New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Memo to GOP: Roberts could disappoint

New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Memo to GOP: Roberts could disappointMemo to GOP: Roberts
could disappoint

South Carolina's Bob Jones University is a GOP stalwart. But it also has been a public relations spear in the side of the elephants because of its racist policies against interracial dating. After all, so many of our historical troubles in the areas of color, religion and ethnicity come down to the question of two heads on a pillow.

During the civil rights era, the question was often asked in straight terms when questions regarding segregated policies came up: "Would you want a Negro to marry your daughter?"

This may even affect the argument about John Roberts, President Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court. Roberts neither attended nor taught at Bob Jones University. If he had, it is doubtful that he would have risen far enough to become a legal adviser to the Reagan White House.

Roberts has been exposed in the press as a pragmatic man who supposedly made an intellectual argument in favor of Bob Jones University, saying that there were grounds not to refuse it federal funds because of its policy against interracial dating. But Roberts, who knew what time it was, advised the Reagan White House not to accept that argument. Any policies that exist in order to oppress part of the population should not be upheld by the presidency, like slavery, segregation and the refusal to allow women to vote.

If that is true, Roberts, unlike elephants who travel forward by looking in the rearview mirror for instructions, might actually be the kind of man who understands how important it is to set aside backward policy in the interest of the nation. Let us hope.

What we may soon see is the pachyderms running through the bushes in a tizzy until they find the lost treasure of an argument that Hubert Humphrey used against Bill Miller when they were vice presidential candidates debating in 1964.

Miller was running with Barry Goldwater against the ticket headed by Lyndon Johnson, whom he dismissed as having once been a segregationist.

Humphrey, faster than a whip, responded, "That's what I like about Lyndon Johnson; he learns!" Humphrey could not have known that Johnson would become the greatest civil rights legislator since Abraham Lincoln, but he did know that the time had passed when the Democratic Party could afford to side with racists.

It is still the kind of argument that the elephants need to use, if they want to get Roberts on the court. But the elephants always have to remember Hugo Black, one of the most liberal judges in Supreme Court history. Black proved that even an ex-klansman who avoids elimination might not keep the faith. He might fail to maintain the lease in the good old American times when second-class citizenship was held in place by everything that could be called upon, from murder to the decisions of our highest court.

So, these may still prove to be very disappointing times for backward people.

Originally published on July 27, 2005