The most telling point in the history just summarized is the following neglected fact: This was all accomplished without government intervention and without affirmative action. There were no government policies or official guidelines laid down for owners of athletic teams, no EEOC investigators hovering around stadiums or summoning owners to court; no lawsuits filed by NAACP lawyers, no consent decrees ordered by federal judges, no heavy government hand compelling owners to redress “past injustice.” Only two things were required to launch this momentous change in America’s race relations: a single white businessman with a vision, and a public to support him.
That man was Branch Rickey, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was Branch Rickey and Branch Rickey alone who decided to hire Jackie Robinson and make baseball a multiracial sport. To complete the process, a second element was indispensable: the good will of the white fans. If whites had turned away from the game because of the presence of black players, Rickey’s efforts would have come to naught. But the crowds kept coming. Other owners, needing the best players to transform their clubs into winning teams, and seeing that the fans would accept players of any race, followed suit. And that was how the face of America’s sports industry was changed: through an open market and competition.
Sports club owners are not the most enlightened segment of the population, and neither perhaps are sports fans themselves. But they have shown over half a century they are not racists either. Given the choice, they will accept black Americans, recognize their achievements and even worship them as popular icons and heroes, rewarding them like kings in the process.
So tolerant is the real America that, in 1997, Dennis Rodman, a black transvestite with orange and sometimes green hair, can earn millions of dollars a year, be sought after for product endorsements and become an idol to white American youngsters. These are facts that need to be remembered at a time when so many civil rights leaders dwell only on the negative aspects of our racial present and past.
The corrosive effect of affirmative action policies that insist on government-ordered race preferences is to make America forget this history, and to convince black Americans that without government coercion and court decrees, they cannot get the justice they deserve. It is to convince them that whites are irredeemably racist and that black success depends on government agencies forcing whites to be fair. This is a perverse argument and I leave it to armchair psychologists to figure out why it is apparently so persuasive.
Jackie Robinson was able to break the color bar and enter the major leagues because he was better than most of the players at the time. The injustice of his exclusion was obvious first to one man and then to all. Americans are by and large a fair-minded people. As we commemorate Black History Month, it’s time for us all to acknowledge this fact.
February 24, 1997, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24416; http://www.salon.com/1997/02/24/horowitz970224/.
Considered by many conservatives as the great hope of the Republican Party, Jack Kemp has a strange weakness for America’s premier black racist, Louis Farrakhan. On a campaign stop in Harlem during his 1996 vice-presidential campaign, Kemp praised Farrakhan as a “wonderful” supply-side role model for inner-city blacks, without mentioning Farrakhan’s racial venom against whites or his pathological obsession with Jews.
Kemp was prompted to embrace Farrakhan by his eccentric friend Jude Wanniski, a Wall Street economic advisor whose supply-side theories are highly influential in some conservative circles.11 But the two went much further earlier this month at Wanniski’s annual gathering for clients and admirers in Boca Raton, Florida. Lured by such stars as Kemp, conservative columnist Robert Novak and key legislators like Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and Rep. John Kasich, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Budget Committee, approximately 100 Wall Street and industrial movers and shakers came to hear a 90-minute talk by the gathering’s main attraction, Minister Farrakhan.
See also “Kemp Praises Farrakhan For His Focus on Family,” Jerry Gray, New York Times, September 10, 1996, http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/10/us/kemp-praises-farrakhan-for-his-focus-on-family.html.
The Kemp-Wanniski agenda in Boca Raton was to introduce representatives of the white establishment to the “new” Farrakhan, a smooth-talking advocate of inner-city “self-reliance”—a nostrum dear to the hearts of some conservative theorists—and to promote reconciliation with the fanatic and his gullible followers. Novak, who moderated the event, described Farrakhan as “a man trying to transcend his past.”
While Farrakhan was supposedly undertaking that effort, his followers were distributing hundreds of thousands of copies of the March issue of his newspaper, The Final Call, to black communities across the nation. The issue accuses whites of “lynching” O.J. Simpson and insinuates that Jewish manipulators of the media deliberately scheduled NBC’s airing of Schindler’s List, the Academy Award-winning film about the Holocaust, during Black History Month as an insult to African-Americans. It also reprints an article by the late Elijah Muhammad about the coming “fall of America”—a fall ordained by God because of this nation’s irredeemable wickedness—and prints a message that Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi sent to Farrakhan’s recent Saviors’ Day Convention in Chicago.
What attracts these white conservatives—who presumably don’t read The Final Call—to Farrakhan? Like the Marxists of a bygone era, Kemp and Wanniski are convinced that economics is destiny, even in the poorer segments of the black community. Convinced that “enterprise zones” will cure America’s inner-city problems, they regard anyone who adopts such market-oriented solutions with favor. What they perhaps did not know was that only weeks earlier, Farrakhan had re-launched his crusade for an independent and separate black state to be carved out of America. This, it is true, would be a self-reliant entity, but one premised on the belief that white America is irretrievably racist—a belief that repudiates everything Kemp presumably holds dear.
If Louis Farrakhan wants to convince the objects of his venom that he is interested in reconciliation, he does not need Jack Kemp, Jude Wanniski or Robert Novak to act as interpreters for him. Any day Farrakhan wants to show that he has changed his malevolent tune, he can do so very simply and all by himself. He can begin by repudiating the creed that he preaches: that white people are “blue-eyed devils” created by a mad scientist named Yakub, that they are guilty of monstrous crimes against humanity and are therefore slated for destruction by God in order that the world may be saved. Then he can stop his publication and distribution of “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,” which is the Nation of Islam’s home-grown version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, portraying Jews as the diabolical and conspiratorial enemies of blacks through history.
Until Farrakhan repudiates his abhorrent preaching, it is shameful for American conservatives to lend him credibility and support.
http://www.salon.com/1997/03/20/news_351/.
1 See also “Kemp Praises Farrakhan For His Focus on Family,” Jerry Gray, New York Times, September 10, 1996, http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/10/us/kemp-praises-farrakhan-for-his-focus-on-family.html.