Dorothy I. Height, founding matriarch of U.S. civil rights movement, dies at 98
Dorothy Height's Civil Rights Legacy Dorothy I. Height's crusade for racial justice and gender equality spanned more than six decades. Ms. Height was among the coalition of African American leaders who pushed civil rights to the center of the American political stage in the years after World War II, and she was a key figure in the struggles for school desegregation, voting rights, employment and public accommodations. » LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2010/04/20/GA2010042001303.html ]
By Bart Barnes Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Special to The Washington Post
Dorothy I. Height, 98, a founding matriarch of the American civil rights movement whose crusade for racial justice and gender equality spanned more than six decades, died Tuesday at Howard University Hospital. The cause of death was not disclosed.
Ms. Height was among the coalition of African American leaders who pushed civil rights to the center of the American political stage after World War II, and she was a key figure in the struggles for school desegregation, voting rights, employment opportunities and public accommodations in the 1950s and 1960s.
As president of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years, Ms. Height was arguably the most influential woman at the top levels of civil rights leadership.
Although she never drew the media attention that conferred celebrity and instant recognition on some of the other civil rights leaders of her time, Ms. Height was often described as the "glue" that held the family of black civil rights leaders together. She did much of her work out of the public spotlight, in quiet meetings and conversations, and she was widely connected at the top levels of power and influence in government and business.
As a civil rights activist, Ms. Height participated in protests in Harlem during the 1930s. In the 1940s, she lobbied first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on behalf of civil rights causes. And in the 1950s, she prodded President Dwight D. Eisenhower to move more aggressively on school desegregation issues. In 1994, Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
In a statement issued by the White House, President Obama called Ms. Height "the godmother of the Civil Rights Movement and a hero to so many Americans."
She "devoted her life to those struggling for equality . . . witnessing every march and milestone along the way," Obama said.
In the turmoil of the civil rights struggles in the 1960s, Ms. Height helped orchestrate strategy with movement leaders including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph and John Lewis, who would later serve as a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia.
In August 1963, Ms. Height was on the platform with King when he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. But she would say later that she was disappointed that no one advocating women's rights spoke that day at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Less than a month later, at King's request, she went to Birmingham, Ala., to minister to the families of four black girls who had died in a church bombing linked to the racial strife that had engulfed the city.
"At every major effort for social progressive change, Dorothy Height has been there," Lewis said in 1997 when Ms. Height announced her retirement as president of the National Council of Negro Women.
Women's rights champion
As a champion of social justice, Ms. Height was best known during the early years of her career for her struggles to overcome racial prejudice.
She was also energetic in her efforts to overcome gender bias, and much of that work predated the women's rights movement. When President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, Ms. Height was among those invited to the White House to witness the ceremony. She returned to the White House in 1998 for a ceremony marking the 35th anniversary of that legislation to hear Clinton urge passage of additional laws aimed at equalizing pay for men and women.
"Dorothy Height deserves credit for helping black women understand that you had to be feminist at the same time you were African . . . that you had to play more than one role in the empowerment of black people," Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) once said.
As president of the National Council of Negro Women, Ms. Height was instrumental in organizing and sponsoring programs that emphasized self-help and self-reliance.
Those included nutrition, child care, housing and career counseling. In response to a public TV program, "The Vanishing Black Family," Ms. Height helped create and organize the Black Family Reunion Celebration, which has been held on the Mall and in cities across the country annually since 1985. The gatherings are intended to honor the traditions, strength and history of African American families while seeking solutions to such social problems as teen pregnancy and drug abuse.
"The reunion is as important today as some of our marches were in the past," Ms. Height said in 1992.
In 1995, Ms. Height was among the few women to speak at the Million Man March on the Mall, which was led by Louis Farrakhan, the chief minister of the Nation of Islam. "I am here because you are here," she declared. Two years later, at 85, she sat at the podium all day, in the whipping wind and rain, at the Million Woman March in Philadelphia.
A constant fight
Dorothy Irene Height was born in Richmond on March 24, 1912, and she grew up in Rankin, Pa., near Pittsburgh, where she attended racially integrated schools. But she felt the lash of racial bigotry early in her life. A music teacher in her mostly white elementary school appointed her student director of the school chorus, but a new principal forbade her to take that position. At the next school assembly, the chorus refused to stand and sing until Ms. Height was reinstated as leader, and the principal relented.
The principal subsequently became one of her staunchest supporters, Ms. Height recalled in her 2003 memoir, "Open Wide the Freedom Gates."
As a high school senior and the valedictorian, she won a national oratorical contest, and with it a $1,000 college scholarship. But the college of her choice, Barnard in New York, had already admitted its quota of black students -- two. When Ms. Height applied, she was informed that she would have to wait at least a semester before she could enroll.
Instead, she went to New York University, where she graduated in three years and received a master's degree in educational psychology in her fourth year.
As a young woman, Ms. Height made money through jobs such as ironing entertainer Eddie Cantor's shirts and proofreading Marcus Garvey's newspaper, the Negro World. She went nightclubbing in Harlem with composer W.C. Handy.
Ms. Height began her professional career as a caseworker for the New York City welfare department. She got her start as a civil rights activist through the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and from the pastor's son, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who later represented Harlem in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Ms. Height later said that as an officer of the Harlem Christian Youth Council, "I was one of the multitude whose first experience as a civil rights activist was in walking and talking with merchants on 125th Street."
Seizing an opportunity
After attending an international church youth conference in London in the summer of 1937, Ms. Height returned to New York with the conviction that she needed to operate from a broader base than that of a welfare caseworker. She found her opportunity that November at the Harlem branch of the YWCA during a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Mary McLeod Bethune, president of the Harlem YWCA, was impressed by Ms. Height's poise and style in greeting the president's wife, and she promptly offered her a job.
Quitting her job as a welfare caseworker, Ms. Height joined the staff of the Harlem YWCA. She remained a full-time YWCA staffer until 1975, serving the last 18 years simultaneously as president of the National Council of Negro Women.
As a child, she had once been turned away from the Pittsburgh YWCA swimming pool. As a YWCA staff member, she was instrumental in bringing about an interracial charter for Ys in 1946.
