Racial discrimination, 1976

At this charitable season, I'm sure the last thing you want to hear about is an account of the ruthless bossism of Mayor Daley of Chicago who dropped dead a few days ago. Or, next to that, about the political in-fighting that's now going on inside the camp of Jimmy Carter's advisers.

I mentioned two weeks ago, I think, that there's no need whatever to try and memorise the names of the Cabinet officers he's chosen because the American presidential system is not a Cabinet system. It meets only when the president feels like it, which is not often because he's too busy running the country with the four or five cronies un-elected, un-appointed, who live with him day and night. But there's one Cabinet appointment just made that has set off an uproar, especially among the blacks, and it's now pretty clear that if there was one block of voters, one distinguishable group of Americans who put Mr Carter in the White House more than any other, it was the black voters. 

Mr Carter has just appointed an Attorney General who's the head of the Department of Justice and is, therefore, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. I'm not going into his qualifications – which are now a matter of hot debate – to fill this office, for the moment I'll simply say that whereas Mr Carter says that Mr Griffin Bell, that's the name, that Mr Bell has a superb record on civil rights, for all the blacks say he has a very dubious record indeed. 

What has attracted me to talk about Mr Bell, an Atlanta lawyer, a judge on the Federal Court of Appeal and close friend of Mr Carter, is something that comes up in this country but not, I think, in other democratic countries; never, so far as I can recall, in Britain. And it's yet another fascinating example of the vigilante role of the American press that makes the life, the public and private life of any man or woman an open book once he, or she, becomes a public official. 

Now, just to sharpen the contrast, to make you think of London when I'm talking about Washington, let me put it this way. When you'll hear that John Wallaby has been made Foreign Secretary or Fred Stretchford has been made Chancellor of the Exchequer, do you instantly wonder how many companies he has shares in and which clubs he belongs to? And do your newspapers hasten to tell you, to his immediate embarrassment, with questions asked and, as can happen here, a regretful little speech by the Prime Minister withdrawing the appointment. I think not. By the way, when people are appointed to a federal office in this country, they are required to report all their stocks and shares and put them in escrow for the period of their service. 

Well, Mr Bell has been named Attorney General designate and about 24 hours later the diggers of the press dug up the fact that he was a member of two private clubs in Atlanta that have no blacks or Jews as member. Now what's amazing to the politicians is that Mr Carter should not have routinely questioned all his appointees about such affiliations, because when it comes out it always triggers a shockwave and it always subsides when the appointee regrets the insensitivity of his past life and resigns from the club, or clubs. When Mr Carter heard about the sin of Mr Bell, he said rather limply that he hoped all his Cabinet officers would give up their membership in any organisation that discriminated against minorities. In the South-West it may soon become a scandal if you belong to a club that does not admit, say, Mexican Americans. Well, if Mr Bell hasn't already resigned by the time you hear these words – resigned from those clubs – it will be amazing. 

This is bound to bring up in the minds of some people the question of whether, in the heyday of civil rights, whether it's legal to form a club with any sort of exclusive membership. Well, yes! No question. You can form an Irish American club or (the) rifle club, a tennis club, a debating society, and you can exclude anybody the board feels like excluding, provided that you don't meet in a building or on land, or employ any services that are owned by the city, by the state or by the federal government. 

All the test cases that have come up before the Supreme Court since the Equal Rights decision of 1954 have challenged the right to discriminate of any organisation supported in any way by public funds – schools, restaurants, buses, toilets, housing projects, clubs, recreation grounds attached to the same, and so on. The forbidding grounds are always the same, and the Supreme Court has always reiterated them, that such discrimination violates the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which says, 'No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws'. Nobody has yet tested the right of private clubs to exclude anyone on grounds of race or religion, or whatever, and I don't think they're likely to. Mr Bell's clubs were privately owned. 

