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When I joined the White House staff in 1969 at age 33, I was welcomed by the Nixon administration. Indeed, during President Richard Nixon's tenure, African Americans on the White House staff and elsewhere in the executive branch sometimes got a warmer reception at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue than we did from our brothers and sisters in the community. Perhaps fortunately, the pressure of work at the White House--particularly during the traumatic days of the late 1960s--precluded my focusing too much on this irony.
As special assistant to the president for domestic affairs, my day began at 7:30 a.m. with a review of "red-tag" memos and the two-foot-high stack of communiques that usually awaited me in my other "in" box. All the while, the phone rang incessantly.
Since I was looked to as liaison to the black community, the calls typically were from civil rights leaders like Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Leon Sullivan of Opportunities Industrialization Centers, and Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women, voicing concerns with pending civil rights legislation or funding for jobs, black colleges and inner-city housing.
A constant stream of powerful people--legislators, corporate chief executives and heads of organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce, the National Newspaper Publisher's Association, the National Medical Association and the National Baptist Convention--flowed through my office seeking access to the president.
The immediate background that gave context to my labors was inherited from the Johnson administration: the Vietnam War and inner cities ravaged by race riots. The latter left us not only with the need to rebuild, but to ensure that minority firms participated in the reconstruction.
In addition, we had our own share of fires to put out: From 1969 to 1972, full-scale race riots broke out in Hartford, Conn.; Augusta, Ga.; Asbury Park, N.J.; and New York City's Bronzeville(sic) section. During those riots, I developed strategies with the Justice Department's community relations service and leaders from across the nation to restore the peace and develop programs to alleviate some of the underlying tensions.
There was racial strife within the military as well, with numerous disturbances on military bases in the United States and abroad, and reports from civil rights leaders that African-American soldiers were being barred from some public facilities in Southern towns. I called the Pentagon to investigate.
With Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Howard Bennett, also African American, I flew to Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi. There, the base commander had organized a caravan of officers and a military police escort for our tour of local cafes and restaurants. It became obvious, however, that he had predetermined which ones we would I saw some white soldiers entering a restaurant and asked that we stop. The colonel objected but complied. When I walked in, a waitress said, "We don't serve colored here." I had seen enough. Back at the base, I instructed the colonel to issue an order barring all service personnel from entering the whites-only facilities. Within 48 hours, those facilities were integrated.
To ease the broader racial tensions in the armed forces, Nixon founded a race relations school, a precursor of today's diversity programs. This was a first cut at a large problem. However, I think it is significant that during Nixon's first term the number of African-American generals and admirals increased from two to 14.
Although bigotry was by no means dead, progress would not be halted. President Nixon put teeth in anti-discrimination laws, increasing the civil rights enforcement budget eightfold from $75 million in 1969 to more than $600 million in 1973. It helped to have people like Arthur Fletcher, assistant secretary of the Department of Labor, on our side. He once alerted us that a billion-dollar shipbuilding contract had been let without proper equal employment opportunity safeguards built in. Nixon held up the contract until we could secure an agreement from the company regarding minority hiring.
Indeed, of the many projects and issues I became involved in, I am especially proud of the part I played in marshaling President Nixon's minority business initiatives. I believe his most lasting domestic legacy is the Black Capitalism Program. Keeping his 1968 campaign promise, the president signed an executive order establishing the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (now known as the Minority Business Development Agency) in the Department of Commerce.
In 1970, the administration launched a program to generate deposits for minority banks. By the end of its first year, the program had resulted in $242.2 million in deposits by the federal government and the private sector.
Nixon also instituted minority set-asides that changed the way the government did business. From 1969 to 1971, federal purchases from minority firms increased more than 1,000 percent. Small Business Administration lending to minority enterprises increased from $41.3 million in fiscal year 1968 to $195 million in fiscal year 1971.
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