In the 1940s, Ms. Height came to Washington as chief of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA branch. She joined the staff of the national YWCA board in 1944, and, until 1975, she remained on that staff with a variety of responsibilities, including leadership training and interracial and ecumenical education.
In 1965, she organized and became the director of the YWCA's Center for Racial Justice, and she held that position until retiring from the YWCA board in 1975. She was a visiting professor at the Delhi School of Social Work in India, and she directed studies around the world on issues involving human rights.
Ms. Height became national president of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority in 1947, and she held that position until 1957, when she became the fourth president of the National Council of Negro Women.
Over the next four decades, she established a national reputation as a graceful and insistent voice for civil rights and women's rights. She was tall and stately and spoke in a tone that always commanded attention. She rarely had to raise her voice.
"If the times aren't ripe, you have to ripen the times," she liked to say. It was important, she said, to dress well. "I came up at a time when young women wore hats, and they wore gloves. Too many people in my generation fought for the right for us to be dressed up and not put down."
Ms. Height never married. She is survived by one sister, Anthanette Height Aldridge of New York.
Wide influence
As the women's rights movement gained momentum in the early 1970s, Ms. Height forged alliances with white feminist leaders, while disagreeing periodically on matters of tactics and racial emphasis. "African American women have advanced in every field that women have advanced, but the sad point is that those are the few and not the many," she said.
Under her leadership, the National Council of Negro Women sponsored voter registration drives and organized an education foundation for student activists who interrupted their education to do civil rights work.
Another 1960s program, Wednesdays in Mississippi, was a favorite of Ms. Height's. It consisted of weekly trips to Mississippi by interracial groups of women to assist at Freedom Schools and voter registration campaigns. This was often perilous work, especially during the summers of 1964 and 1965, when the hundreds of young civil rights volunteers who streamed into Mississippi were routinely harassed, sometimes beaten and, in a few cases, killed.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the council helped organize and operate development projects in African countries. It ran a "pig bank" project in rural Mississippi in which pigs were given to poor, hungry families so they could raise them, with the understanding that two pigs from subsequent litters would be put back into the bank for another family.
Over the years, there were fundraising drives for a statue of Bethune and acquisition of a large and imposing headquarters building in downtown Washington to house the National Council and the Dorothy I. Height Leadership Institute. The building, with white oak woodwork, a marble staircase and fluted cast-iron columns, stands at 633 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, the site of what was once a slave market. For years after stepping down as president of the National Council, Ms. Height made daily visits to her office there, using a walker or a wheelchair as she became infirm.
On her 92nd birthday, she received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest decoration Congress can bestow. But Ms. Height often urged her co-workers to "stop worrying about whose name gets in the paper and start doing something about rats, and day care and low wages. . . . We must try to take our task more seriously and ourselves more lightly."
Staff writer Hamil R. Harris contributed to this report.
Appreciation: Civil rights matriarch fought racism with dignity
By Hamil R. Harris Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, April 20, 2010; 11:30 AM
The first time I met Dorothy Height, she seemed out of place.
She was wearing an obviously expensive pantsuit, sporting a wide-brim church hat and zipping around the Mall on a golf cart.
It was 1986, the first year of the National Black Family Reunion that Height had boldly pushed for. Even though racial diversity was in full bloom, Height believed that African American families needed to celebrate themselves in a big way.
By then, Height was already a civil rights icon, revered as a national treasure. I was new to Washington. As a freelance broadcast journalist, I needed a sound bite to get paid. Height stood in front of my little microphone and gave much more.
Of course I knew her, had seen her on television, but as I listened to Height her passion for social justice was overwhelming. Since then, I have interviewed her dozens of times. She was always available and accessible to the ordinary, as well as the extraordinary. And she always seemed to say the right thing.
Height began her career with another civil rights leader, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, and worked with presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama. She always mixed the social with the political, closing out the annual family reunion with a gospel concert and a traditional benediction.
More than a half-million people have attended the National Black Family Reunions since they began in 1986. Along the way, she reminded everyone that the event was not just about money. She forced vendors to keep the food prices low and kept the focus on health care and education.
In the summer of 1991, my wife and I attended the annual summer gathering with my mother-in-law and our new baby Aria. My wife, Taunya Harris, had never been to the reunion and wanted to see singer Jermaine Jackson. But it was Dorothy Height who stole the show. "I will never forget. Dr. Height came out on stage dressed in this blue outfit," she said.
Height knew how to bring people together. When comedian Bill Cosby offered a scorching critique of black America during the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education case, which declared separate schools for blacks and whites unconstitutional, many blacks were angry. But Height said that Cosby was right because "the promises of Brown have yet to be fulfilled."
Former secretary of labor Alexis Herman, who has been leading the day-to-day operations of the National Council of Negro Women, said when she thinks of Height's legacy, she thinks of one word: service.
"She has lived her whole life serving the people," Herman said. "Hers was a life of service and giving back.
"She not only expected us to keep going, she instructed us to keep going," she added. "She would ball that fist up and say that the National Council of Negro Women wasn't about one or two persons. She balled her fist to say that you can strike a mighty blow when you make a fist and work together."
Before coming to the NCNW, Height served as president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority from 1947 to 1956. E. Faye Williams, a lawyer and president of the National Congress of Black Women, said she met Height at a Delta convention when Williams was only 17.
"Dr. Height has been a mentor and a role model for so many of us who work in the service to our country," Williams said. "She leaves impossible shoes for us to fill. She was involved in organizational leadership when it was not always popular for women to be leaders."
In 1995, NCNW became the only historic black organization on Pennsylvania Avenue, in close proximity to the Capitol. A few years later, Oprah Winfrey paid off the mortgage. Before her death, Height said one of the proudest moments came when the organization hosted an inaugural viewing party for the first African American president.
"Having worked hard for civil rights and opportunities, I was excited," she said. "The fact that we won the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which eliminated legal segregation, made the country better not just for black people, but for white people, too."
Height fought racism with dignity. On Sunday, Sept. 13, 2009, the last black family reunion Height attended, she parked her wheelchair on the main stage as gospel artist CeCe Winans performed. My camera was rolling.