So was a club to which Senator Kennedy, John Kennedy, belonged in Washington, but when he became president, he resigned. And Mr Bell, similarly, is not up against the law, he's up against the strong public feeling that no government official should be associated with any group that chooses to bar any sort of American. And this takes me back to a prime example of the power of the press to embarrass any public man into shedding what may well be a lifetime's fellowship with his buddies. 

When in, I think, 1964 Mr Nelson Rockefeller came out for the presidency, the press discovered overnight that he was a member of an exclusive New York City Club that did not include Jews or Negroes, as we then used to say. 'What?' cried Mr Rockefeller, shocked to his marrow, 'No Jews or negroes?' I'm sure he could have sworn that he'd seen Negroes there often, carrying trays. Well, Mr Rockefeller was so indignant over the (tacit) policies of a club he'd belonged to for years that he got out at once. It then came out that one of his sons, I believe it was the littlest and the last, had stock in the club. Mr Rockefeller scrupulously and immediately sold it. 

Within a day or two, Mr Richard M. Nixon let it be known that he, too, was thinking of the presidency. So the press discovered that he was a member of a famous golf club in New Jersey which may have heard of Jews and blacks but most certainly had never seen one on the course or in the clubhouse. Mr Nixon's approach was, as you might expect, less hasty, more thoughtful, more humane. Mr Nixon said ah yes, he was well aware of the discrimination but he was working from within to change it. This admirable crusade, which he had naturally not publicised, was brought to an abrupt end when, about a day later, Mr Nixon resigned. 

This, by the way, was the club which in 1967 was chosen as the site of the US Open, which is the American national golf championship, and I... I remember it vividly because I was called on by my paper to cover the event at the last minute. It seemed that our permanent golf expert, the eminent Mr Pat Ward-Thomas was detained in Britain on other business, the Dorsetshire Girl Guide foursomes I believe, or some other such prestigious event. In any case, he couldn't cross the Atlantic and this put me in a bind because the Security Council of the United Nations was meeting night and day over the dreadful business of the Arab Israeli war (...) . Well the council finished up, considerately, at three in the morning on the day the United States Open started and I remember the puzzlement on the face of the most artful of American sportswriters, a prose demon named Red Smith, when he saw me bent over my typewriter in the press tent in this New Jersey club, banging out a couple of thousand words. The tournament had not yet begun and he wondered how I could have anything at all to write. Then, he looked over my shoulder and saw that the dateline was 'United Nations NY' and I was busy filing my last dispatch on the war in the Middle East. 

Well, the golf was played in one of the most drenching heatwaves even of an American summer on the infernal Eastern seaboard. On the last, the fourth, morning of the championship, it was 112 degrees inside the press tent and at some sweating pause in mid-morning, two or three of us were standing round looking up at the huge scoreboard that blanketed one wall of the press tent – the scores are recorded cumulatively so that you can see, at a glance, who is so many strokes under par or over par for the previous three rounds and the holes he's already played in the final round then (proceeding). You recognise the leader, or leaders, at once because they tend to be under par and if so their score, three, four, five, whatever, is printed in red. Everybody over par is printed in green. Well, at the start of that fourth, last, round there was only one name in red, it was that of an unknown, a fellow named Marty Fleckman. As we were goggling over this and wondering if some official would come through with a quick, potted biography of this redoubtable Fleckman, an old stockbroker, who's had much to do with golf in the United States, sauntered by, followed our gaze and said, 'Who's that Fleckman in the lead? Is that that Jewish boy from New Orleans?' 'That's the man', somebody said. Somebody else said, 'Boy, wait till the Arabs hear about this!' And Red Smith said wistfully, 'Wait till the club hears about it!' 

You know the most ironical thing about discrimination, especially discrimination against Jews, is that it is practised with the quietest, but the most unflagging, tenacity by white-prophesying Christians and it's a rueful thought, at this time of the year, that they would be the first to blackball from their clubs the founder of Christianity himself. Again. 

Merry Christmas!

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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