Bush's first week and 'African-Americans' - 20 January 1989

President Bush. By the time you hear these words, he will be it.

He’s still having trouble with time, with dates. You may remember how during the campaign he wanted to recall a date which has sunk firmly into the American memory, 7 December 1941, the Japanese came whizzing out of the deep blue yonder and bombed the main base of the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu and so brought the United States into the war.

Everybody, schoolboys, says – as Groucho Marx, said “Run out and get a schoolboy” – that date, but it evidently eludes George Bush. On 7 September in a nationally-televised speech Mr Bush said let’s never forget that 47 years ago this very day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

A little over two weeks later a joke went the rounds, happily inspired by Mr Bush’s own staff, that he would not be available for any public appearance on 25 September because he always likes to spend Christmas at home. He used it himself in a subsequent television debate.

Curiously it became, not like Mr Reagan’s frequent violation of facts which had to be corrected next day by his staff, not an embarrassing habit, this foible of Mr Bush became actually engaging. He can’t help it and people begin to relish the prospect of more to come.

They were not disappointed. Last Tuesday when the media, wanting to know how he would spend inauguration day, received a photostat of a memo to himself in his own handwriting. He was going to get up at six and then quote “Catch three new shows, 6 – 6.15. 6.30 drink coffee, play with grandkids, pray, go to White House, go to Capitol Hill, get sworn in.”

What makes this homely little note precious and likely to chalk up an alarmingly high price if the original ever comes to auction is the first entry. It says “Gets up 6pm, catch three new shows, drink coffee” and so on. Well by this time you all know he didn’t sleep 'til the evening. He did get up at 6am and was on hand, as custom prescribes, at high noon and took the oath on 20 January. A rogue of a newsman hoped to badger an aide to get a copy of the President’s Friday diary in the hope it would say “Friday, January 21st, became President.”

I know a man who has already taken on a new hobby, collecting these clangers to make a little book of trivia to be called “The Time Warp of George Bush”. Well such pleasantries are always welcome on the days leading up to the inauguration because from Saturday on – Monday at the latest – the domestic life and amusements of George Bush will be nobody’s business but his own and the incurable tabloids.

He will sit down and face the immense problems that he himself has said are most pressing – the crushing budget deficit, a drug-infested society, the lag in equal rights for blacks and Hispanics, the chronic shortage of affordable housing for the working population and the poor, the rising numbers of homeless on the streets, as well as the creation of his own policies towards the Israelis and the Palestinians, towards Mr Gorbachev and his reforms and his ideas about disarmament, towards the now recognised diversity among the countries of Eastern Europe, towards the NATO allies and their notions of security, towards the looming prospect of 1992 and an economically united Western Europe, towards the economic challenges of Japan and over the prospering nations along the Pacific rim, towards the debt-ridden nations of Latin American, and always, at his back, he will hear the ticking of the time bomb, the threat of radioactivity from America’s first nuclear facilities which are rotting, bursting with undisposed waste and will – at the conservative guess of Senator John Glenn – cost between $140–$200billion just to repair and make safe.

How this enormous price tag is to be reconciled with reducing the federal deficit is something that no senator, congressman or incoming member of the presidential branch has yet proposed with any plausibility.

The only issue that Mr Bush addressed himself to vigorously before he was inaugurated, the only one anyway in which he plainly chose to differ strongly with Mr Reagan, was that of racial discrimination and black equality.

Mr Reagan, in one of several farewell interviews he’s given said on Sunday that civil rights leaders – he named no names – had greatly exaggerated the amount of discrimination practised against blacks and maintained that his own economic programmes had not by-passed black communities.

Now last Sunday you may have noticed was the 60th anniversary of the birth of the Reverend Martin Luther King. It’s now one of the only four national holidays and there were parades and commemoration services throughout the country. Mr Reagan has never, I believe, spoken with great admiration of Dr King.

When the national holiday was first proposed and a pushy reporter asked him he thought Dr King had been a Communist President Reagan said cryptically “Well later on we shall see, won’t we?” Dr King, may I remind you, was assassinated in his 40th year in the spring of 1968.

Well on Monday, the day of the actual national holiday, Mr Bush went to a breakfast prayer meeting which was held at a Washington hotel, and spoke out in remarkable terms about the dead leader. “Remember” he said “the moral stain of segregation, the lies it taught, and the anguish it inflicted on the lives of black Americans and on the conscience of the entire American people.”

He called Dr King “a great gift from God” who lived a hero’s life and dreamed a hero’s dreams. “Heed him, heed them, so that bigotry and indifference to disadvantage will find no safe home on our shores, in our public life, in our neighbourhoods or in our home. It will, I promise, be my mission as President of the United States.”

No former President of either party has spoken out so unreservedly about the Reverend King as a national hero and one effect of Monday morning’s speech was a telephone call from the Reverend Jesse Jackson who on the same morning in Atlanta had spoken from the pulpit of the Reverend Martin Luther King’s old church and called the leadership of President Reagan below the dignity and promise of America.

Now Jesse Jackson had no plans to attend the inauguration but after Mr Bush’s breakfast speech he put in a call to the Bush headquarters and said he was coming and just in case anyone thought he was showing unwonted respect for the Republican party he announced with characteristic sharp eloquence, “The inauguration is not a Republican event, it is an event for the Republic”.

Incidentally a week or two ago Jesse Jackson made an announcement, gave it out almost as a command to the nation. I can’t think of another politician who could do this without adding “I speak only for myself.” He said the time had come to stop calling blacks "black". He proposed, announced, ordered, another change.

From now on, he wants to be known and he wants all blacks to be known as African Americans. "Black" he says, makes an immediate glaring distinction between the colours of different American citizens, which indeed it does as of, he says, white, yellow, black, not good enough any more.

"African American" on the contrary, he says, is a reminder of an American with a particular heritage. He says we talk about Italian Americans, Polish Americans, German Americans. Time now to call all blacks, to give them the dignity as he sees it, of being African Americans.

To this generation of Americans this will be a new idea. To many it will be a step backwards and suggest that we are reverting to what President Theodore Roosevelt called so long ago as 1919 the “polyglot boarding house” from which he thought the immigrants from every nation ought to be rescued.

In a famous speech Teddy Roosevelt said, “Let’s talk no more of Italian Americans, German Americans, Polish Americans – let us have no more hyphenated Americans. We have room for but one language here and that is the English language for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.”

That was the beginning of Teddy Roosevelt’s drive to help immigrants break out of tight compounds, of foreign quarters and of staying permanently with their own kind, most seriously with their own language. Night schools began everywhere to teach immigrant parents the language of their children, English, and in the new great tidal wave of these last years of Hispanic and Asian immigrants there is a similar movement which is receiving tough resistance to make English the official language of the states by law, to see at least that Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese, whatever remained the second language of the newcomer.

As for the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s proposal about African American, it strikes me that in 60 years we’ve come full circle. When I arrived here in the early '30s the public respectable word was "negros". Whites could talk winsomely, but not in their presence, about "darkies". "The coloured people" was the other general acceptable alternative. The big change came in the 1960s when the negro leaders, and no one more assertively than the young Reverend Jesse Jackson, proclaimed that "black is beautiful" and that "negro" and "coloured" should be dropped and now everybody talks and writes about the "blacks", including themselves.

In the mid 1920s the Baltimore newspaper man HL Mencken, who was a national figure, began using "Aframerican" in his writings. There was an instant uproar among coloured, black, negro leaders as we said and strong protests from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Mencken was seen as being an outrageous mocker. He dropped it.

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