"We open with a prayer breakfast, we close with a gospel concert, because we know that with all we have been through we have not come this far alone," Height said. "We do not like to hear the black family always described as a problem. Our children were a problem, our men were a problem, our women were a problem. We know we have problems, but we are not a problem people!"
Dorothy Height, a leader of the African-American and women’s rights movements who was considered both the grande dame of the civil rights era and its unsung heroine, died on Tuesday in Washington. She was 98.
The death, at Howard University Hospital, was announced jointly by the hospital and the National Council of Negro Women [ http://www.ncnw.org/ ], which Ms. Height had led for four decades. A longtime Washington resident, Ms. Height was the council’s president emerita at her death.
One of the last living links to the social activism of the New Deal era, Ms. Height had a career in civil rights that spanned nearly 80 years, from anti-lynching protests in the early 1930s to the inauguration of President Obama in 2009. That the American social landscape looks as it does today owes in no small part to her work.
Originally trained as a social worker, Ms. Height was president of the National Council of Negro Women from 1957 to 1997, overseeing a range of programs on issues like voting rights, poverty and in later years AIDS. A longtime executive of the Y.W.C.A. [ http://www.ywca.org/site/pp.asp?c=djISI6PIKpG&b=284783 ], she presided over the integration of its facilities nationwide in the 1940s.
With Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan and others, she helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus [ http://www.nwpc.org/ ] in 1971. Over the decades, she advised a string of American presidents on civil rights.
If Ms. Height was less well known than her contemporaries in either the civil rights or women’s movement, it was perhaps because she was doubly marginalized, pushed offstage by women’s groups because of her race and by black groups because of her sex. Throughout her career, she responded quietly but firmly, working with a characteristic mix of limitless energy and steely gentility to ally the two movements in the fight for social justice.
As a result, Ms. Height is widely credited as the first person in the modern civil rights era to treat the problems of equality for women and equality for African-Americans as a seamless whole, merging concerns that had been largely historically separate.
The recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom [ http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/two_column_table/Presidential_Medal_of_Freedom_Recipients.htm ] and other prestigious awards, Ms. Height was accorded a place of honor on the dais on Jan. 20, 2009, when Mr. Obama took the oath of office as the nation’s 44th president. In a statement on Tuesday, he called Ms. Height “the godmother of the civil rights movement and a hero to so many Americans.”
Over the years, historians have made much of the so-called “Big Six” who led the civil rights movement: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, John Lewis, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins and Whitney M. Young Jr. Ms. Height, the only woman to work regularly alongside them on projects of national significance, was very much the unheralded seventh, the leader who was cropped out, figuratively and often literally, of images of the era.
In 1963, for instance, Ms. Height sat on the platform an arm’s length from Dr. King as he delivered his epochal “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington. She was one of the march’s chief organizers and a prize-winning orator herself. Yet she was not asked to speak, although many other black leaders — all men — addressed the crowd that day.
Ms. Height recounted the incident in her memoir, “Open Wide the Freedom Gates” (PublicAffairs, 2003; with a foreword by Maya Angelou). Reviewing the memoir, The New York Times Book Review called it “a poignant short course in a century of African-American history.”
Dorothy Irene Height was born on March 24, 1912, in Richmond, Va. Her father, James, was a building contractor; her mother, the former Fannie Burroughs, was a nurse. A severe asthmatic as a child, Dorothy was not expected to live, she later wrote, past the age of 16.
When Dorothy was small, the family moved north to Rankin, Pa., near Pittsburgh, where she attended integrated public schools. She began her civil rights work as a teenager, volunteering on voting rights and anti-lynching campaigns.
In high school, Ms. Height entered an oratory contest, sponsored by the Elks, on the subject of the United States Constitution. An eloquent speaker even in her youth, she soon advanced to the national finals, where she was the only black contestant. She delivered a talk on the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments — the Reconstruction Amendments [ http://www.blackpast.org/?q=primary/reconstruction-amendments ] —intended to extend constitutional protections to former slaves and their descendants. The jury, all white, awarded her first prize: a four-year college scholarship.
As Ms. Height told The Detroit Free Press in 2008, “I’m still working today to make the promise of the 14th Amendment of equal justice under law a reality.”
A star student, the young Ms. Height applied to Barnard College and was accepted. Then, in the summer of 1929, shortly before classes began, she was summoned to New York by a Barnard dean.
There was a problem, the dean said. That Ms. Height had been admitted to Barnard was certain. But she could not enroll — not then, anyway. Barnard had already met its quota for Negro students that year.
Too distraught to call home, as she later wrote, Ms. Height did the only thing possible. Clutching her Barnard acceptance letter, she took the subway downtown to New York University. She was admitted at once, earning a bachelor’s degree in education there in 1933 and a master’s in psychology two years later.
Ms. Height was a caseworker with the New York City Welfare Department before becoming the assistant executive director of the Harlem Y.W.C.A. in the late 1930s. One of her first public acts at the Y was to call attention to the exploitation of black women working as domestic day laborers. The women, who congregated on street corners in Brooklyn and the Bronx known locally as “slave markets,” were picked up and hired, for about 15 cents an hour, by white suburban housewives who cruised the corners in their cars.
In 1946, as a member of the Y’s national leadership, Ms. Height oversaw the desegregation of its facilities nationwide. In 1965, she founded the Y’s Center for Racial Justice, which she led until 1977.
While working for the Y in the late ’30s, Ms. Height was chosen to escort the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, to a meeting of the National Council of Negro Women. There, Ms. Height caught the eye of Mary McLeod Bethune, the council’s founder, who became her mentor.
As the council’s president during the most urgent years of the civil rights movement, Ms. Height instituted a variety of social programs in the Deep South, including the pig bank, in which poor black families were given a pig, a prize commodity. In the mid-’60s, she helped institute “Wednesdays in Mississippi,” a program that flew interracial teams of Northern women to the state to meet with black and white women there.
Ms. Height, who long maintained that strong communities were at the heart of social welfare, inaugurated a series of “Black Family Reunions” in the mid-1980s. Sponsored by the National Council of Negro Women and held in cities across the United States, the reunions were large, celebratory gatherings devoted to the history, culture and traditions of African-Americans. Hundreds of thousands of people attended the first one, in Washington in 1986.
