“The Conservative approach is nothing more or less than an attempt to apply the wisdom and experience and the revealed truths of the past to the problems of today.”
Faced with pressing concern by liberals and conservatives about his twenty-year relationship with the controversial Pastor Jeremiah Wright, presidential hopeful Barack Obama stood at a podium in Philadelphia to deliver one of the most necessary speeches of his campaign. Perhaps his boldest admission to recognize that these discussions about his church “reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.” 2 In an effort to form that more perfect union, several states have taken one of the most basic principles of the conservative conscience into action by offering legislative apologies for slavery, segregation, and long-standing discrimination.
The first to begin this exercise in historical recognition was the Commonwealth of Virginia on Saturday, February 24, 2007. This was, of course, merely a “symbolic resolution” that meant little more than words, but the 96 members of the House and the 40 members of the Senate were unanimously in its favor. The Associated Press referred to the formal apology as “the latest in a series of strides Virginia has made in overcoming its segregationist past.” Virginia had been the first state to elect a black governor in 1989 as well as one of the first to create a “scholarship fund for blacks whose schools were shut down between 1954 and 1964.” 3
By sheer coincidence, my wife and I were living and working at Longwood University in Farmville, VA when the scholarship fund was passed in 2004. My position as the Assistant Catering Director of the institution required management of adults from the community and students from the college. Local demographics were evidenced in the staff. African Americans make up more than 25% of the population in Farmville and almost all of our food service employees were pulled from this percentage (by my own estimation, the Aramark staff was 90% black to 10% white). 4 Many of the people I worked closely with were still feeling the impact of Brown vs the Board of Education.
In 1959, rather than accepting Federally mandated integration, the school board of Prince Edward County (where Farmville rests) chose to close all the schools and bus the white children to a private academy. The educational blackout lasted four years. Black children who spanned every grade level were unable to continue their education and turned to other alternatives. More than forty years later, many of the men and women who had been teenagers between 1959 and 1962 were now employed under my supervision at Longwood. Understandably, the wounds still cut deep.
The most common sentiment on race expressed in 21st Century public opinion is to “get over it.” In an age of worldwide information and round-the-clock news, most Americans, predominantly white, have lost their historical sensitivity. In other words, to the vast majority of forward thinking white Americans, problems of racism and segregation were and are a thing of the past that has no relevant bearing on the people of today. And while we admit that our parents and grandparents can still remember the day when Kennedy was shot, we pretend that his assassination was the only historic event of the 60s beyond Vietnam. For some, going as far as to remember the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is resolution enough. Certainly, in these minds, we have no cause to apologize because the solutions have already been issued and any further wrangling would imply that those solutions were insufficient. Be it wrangling or mere discussions, these things have been consistently necessary to the progress of healing those racial wounds.
In 2004, during my brief tenure at Longwood, Andrea Walker, one of our best student employees, received the honorable Citizen Leader Award for her contribution to the institution. Graduating with a degree in Social Work, Andrea was a recipient of government assistance in financial aid (though I am unsure whether she received the Virginia scholarship fund). Her mother had been just a child when the schools closed in 1959 and Andrea was now the proud future of a broken history. Children whose education had been cut off either went in search of schooling elsewhere or stayed behind and bit the bullet of insufficiency. As those children grew older, they began having families and the redemption of what was lost could be seen in the glimmer of a rising generation. Implications of affirmative action aside, Andrea and her mother became one of many visible examples of racial healing through the privilege of a long overdue education.
Barry Goldwater was reasonably accurate to assert in 1961 that “the federal Constitution does not require the States to maintain racially mixed schools,” but when such an order was passed by law, those with Goldwater’s conservative mind did little more than feud about the improper actions of their government. All the while, black children within three hours of Washington were unable to read, to write, or perform the basic necessities of arithmetic. He did, to be sure, believe it “both wise and just for negro children to attend the same schools as whites,” but felt it unwise to “impose that judgment… on the people of Mississippi or South Carolina, or to tell them what methods should be adopted and what pace should be kept in striving toward that goal.” 5
It was the conservative conscience of the early 1960s that looked on the Brown case with constitutional frustrations. Goldwater was right to be angry with the intrusion of federal involvement with state affairs, but the action was done. The failure of conservatives was not in their disappointment, but rather, through their inaction. Indeed it was Goldwater himself who believed that the function of schools was to “educate individuals and to equip them with the knowledge that will enable them to take care of society’s needs.” 6 His challenge wasn’t ideological; it was practical.
Dorothy E. Davis had been the young voice of black equality in Farmville education. As a freshman, Davis was appalled by the overcrowding of Moton High School where all 450 black teenagers of the community were forced to squeeze into a facility made for only 180 people. Without running water or proper air circulation, the children were subject to inhumane environments that white schools in the area had no concern. 7 In theory, Goldwater was right to say that this was the state’s business. In fact, one could argue that it fell on the responsibility of the county and local government to resolve. But what was to be the result if Davis appealed for equality at the local and state level and found no assistance? Where else could she, or anyone with her concerns, turn when the state failed to uphold equal opportunity for happiness? Such a right to pursue happiness was, after all, the bedrock principle of the nation upon which the Federal government was created to protect. And if a black child could not receive an equivalent education to his white counterpart, was this not an injustice worth standing against at the highest level?
Goldwater conservatives turned Brown vs the Board of Education into a political right-and-wrong that left many displaced children without a prosperous future. In the wake of their arguments, Democratic Liberals took the mantle of fighting against racial injustice that now leaves many believing that conservatives are opposed to civil rights. This is, of course, a flawed generalization that implies every conservative is incapable of genuine compassion, but the recent increase in state apologies has made that flaw hard to argue. Far more conservatives than liberals seem to wrestle with the idea of apologizing for slavery and segregation when doing so is, quite clearly, just an act of resolving the legislative conscience from the stain of past wrongs.
After Virginia came apologies from Maryland (March 27), North Carolina (April 12) and Alabama (April 25). By January 7, 2008, New Jersey made the next move by joining with Maryland to apologize for their part in the deplorable slave trade. And more recently, Florida came on board with their own apology that prompted Governor Crist to call such historic racism a “gross inequity.” 8
From classrooms to grocery lines, many conservatives still wonder why we bother with this seeming nonsense. The very essence of being an original conservative, however, was always about making progress with cautious moderation. And it is moderation that allows people to see change in slow steps without trying to jump the entire staircase. Our nation still faces a dishonorable racial divide that some see and some do not, but apologizing for historic injustice is a move toward restoring our national conscience. One would hope that in the process, conservatives would recognize the need to restore their own.