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right which have always balked at civil rights laws.

"But it has been given an intellectual underpinning by those free market economists with good White House connections who argue that government aid to minorities has been useless, perhaps even harmful. The Reagan Administration's enthusiasm for this logic heralds an end to the bipartisan consensus on civil rights that has prevailed for the past 20 years."

Whether this prediction will hold true in 1982 is not certain but there is no doubt that the major test will come in the Senate when an extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 comes to the floor. There will be efforts made to render the bill almost meaningless, and though no reasonable person would argue that the bill has been anything but a resounding success, its future is not assured and the Administration will play a major role in the decision-making process.*

But throughout 1981, when the President has an opportunity to send a clear message of reassurance to black Americans that he was not anti-civil rights, he delayed making any statement on the bill until after the House had passed it overwhelmingly, and then his endorsement was qualified as he also announced his support for two provisions that would weaken the law's effectiveness.

Within the Justice Department, the defender of the people, it was apparent during 1981 that the Civil Rights Division under Assistant Attorney General Bradford Reynolds, was pulling back from the former relatively aggressive position it maintained in civil rights enforcement. While the Division claimed to reaffirm its traditional commitment, it revealed its perception of affirmative action as preferential treatment and sex or race conscious preferences as divisive techniques which go beyond the remedy necessary for redness.

Reynolds has said that the department will now seek "full relief" only on behalf of individuals who can prove they are personally victimized, a technique that many experts believe will prevent effective enforcement of equal opportunity law. 

Reynolds also announced that he believed the Supreme Court has acted wrongly in the Weber case of 1979 and he was looking for an opportunity to overturn the decision which upheld the legality of voluntary affirmative action preferences for hiring minorities that had been negotiated by the United Steelworkers of America and Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corp. 

*Since the passage of the act the number of blacks registered to vote in the South rose from 29.3% to 55.6% in 1980, and the number of blacks holding elective office climbed from less than 100 to 1,813.

Several days later, in response to a question at a news conference about the Weber case, the President gave an answer that was widely interpreted as signifying his approval of the court decision and voluntary agreements of affirmative action hiring goals and timetables. This impression was negated when a spokesman subsequently "clarified" Mr. Reagan's remarks and explained that he (the President) believed the Supreme Court was wrong in the Weber decision and that the precedent set in that case should in fact by challenged in an appropriate suit.

This approach by the Administration was made public after the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report, "Affirmative Action in the 1980s: Dismantling the Process of Discrimination," in which it took the position that discrimination experienced by minorities and women is far more pervasive, entrenched and varied than many critics of affirmative action assume, and that "such discrimination will not yield to remedies that are premised on ignoring its existence." (The chairman of the Commission, Arthur S. Fleming, has been fired a few days earlier by President Reagan presumably because of the former's position on civil rights and affirmative action.)

And the Justice Department, in a major change in civil rights policy, has announced that it will no longer seek to desegregate an entire school district on the basis of segregation shown to exist in only a portion of the district. It stated: "We are not going to compel children who don't choose to have an integrated education to have one."

Major changes in the federal civil rights enforcement mechanism have also been proposed in a plan by the Administration which would centralize all enforcement efforts within the Justice Department and in the process abolish the Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs and considerably shrink the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A similar plan had been rejected by the Carter Administration as basically an "anti-civil rights proposal."

The EEOC also faced another type of problem in 1981 when the Administration proposed as its chairman a man totally unqualified to run the agency, thereby creating a firestorm of protest in Congress and in the public arena that forced the Administration to pull back.

What is clear from a totaling of these actions is that the civil rights gains of the past, the same gains that came about through bi-partisan support, are now under attack and in danger.

Violence From the Far Right

Also of major concern to Black America over the past year was the continued violence directed against blacks and other minorities by such far-right groups as the Ku Klux Klan. Encouraged by what has been described as a rising tide of conservatism in the country and fueled by the air of uncertainty, mistrust and fear that difficult economic times can generate, the Klan has been growing over the past several years, though its membership is still believed to be relatively small. 

That fact notwithstanding, from every section of the country have come reports of such typical Klan activities as cross-burnings, fire-bombings, threats, beatings and other terror tactics. The danger in the Klan lies not so much in its size, but in its inherent virulent racism that stops short of nothing—including murder.

On this issue, the Administration and others have spoken out forcefully. As Vice President George Bush told the annual conference of the National Urban League this past summer: "We believe as you do, that the white hood of the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi swastika are symbols of hatred from out of the past and there is no place for these ugly symbols in modern America."

A most encouraging sign that the American people are beginning to awaken to the dangers posed by the Klan was the convening of some 300 white and black people at Howard University in Washington, D.C., early in the year under the sponsorship of the National Anti-Klan Network. Representing some 23 states and the District of Columbia, the conference attendees mapped strategies to combat what they saw as a rising tide of racial violence. Such efforts need to be duplicated.

From what has been said above, it might be assumed that life was a totally bleak experience in Black America during 1981. It was not and no contention is being made here that it was. In fact, in a Washington Post/ABC poll blacks said, by a 3 to 1 margin, that their lives had gotten better not worse over the last ten years. But they also saw discrimination holding many of them back just as they saw the nation at a ominous turning point in race relations.

There are several observations to make about these results. The first is that contrary to the critics who say that none of the human resources programs and civil rights policies of the past have worked, obviously they have had a positive impact or else so many blacks would not feel that their condition has improved. And just as ob-

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