From 1947 to 1956, Ms. Height was also the president of Delta Sigma Theta [ http://www.deltasigmatheta.org/ ], an international sorority of black women.
Besides the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by President Bill Clinton in 1994, Ms. Height’s many honors include the Congressional Gold Medal [ http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/goldMedal.html ], awarded by President George W. Bush in 2004. The two medals are the country’s highest civilian awards.
Ms. Height, who never married, is survived by a sister, Anthanette Aldridge, of New York City.
If despite her laurels Ms. Height remained in the shadow of her male contemporaries, she rarely objected. After all, as she often said in interviews, the task at hand was far less about personal limelight than it was about collective struggle.
“I was there, and I felt at home in the group,” she told The Sacramento Bee in 2003 “But I didn’t feel I should elbow myself to the front when the press focused on the male leaders."
Ms. Height received three dozen honorary doctorates, from institutions including Tuskegee, Harvard and Princeton Universities. But there was one academic honor — the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree — that resonated more strongly than all the rest: In 2004, 75 years after turning her away, Barnard College designated Ms. Height an honorary graduate [ http://www.barnard.edu/newnews/news060304c.html ].
Dorothy Height remembered as a supporter of church unity
From "Philip Jenks" <pjenks@ncccusa.org> Date Tue, 20 Apr 2010 13:01:58 -0400
Ecumenical leaders recall Dorothy I. Height as a tireless supporter of church unity
Washington, April 20, 2010 -- Dorothy Irene Height, who began her activist career as a teenager marching in New York's Times Square shouting, "Stop the lynching," was remembered Tuesday as one of the last great voices of the American Civil Rights Movement.
Height, 98, who led the National Council of Negro Women for four decades and continued to speak out on justice issues in her 90s, died early today. "We remember Dr. Height both as a civil rights leader and as a tireless champion of church unity," said the Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches.
"History will not forget the contributions Dorothy Height made to the cause of freedom and justice," Kinnamon said. "We in the church will never forget the essential role her faith played in motivating her lifelong quest on behalf of persons of all ages, races and ethnicities. She knew that persons of faith can be an irresistible force for justice when we join hearts and hands, and she was a leader in that march throughout most of our lifetimes." A United Methodist, Height was the first recipient in 2004 of the National Council of Churches J. Irwin Miller Award, named for one of the Council's lay presidents, Kinnamon noted. (See http://www.ncccusa.org/generalassembly/ga2004/heighttext.html )
Presenting the award was Bishop Thomas L. Hoyt of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, and NCC president in 2004.
"Friends, I cannot think of anyone who is more deserving of the J. Irwin Miller Award than Dorothy Height," Hoyt said at the time. "She is a living legend in the movement for civil rights in this nation. She has dedicated herself to improving the quality of life for African-American women and children. She is known internationally for her work for human rights for all. The world is truly a better place because of the work and witness of Dr. Dorothy Irene Height.
"Dr. Height is also an unassuming and gracious woman of God. When you first see her, impeccably dressed from head to toe, with soft smile, and a twinkle in her eye, you would not imagine what a powerful woman she has become," said Hoyt.
Height was also honored by Church Women United in 1999 as a recipient of the CWU Human Rights Award.
"Dr. Height was a tremendous supporter of Church Women United since our beginning in 1941," said Djamillah Samad, Church Women United national executive in New York.
Height and her friend Eleanor Roosevelt, then First Lady, saw the organization as an important witness for peace on the brink of the Second World War. "We are going to miss her greatly. It was through the leadership and guidance of women like Dr. Height that working with social justice issues from a Christian perspective became and remains the focus of CWU today," Samad said.
In 1937, while she was working at the Harlem YWCA, Height met famed educator Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of the National Council of Negro Women, and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who had come to speak at a meeting of Bethune's organization. Height eventually rose to leadership roles in both the council and the YWCA.
In 2006, National Council of Churches staff were invited to preview performances of a musical about the life of Dorothy Height, "If This Hat Could Talk." The "hat" referred to Height's wide-brimmed trademark hats that she wore throughout her life. (See http://www.ncccusa.org/069530hat.html )
NCC News contact: Philip E. Jenks, 212-870-2228 (office), 646-853-4212 (cell) , pjenks@ncccusa.org
The posting organizations grant permission to reproduce, copy or quote all documents on the WFN web site [ http://www.wfn.org/index.php ].
The hospital spokesman, Ron Harris, said Height died at 3:41 a.m. No cause of death was given. She was age 98.
Height, who had been chair and president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women, worked in the 1960s alongside civil rights pioneers, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., future U.S. Rep. John Lewis and A. Philip Randolph.
Here's a look at the highlights of her life:
Personal:
Birth date: March 24, 1912
Birth place: Richmond, Virginia
Birth name: Dorothy Irene Height
Parents: James Edward, building contractor, and Fannie (Burroughs) Height
Education: New York University, BA and MA (Educational Psychology), 1933
Columbia University and the New York School of Social Work (Post-Graduate)
Career Highlights:
* 1933 – Leader of the United Christian Youth Movement of North America. Height works to prevent lynching and desegregate the armed forces.
* 1935 – Height is asked to work with ending Harlem riot.
* 1937 – Mary McLeod Bethune, National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) founder asks Height to join organization assisting with women's rights for equal pay and education.
* 1944-1977 – Height works in several leadership positions with the National Board of the YWCA of the USA.
* 1965 – Becomes Director of the Center for Racial Justice.
* 1944-1956 – Height serves as Vice President and later President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.
* 1952-1955 – Is a member on the U.S. Department of Defense Advisory Committee on Women.
* 1957-1998 – National President of National Council of Negro Women.
* 1958-1968 – Is a member on the New York State Welfare Board.
* 1964 – Organizes "Wednesdays in Mississippi" to open communication among women of various races.
* 1964-1970 – Is a member of the American Red Cross board of governors.
* 1965-1977 – Is the founder and director of YWCA Center for Racial Justice.
* 1970 – Height creates the Women's Center for Education and Career Advancement in New York City. Center helps women with entry-level jobs.
