In Trouble With Blacks

By Susan Tifft

Trying to cut his losses, Reagan looks for votes elsewhere

Ever since he was Governor of California, Ronald Reagan has had to fend off charges that he is insensitive to black concerns. In 1980 his problems with blacks were evident at the polls: he captured only about 9% of their vote. Events last week put him on the defensive again and revived talk that Reagan strategists have written off the black vote in 1984. First, in an embarrassing rebuff to the Administration, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that racially discriminatory private schools are ineligible for federal tax-exempt status. Then, the next day, Reagan replaced three members of the Commission on Civil Rights with appointees who share his opposition to racial quotas and busing. Reagan, who heatedly claims that he is against any kind of discrimination, was nonplused by the furor that followed the reshuffling. Said a senior aide: "He really is wounded when he's portrayed as anti-civil rights."

The Supreme Court ruling administered the coup de grace to one of the Administration's major political blunders. It stemmed from the Internal Revenue Service's denial of tax exemptions for Bob Jones University of Greenville, S.C., which bars interracial dating and marriage, and the Goldsboro Christian Schools of Goldsboro, N.C., which excludes black students. Rejecting tax breaks for discriminatory schools had been IRS policy since 1970. But Bob Jones University and Goldsboro Christian sued, claiming that their racial practices were dictated by religious beliefs and were thus constitutionally protected. On Jan. 8, 1982, Reagan, bowing to pressure from Southern conservatives, revoked the IRS rule, claiming that Congress alone has control over such 5 matters. On the same day, the Justice Department, which had initially argued against the segregationists, also abruptly switched sides. But after Democrats, moderate Republicans, civil rights leaders and 100 of the Justice Department's 175 civil rights lawyers protested, Reagan furiously backpedaled and asked Congress to pass legislation outlawing his new policy.

Congress never did. Last week's court ruling was an emphatic repudiation of Reagan's initial position. The court's decision essentially followed the reasoning presented last October by William T. Coleman Jr., a prominent Washington lawyer and Transportation Secretary under President Ford, who was appointed by the court to argue the position abandoned by the Justice Department. Not only was the IRS ban "wholly consistent with what Congress, the Executive and the courts had repeatedly declared," wrote Chief Justice Warren E. Burger in the unusually forceful opinion, but Congress had implicitly approved the policy by refusing 13 times since 1970 to overturn it.

The purges at the Civil Rights Commission brought charges that Reagan was stacking the panel with his own people. Indeed the six-member commission, including its Reagan-appointed chairman, Clarence Pendleton Jr., a former president of the Urban League of San Diego, has publicly questioned the President's civil rights enforcement record. Anticipating that Congress would soon give the commissioners fixed instead of open terms, effectively freezing them in place for the rest of Reagan's presidency, the White House decided to act. "We wanted our own people," acknowledged White House Counsellor Ed Meese. The nominees, like the commissioners they would replace, are Democrats: Morris B. Abram, former president of Brandeis University and onetime chairman of the United Negro College Fund; John H. Bunzel, senior research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution; and Robert A. Destro, assistant law professor at Catholic University of America. Linda Chavez, assistant to the president of the American Federation of Teachers, was named staff director.

Reagan may not have a racist bone in his body, as his aides insist, but his philosophical antipathy to federal activism, whether it takes the form of social spending or statutory redress, is at odds with the kind of government leadership that blacks have come to expect. His budget cuts were felt most immediately by the nation's poor, who are disproportionately black. He flirted with the idea of weakening the Voting Rights Act until a political fire storm changed his mind, and until recently was criticized for lax enforcement of fair housing laws. William Bradford Reynolds, the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, has angered blacks with his apparent insensitivity to their concerns and his outspoken opposition to busing and affirmative action.

Despite his reputation as a master of political symbolism, Reagan has failed to make the kind of gestures that would defuse some of the hostility in the black community. Of 450 political appointments, only 30 have gone to blacks, a poor record compared with President Carter's. He has appointed no black federal judges. "There is no prejudice in the man," admitted a White House aide, "but his policies do seem to penalize blacks more than anyone else."

The Reagan record on blacks does not bode well for 1984. White House Pollster Richard Wirthlin predicts that Reagan, if he runs, will again receive only about 8% or 9% of the black vote. But with black voter registration expected to rise sharply, the Democrats' percentage could translate into substantially more votes. Said a White House aide: "The problem is not that we cannot get more than 9%. It's that there will be a larger black vote." Privately, Reagan strategists have conceded the black vote to the Democrats, despite knowing that it could hurt Reagan badly in the South, where some analysts feel the election will be won or lost. To compensate, the White House is aggressively courting Hispanic voters in Florida Texas and California. It is also trying to reassure white moderates, who might abandon Reagan if he seems indifferent to blacks and other minorities. But it is an uphill struggle. Conceded one adviser: "It's an issue the President can't win on."

-- By Susan Tifft. Reported by Douglas Brew/Washington

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