to discriminate, then I don't think any of them should get the funds or all of them should get the funds. I guess I'm sort of an intellectual purist on this. A lot of controversy in the black community has been over the problem of busing, the issue of the busing. You have a particular opinion on the issue of busing. The newly reconciled Civil Rights Commission is now beginning a study on the effects of voluntary and involuntary segregation in the schools. And when that study is finished, I think we'll have a lot more facts to present. I would like to take the opportunity to also say, particularly while I'm in the Southwest, that we're starting to look into the problem of the segregation of Hispanic students and the isolation which that creates. You see, it's bad enough to segregate a black kid but he already knows English.

And segregation has its evils by virtue of its innate differentiation with people on the base of skin color. But the segregation of Hispanic students has a further dimension. If you put all Spanish students in one school, they may never learn English. And so they are thoroughly segregated from the society. We're beginning a study of that. This commission is totally dedicated to the Civil Rights Statutes and Laws. I think it is off to a good start. It has a splendid Executive Director Linda Chavez, who is a Chicano woman from Colorado. And former aide to Albert Shanker, head of the American Federation of Teachers. We're off to a good start and I hope people will judge us by what we do and not be political and simply decide that if President Reagan appoints somebody, then it must be wrong. Because if that's the case, we've got the entire federal establishment that is wrong because he appointed it all, didn't he?

Morris Abram, Vice Chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. If you have a comment or would like to purchase a cassette copy of this program, write it. The address is in Black America, Longhorn Radio Network, Austin, Texas, 7-H-7-1-2. For in Black America's Technical Producer Cliff Hardgrove, I'm John Hanson. Join us next week. In listening to, in Black America, reflections of the Black experience in American society. In Black America is produced and distributed by the Center for Telecommunication Services at UT Austin. And does not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Texas at Austin or the station. This is the Longhorn Radio Network.