* 1993 – Is inducted into The National Women's Hall of Fame.
* 1994 – Is Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by president Bill Clinton.
* October 25, 1997 – Participates in the "Million Woman March" in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
* 1998 – Height becomes Chair and President Emerita of NCNW.
* 2004 – President George W. Bush presents Height with the Congressional Gold Medal.
* January 20, 2009 – Is at the podium when Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th president of the United States.
* April 20, 2010 – Dies of natural causes at Howard University Hospital in DC.
Publications:
Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir, 2003
Sources: Biography Resource Center, NCNW, Britannica
Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure – the ones who are driving the action – we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.
So let’s begin.
Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.
Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington.
Imagine that a rap artist were to say, in reference to a white president: “He’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on my machine gun.” Because that’s what rocker Ted Nugent said recently about President Obama.
Imagine that a prominent mainstream black political commentator had long employed an overt bigot as Executive Director of his organization, and that this bigot regularly participated in black separatist conferences, and once assaulted a white person while calling them by a racial slur. When that prominent black commentator and his sister — who also works for the organization — defended the bigot as a good guy who was misunderstood and “going through a tough time in his life” would anyone accept their excuse-making? Would that commentator still have a place on a mainstream network? Because that’s what happened in the real world, when Pat Buchanan employed as Executive Director of his group, America’s Cause, a blatant racist who did all these things, or at least their white equivalents: attending white separatist conferences and attacking a black woman while calling her the n-word.
Imagine that a black radio host were to suggest that the only way to get promoted in the administration of a white president is by “hating black people,” or that a prominent white person had only endorsed a white presidential candidate as an act of racial bonding, or blamed a white president for a fight on a school bus in which a black kid was jumped by two white kids, or said that he wouldn’t want to kill all conservatives, but rather, would like to leave just enough—“living fossils” as he called them—“so we will never forget what these people stood for.” After all, these are things that Rush Limbaugh has said, about Barack Obama’s administration, Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama, a fight on a school bus in Belleville, Illinois in which two black kids beat up a white kid, and about liberals, generally.
Imagine that a black pastor, formerly a member of the U.S. military, were to declare, as part of his opposition to a white president’s policies, that he was ready to “suit up, get my gun, go to Washington, and do what they trained me to do.” This is, after all, what Pastor Stan Craig said recently at a Tea Party rally in Greenville, South Carolina.
Imagine a black radio talk show host gleefully predicting a revolution by people of color if the government continues to be dominated by the rich white men who have been “destroying” the country, or if said radio personality were to call Christians or Jews non-humans, or say that when it came to conservatives, the best solution would be to “hang ‘em high.” And what would happen to any congressional representative who praised that commentator for “speaking common sense” and likened his hate talk to “American values?” After all, those are among the things said by radio host and best-selling author Michael Savage, predicting white revolution in the face of multiculturalism, or said by Savage about Muslims and liberals, respectively. And it was Congressman Culbertson, from Texas, who praised Savage in that way, despite his hateful rhetoric.
Imagine a black political commentator suggesting that the only thing the guy who flew his plane into the Austin, Texas IRS building did wrong was not blowing up Fox News instead. This is, after all, what Anne Coulter said about Tim McVeigh, when she noted that his only mistake was not blowing up the New York Times.
Imagine that a popular black liberal website posted comments about the daughter of a white president, calling her “typical redneck trash,” or a “whore” whose mother entertains her by “making monkey sounds.” After all that’s comparable to what conservatives posted about Malia Obama on freerepublic.com last year, when they referred to her as “ghetto trash.”
Imagine that black protesters at a large political rally were walking around with signs calling for the lynching of their congressional enemies. Because that’s what white conservatives did last year, in reference to Democratic party leaders in Congress.
In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at President Obama, by folks who are almost exclusively white, were being aimed, instead, at a white president, by people of color. How many whites viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that white president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same people of color?
To ask any of these questions is to answer them. Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. Which is why Rush Limbaugh could say, this past week, that the Tea Parties are the first time since the Civil War that ordinary, common Americans stood up for their rights: a statement that erases the normalcy and “American-ness” of blacks in the civil rights struggle, not to mention women in the fight for suffrage and equality, working people in the fight for better working conditions, and LGBT folks as they struggle to be treated as full and equal human beings.
And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.
To get a sense of the fundamental injustice of Arizona's anti-immigration bill, SB 1070, consider something that happened recently, and something that didn't--neither of them in Arizona, but rather in Nashville, Tennessee.
Earlier this week, because our children were out of school for teacher in-service, my wife and I slept in late. Upon rolling out of bed, Kristy, who doesn't drink coffee, let it be known she was desperate for caffeine. This is her way of indicating that I am to go hunting and gathering for some carbonated delivery system of this critical stimulant, and not to return until I've found it.
So off I went to the closest fast food restaurant, which, not having paid me for product placement will receive no free advertising from me here, but which apparently is of Scottish derivation. Being barely awake upon my departure from the house, I grabbed cash but neglected to snag my driver's license from the drawer next to my bed. About halfway there I realized my oversight but opted to keep driving rather than turning back and retrieving it. I'll just be careful, I thought to myself. And anyway, it's only three miles round-trip.
After placing my order at the drive-thru, I pulled up to the window to pay. Needing to reach into my pocket for the money, I unhooked my seat belt for easier access, paid the $1.35 and drove away, neglecting to re-attach the belt: something I often forget to do in that situation. As I turned on to the street, I noticed a parked police car, officer inside, up against the curb. About 15 feet in front of him I came to the stop sign, then turned right onto the main road to go home, forgetting in the process, as I often do, to use my turn signal.
I glanced in the rear view mirror just long enough to notice that indeed the officer had been looking right at me as I made the turn: the turn that I made without a seatbelt on, and without first giving a signal, and without possessing (though he couldn't have known this) my driver's license, having left it at home. He did not follow me. He did not pull me over. He did not issue me a ticket, despite the two known violations I had committed, and the other one that, had he stopped me, he would have immediately discovered.
