Bush legacy on racial issues is complicated

Kosovo mourns Bush

WASHINGTON, Dec 5, (Agencies): George H.W. Bush got elected president after a campaign marked by the infamous Willie Horton ad, about a black murderer who raped a white woman while on a weekend furlough from prison.

On the other side of the racial ledger, Bush appointed Gen Colin Powell as the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

And while Bush replaced civil rights hero Thurgood Marshall with another black man to maintain the racial status quo on the Supreme Court, he picked Clarence Thomas, a conservative whose views are at odds with those of much of black America.

Lionized upon his death as a man of decency and civility, Bush has a mixed and complicated legacy when it comes to race.

“Intellectually and emotionally, he was somebody who was civil rights-minded,” said Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley. “Bush wanted to see himself as being a man devoid of racism. But the reality is that Bush often had to do dog whistles and appeal to less enlightened Americans on race.”

The Rev. Jesse Jackson summed up the 41st president’s record this way: “He was a fundamentally fair man. He didn’t block any door. He was never a demagogue on the question of race.”

Bush, who died Friday at 94, had a political career that spanned decades and straddled the Jim Crow era, the civil rights movement and its aftermath.

To many black Americans, the Willie Horton ad is an indelible stain on his reputation.

The TV spot about the Massachusetts inmate was produced by Bush supporters during his 1988 presidential campaign against Massachusetts Gov Michael Dukakis. It was widely condemned as racist and is regarded three decades later as one of the most extreme attack ads in modern political history.

The Bush campaign disavowed the ad at the time, but Bush’s chief strategist, Lee Atwater, exploited its message to paint Dukakis as soft on crime.

Bush

Regret

In an interview Monday, Jackson said that he and Bush discussed the ad and that it was the president’s biggest regret.

“It was out of character for him,” the civil rights leader said of Bush and the Willie Horton strategy. “He did it in the heat of battle.”

Bush got his start in politics in Texas, where he joined a Republican Party still regarded as “the party of Lincoln.” During his first, losing bid for Congress in 1964, he criticized his opponent’s support for the Civil Rights Act, legislation many in his home state opposed.

He won election to Congress two years later and went on to support the Fair Housing Act of 1968, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson a week after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.

Bush considered the housing law “the right thing to do,” according to Jackson, who called him “a man of immense dignity who has a very special place in American history.”

Bush caused a minor flap during the 1988 Republican National Convention, when he referred to three of his grandchildren as the “little brown ones.” The three were children of Bush’s son Jeb and his Mexico-born wife, Columba.

Defending himself at a news conference, Bush called his grandchildren his “pride and joy” and added: “For anyone to suggest that that comment of pride is anything other than what it was – I find it personally offensive.”

Columba and the grandchildren later ended up in a Spanish-language campaign commercial where Bush promised to help Hispanics because he would have to answer to his family and “answer to history.”

Once in office, Bush elevated African-Americans to the heights of public office. He nominated Powell to the top post in the U.S. military. Powell went on to become the first black secretary of state, under Bush’s son George W. Bush.

The elder Bush also appointed Dr Louis Sullivan, founding president of the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, as secretary of health and human services.

“He is someone who I would characterize as fiscally conservative and socially liberal,” Sullivan said in an interview Monday. “He believed that people should earn their way, but he felt that everyone should have the equal opportunity for development and appointment to positions. He was very much committed to that, as was his wife, Barbara.”

Nominated

In 1991, Bush nominated Thomas to replace the retiring Marshall, the first African-American on the Supreme Court. Thomas was the ideological opposite of Marshall, a civil rights legend who argued the Brown v. Board of Education case that struck down school segregation.

Meanwhile, Kosovo has declared Wednesday a national day of mourning for the late US president George H.W. Bush, who was seen as an early ally of the ethnic Albanians in the former Serbian province.

Passionately pro-US, Kosovo flies American flags in front of many government offices and businesses in a sign of gratitude for the US-led NATO intervention that helped severe it from Serbia in 1999.

On Wednesday, the day of Bush’s funeral, Kosovo flags will be flown at half-mast across the country in his honour, President Hashim Thaci’s office said in a statement Tuesday.

It will be a “sign of state and civic respect for (Bush’s) contribution to the freedom of Kosovo”, the statement said.

Morning classes in Kosovo schools on Wednesday will also be dedicated to the US leader.

“Bush has been engaged every time in promoting Kosovo’s affairs” on the world stage, said education minister Shyqiri Bytyci at a press release.

In the 1990s, Bush’s administration showed an early interest in the plight of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo who were marginalised under Serbian rule.

His government hosted Kosovo Albanians in Washington and in 1992 he warned then-Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic that the US would respond militarily if Serb troops started a war in Kosovo.

Less than a decade later war broke out between Serbian troops and ethnic Albanian guerillas.

In 1999, a US-led NATO air campaign forced Serbia to withdraw, ending the conflict and paving the way for Kosovo to declare independence in 2008.