Nor did I really expect to be pulled over. Indeed, I was fairly confident that nothing would happen, just as I always am when forgetting to signal a lane change for long enough before moving over, or occasionally violating some other arcane rule of the road about which I have long since forgotten all these many years away from Driver's Ed.
And this is where the story begins to have relevance to the debate over SB 1070. Those who support the new law insist that it won't lead to police unfairly targeting Latino/as, even though literally all the anti-immigrant rhetoric in the state has been aimed at such folks. Although it allows law enforcement officials to ask for proof of legal status from anyone they "reasonably" suspect might be in the country illegally--an inherently vague notion--the standard won't be abused, they claim. After all, according to the law, police can only ask for such documentation during the course of an otherwise legal contact between themselves and the person they suspect of being unlawfully in the country.
But such a stipulation hardly acquits the policy of the likely abuses to which it will be put in practice. After all, as my experience in the car demonstrated, violating minor traffic laws is something we all do regularly. Had the officer outside the restaurant decided to stop me, rather than continuing to eat his Scottish-named egg sandwich, he would have been perfectly within his rights to do so. The contact would have been lawful, even if a bit nit-picky. In Arizona, under the new law, officers who saw drivers they perceived as Latino/a, and who wanted to stop them, need only pick out some minor infraction (the kind we all commit every time we pull out of the driveway), and then use the infraction as an excuse for a stop the real purpose of which was to determine the lawful status of someone whose only reason for being stopped was their perceived ethnicity.
In fact, the law doesn't even require a moving violation. Because SB 1070 includes municipal code violations as a legitimate reason for "legal contact" by officers, police would be able to use everything from failure to cut one's grass often enough, to having too many cars in the driveway, to placing one's garbage containers in the wrong spot on the street, as reasons for a stop and document search.
In other words, Latino/a residents of Arizona, irrespective of their legal or even citizenship status, will now have to think about things no white person will have to sweat. No one, after all, really believes that police will be stopping German tourists, and asking for proper papers, no matter how thick their accents, or how much black clothing they're wearing, even on a sunny, hot Arizona day. Some outsiders will receive a pass, while some who are actually insiders--that is to say, not only lawful residents but even third, fourth or fifth generation citizens--will not. They will, because of skin color, or accent, be seen as ripe for questioning.
They won't be able to take anything for granted, though white folks, as always, still will. They will have to follow every rule to the letter, for fear of being otherwise legally harassed by cops, even as those of us belonging to the dominant group will be able to nonchalantly go through our days, unconcerned about having to prove our identity just because a piece of our taillight cover was cracked, or because we went a few miles over the speed limit, or because our muffler wasn't working sufficiently to reduce the noise from our car within legal limits in our communities.
That such a response will result in the arbitrary stopping and searching of those who are undocumented--but who despite their legal status are still protected under the Constitution from unreasonable searches and seizures, and are guaranteed (in theory) equal protection of the laws--should be sufficiently disturbing. But beyond that, SB 1070 virtually guarantees that any and all Latino/as in the state will be vulnerable to such authoritarian measures. While supporters of the law shrug off this truth as a mere inconvenience, it is quite a bit more than that. For an entire class of citizens to fear that law enforcement will focus attention on their group is to make a mockery of the nation's pretensions to equal justice under law: something we have also long done with regard to black folks, and, since 9/11 especially, to persons seen as Arab or religiously Muslim. It is to stigmatize the group in question in the eyes of the broader public, to label them deviant, untrustworthy, and undeserving of the basic Constitutional protections that white folks take for granted. And the ability to take those protections for granted is the epitome of privilege and entitlement.
Although conservative Tea Party activists insist they are defenders of the Constitution--and that indeed, their deep reverence for it is the primary motivation for their current outrage--they have launched a petition drive in favor of the Arizona immigration crackdown, irrespective of the obvious 4th and 14th Amendment implications. Which makes sense, given that neither of these amendments include the stuff about guns, which is the only part the right much cares for or has seen fit to memorize.
Speaking of which, and in the spirit of bipartisanship, perhaps there's a way to bridge the seeming impasse between right and left when it comes to immigration, SB 1070 and the Constitution. On the one hand, we could allow the new law to stand so as to satisfy the concerns of Arizonans who feel they are being "overrun" by the undocumented. But on the other, and in keeping with the Second Amendment, we could immediately hand out guns--lots of them--to every Latino/a in the state so as to defend themselves against the heavy hand of government tyranny. Then we can sit back and see just how badly cops want to play immigration agent, or how much more they value their donuts, coffee, and the beating of their own hearts. I think I know what most would decide.
After all, and as the NRA reminds us, "an armed society is a polite society."
Indeed.
Tim Wise is the author of five books on race and racism. His latest is Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity
Tim Wise - Racism and White Privilege on the Liberal-Left
With Friends Like These, Who Needs Glenn Beck?
This is the second part of a two-part series on racism on the right and left of the United States’ political/ideological spectrum. Part one, which can be found at the link just below the jump, provided the reader with a working definition of racism, and then explored how racism at both the ideological and institutional levels is connected to and enhanced by American conservatism. In this essay, I will explore the other side of the equation: namely, how even liberals, progressives and leftists, despite our advocacy for equity and stated commitment to racial justice, still manage to manifest and further racism -- whether deliberately or not -- in our activism, messages and policy prescriptions.
I apologize in advance for the length of this piece, but due to the way that we are often defensive about accusations of liberal-left racism, I felt the need to be as thorough and explanatory as possible. This is meant more as a think piece for long term strategizing rather than as a quickly digestable blog or diary. But please take your time with it, and give it some real thought and consideration. Thanks in advance...
Simon Mann looks at how the can-do country lost its way.
THE divisions that lurk in America sometimes become glaringly apparent. Mostly submerged, often papered over, they remain fissures in the great and evolving work that is the Republic of the United States.
Sometimes they are illuminated by the everyday; a trip to the baseball in the nation's capital, Washington DC, is a case in point.
On those balmy summer evenings when the smell of hot dogs and fast food, freshly cut grass and the sweaty remains of the day waft across the expectant after-work crowd, a sense of privilege emerges long before the first pitch.
It arises when the thousands of fans cram the subway trains that leave downtown on the Green Line.
As the carriages draw alongside the platform at Navy Yard, a pointer to a past industrial era that is a short walk from the stadium, the crush heads to the exits. Should the crowd cast an eye over its mostly white shoulder, it would see an example of Divided America that for visitors can be surprising, even confronting: almost exclusively, the faces remaining on the train are black.
Red alert ... As the Tea Party Express tours key campaign states, protesters turn out in Las Vegas, Nevada.
From Navy Yard, the Green Line slips beneath the Anacostia River and eases its way through Washington's south-east quadrant, where African Americans account for 95 per cent of the population and where escalating crime in the '80s and '90s, fuelled by the trade in crack cocaine, gave Washington its label of ''murder capital of the US''. Though easing, much of the city's crime today remains centred on those same neighbourhoods.
America has come a long way since the segregated eating places of the Deep South, and a growing black middle class counters the notion of disadvantage. But sometimes, its slip can show.
In the cafeterias of its public schools black students sit with black students and white students stick mostly with their own, too. And in Washington's leafy north-west suburbs, bands of Latino workers trim the lawns of wealthy white folk, or serve them in restaurants at miserable pay rates, relying on tips to survive.
That the divisions are so stark in the nation's capital, a majority black city, seems symbolic of a gulf that still exists between the various communities of this vast and prosperous land.
Anacostia, and disadvantaged suburbs like it, lie just a few kilometres from the White House, where America's first black president oversees troubled times in which old divisions are becoming writ large and new ones are emerging.
Two years on from Barack Obama's historic election victory, hope has given way to fear and to cultural warring between liberals and conservatives and to a new class of angry, mad-as-hell Americans who talk of bringing down the establishment and of safeguarding the nation's liberties.
In these paradoxical times, some freedoms are cherished more than others: an evangelical southern preacher must be persuaded not to burn copies of the Koran and throughout America hostility is rising against the siting of new mosques. Anti-government militias play weekend war games brandishing M-16s, proclaiming themselves ''patriots'' ready to defend American liberties against a possible Muslim uprising.
''It's all circling around the same problem of personal liberties,'' explains Walter Berglund, the liberal protagonist in Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom. Why should governments intervene?
''People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don't have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can't afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles.
''You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to f--- up your life whatever way you want to.''
Just two years after the country swung wildly to the Democratic cause the political pendulum is poised to swing all the way back - and some - in Tuesday's midterm elections as a Republican Party being driven sharply to the right by the populist no-holds-barred Tea Party reclaims the language of political triumphalism: ''We're taking back the country,'' they cry. And from a ''socialist'', no less!
The political poles are shifting further apart. Partisanship is in the ascendancy; moderates are on the nose, derided as mealy-mouthed. Whither America's most challenging issues?
''Our politics follows from our economics, and vice versa,'' says Robert Reich, a leading progressive intellectual, once a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet and now Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
''In times of economic growth, when everyone's incomes are growing, it's easy to feel generous,'' says Reich. ''In times of economic stagnation, when incomes are flat or endangered, almost every issue becomes a zero-sum game in which either you win or 'they' win.''
And how. Those divisions are being magnified once more by the grim economic reality in which America stews - divisions of race, of class and mostly of opportunity - while scapegoats are being stalked. Illegal immigrants, whose cheap labour has for decades helped underpin economic growth, are being demonised.
The languid economy is the central theme in a country of haves and have-nots, where a new dichotomy is emerging between those people with homes and those whose homes have been repossessed; those with jobs and those who are unemployed or struggling to get enough work to make ends meet; and where half the nation, according to a recent poll, say they are not living the American Dream. And half of those again expect they never will.
In another poll, 63 per cent of Americans doubted they could maintain their current standard of living.
''The modern American Dream for me was [a] general prosperity and well-being for the average person,'' writes the Time Warner commentator Fareed Zakaria, who grew up in India. ''European civilisation had produced the great cathedrals of the world. America had the two-car garage.''
But accompanying the global financial crisis has been a psychological depression and evaporating confidence in America's ''can-do'' resourcefulness. As Zakaria tells it, Americans are worried beyond the current debate over whether fiscal stimulus or deficit reduction is the right remedy.
''[Americans] fear that we are in the midst not of a cyclical downturn but a structural shift, one that poses huge new challenges to the average American job, pressures the average American wage and endangers the average American Dream.
''The middle class, many Americans believe, is being hollowed out. I think they are right.''
Reich agrees that this is no cyclical phenomenon, that the middle class is under siege and that ''something structural is going on''.
New technologies and globalisation have allowed US jobs to be shipped offshore, crimping opportunities for ordinary Americans; safety nets that might have been funded by imposts on the rich have not been expanded to compensate. In fact, the reverse is true, leading to widening disparities between rich and poor.
The root of such fierce divisions in American society, of increasingly extreme positions and growing anger, according to Reich, is that disparity, though taking such a position risks being branded a socialist, no less.
Indeed, when the Democrats' leader in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, recently addressed steel workers on how disparities might be bridged, a follow-up discussion on Rupert Murdoch's conservative Fox News channel carried a shorthand summary across the bottom of the screen: ''Pelosi takes socialist tone: addresses disparity of income in America''.
YOU HAVE MURDOCH NOW, YET BE ASSURED, WE IN AUSTRALIA STILL HAVE HIS PERNICIOUS INFLUENCE, TOO.
Those disparities, in fact, were never more pronounced than they were shortly before the Great Depression and again in 2007, just ahead of the financial meltdown that triggered America's current predicament.
In 1928, the richest 1 per cent of Americans earned 23.9 per cent of the nation's total income. As prosperity was shared more widely in the post-WWII years and through the economic nirvana of the '50s and '60s, the figure fell to about 8 per cent by the 1970s.
But that proportion had climbed back to almost 24 per cent by 2007.
''And we all know what happened in the years immediately following these twin peaks - in 1929 and 2008,'' Reich says.
Income disparity was charting new extremes in 2007. According to the Internal Revenue Service (America's tax office), the 400 richest households earned a total of $US138 billion that year, up from $US105 billion a year earlier. That's an average of $US345 million each, on which they paid a tax rate of just 16.6 per cent.
SO YOU CONSERVATIVES WHO WHINE ABOUT WHAT PERCENTAGE OF INCOME TAX THE WEALTHY PAY, DO AMERICA A FAVOR AND GET IN IN CONTEXT.
TRY TO UNDERSTANDWHAT SO MANY OF US HAVE BEEN POINTING OUT TO YOU FOR SO LONG ...
''What we get from widening inequality is not only a more fragile economy but also an angrier politics,'' wrote Reich recently as a pointer to his latest book, Aftershock.
''When virtually all the gains from growth go to a small minority at the top - and the broad middle class can no longer pretend it's richer than it is by using homes as collateral for deepening indebtedness - the result is deep-seated anxiety and frustration.
''This is an open invitation to demagogues who misconnect the dots and direct the anger toward immigrants, the poor, foreign nations, big government, 'socialists', 'intellectual elites', or even big business and Wall Street.''
Through this bitter crossfire, Obama has steered an agenda that has angered the right and disappointed the left: the former claims he has unnecessarily expanded the role of government and added to the nation's debt; the latter says he has been too cautious, wasting a man- date for a radical overhaul of health, for punishing miscreant Wall Street bankers and reshaping the economy.
Yet the administration was hampered by a Congress that never quite got on board and a Republican push-back that made bipartisanship a mirage. The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, implemented a hard-nosed strategy the moment Obama became President, using procedural tactics to deny Democrats easy passage of legislation. He makes clear now that his raison d'etre in the next two years is to see Obama forced out of office.
While not exonerating Obama, the in-demand independent political analyst Charlie Cook suggests the depth of the economic crash meant ''any one-party government right now would be paying a horrific price''.
But in a Q&A with The Washington Post, Cook suggests irrelevant ambitions complicated Obama's political task. ''Every month, every week, every day that Washington seemed focused on healthcare instead of the economy frightened people,'' he says. ''It seemed out of touch.''
Environmental and healthcare reforms might have been popular in good economic times, but not as the economy was sinking.
And when unemployment climbed through 9 per cent, despite projections of a peak of 8.2 per cent, ''I have never seen an economic stimulus completely discredited before. But it was,'' adds Cook.
Further, Cook lays the blame for the administration's misreading of the situation not at the feet of Obama's aides such as former chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, who ''knew they should cut a deal on healthcare [and] get to the economy'', but with the President himself.
''He had already been first at everything,'' Cook tells the Post. ''He wanted to be something other than the first - to be historical, game-changing, to have grand influence like FDR or LBJ. But he missed out on the day job'', which was employment and economic growth.
So divisions now are running deep, and despair is palpable.
''The real issue [facing America] is the collapse of opportunity for so many people in the working class and the middle class,'' says Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and researcher into the effects of political polarisation.
''Mass unemployment, underemployment, entire industries down-sizing with no particular hope of recovery … And so, the atmosphere of anxiety, I think, is rooted in the fact that people don't have a clear understanding of what the success story is for the next decade, either for the country or for themselves personally.
''Unless they have some increased confidence that somebody does understand the path to a better future and is prepared to put the country on course to move down that path, our political system is going to be very unstable and characterised by resentment, rejection and mistrust.''
IT MUST BE OBVIOUS TO ALL THAT FURTHER DISPARITY OF DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH AND POWER AND SECURITY IS NOT IN THE BEST INTEREST OF THE USA.
JUST SOME DISINGENUOUSLY WILL NOT FACE THE FACT AND, IN SELFISHLY PLAYING THE MYTHICAL OSTRICH, REMAIN WITH THEIR HEADS IN THE SAND.
The exact dimensions of the Democrats' failure won't be drawn until late next Tuesday, but pundits have been writing them off for weeks in the House of Representatives where Republicans need 39 seats to re-establish control. By late this week, Cook was pushing up the numbers, tipping gains for the Grand Old Party of 48 to 60 seats ''with higher [Democrat] losses possible''.
The late-night TV comedian Jay Leno cut to the chase: ''This Sunday is Halloween, the scariest day of the year. Unless you're a Democrat. Then that would be next Tuesday.''
Ironically, a handful of Senate candidates whose Tea Party backing landed them nominations in plum seats could yet deny the Republicans control of the Senate and a clean sweep of Congress. There, the party needs 10 seats out of the 37 up for grabs to clinch a majority.
But polling suggests more moderate candidates might have done the trick, as several of the Tea Partiers implode amid erratic campaigning.
Either way, the upshot of Tuesday's vote will be a divided legislature: a Democratic President, a Republican House that must accommodate a Tea Party caucus and with neither party with the sort of majority in the Senate that would guarantee passage of their political agenda.
Optimists believe that the outcome will force a new bipartisanship, rather than political gridlock. As Galston says, ''Americans don't want their elected representatives to yell at each other for the next two years. They want them to get something done.
''And if one party or the other is perceived as contributing more to the decibel level of the debate than to actual solutions, then eventually that party is going to pay a political price. It always happens.
''To be more specific, if the Republicans gain a share of governing power as a result of this election, as I believe they almost surely will, then the American people are going to apply a new standard to them, a new test. They cannot simply say 'No'. They will have to be seen as offering solutions. If they don't, they could quickly become seen as part of the problem.''
The refrain of the typical Republican candidate does not augur well for post-election harmony. Typically, it plays like this: One, say ''No'' to things we cannot afford; Two, rein in healthcare reform; Three, refuse to raise taxes.
The attitude portends a fierce battle over the future of government spending and tax reform.
Barack Obama has put a freeze on discretionary government spending, although that accounts for just 15 per cent or so of the budget. His healthcare reforms are framed to start delivering cost savings within the decade. And he wants tax cuts that were put in place by George W. Bush - and favoured the rich - to be allowed to expire at the end of this year for those Americans earning more than $US200,000 a year.
Republicans, however, want to repeal Obama's healthcare and financial regulatory reforms, say they won't touch the defence budget and want the Bush tax cuts retained for all at a cost of $US4000 billion over the next decade. Less clearly have they articulated spending cuts necessary for reining in the budget deficit, running at more than $US1300 billion a year. And Galston concedes: ''The better Republicans do [on Tuesday], the less likely they are to compromise.''
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