Tony Deyal...Black Man, White House

Tony Deyal…Black Man, White House

Sep 01, 2008 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

The Harvard Law Review is very well known. It started in 1887. The Harvard Campus Police Review is not as well known, because it was only announced on Wednesday, August 27, 2008. The first black President of the Harvard Law Review is Barack Obama.

The reason for starting the Harvard Campus Police Review is that there are concerns that the campus police have unfairly stopped black people because of their race.

Can the Harvard Campus Police stop Obama? Can Mc Cain stop Obama? Can the Ku-Klux Klan stop Obama?

The Campus Police stopped a summer employee who was trying to cut the chain off his bike because the lock was broken. Police interrupted a campus field day organized by two black student groups, asking if they had a right to be there. In 2004, they stopped a black professor who was walking to his office, because they thought he was a robbery suspect.

Obama was there in 1991. There is no record of whether they stopped him. Even if they did, he certainly rose above them.

Race in America is not the same as the racial issues in Guyana or Trinidad, or the tribal issues elsewhere. There are people who say that whether white Americans or black Americans, they still behave like Americans, and ugly Americans at that. There are others who look at the history of black people in America, and the extent to which they have suffered the slings and arrows, guns and bullets, ropes and nooses, deprivation and segregation, of outrageous fortune aided and abetted by white people, some of whom know better.

In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was campaigning for the Presidency of the United States, Mike Wallace, the journalist famous for his interviews on “60 Minutes,” asked him: “How many blacks are there on your top campaign staff, Governor?” Reagan replied, “I couldn’t honestly answer you. No.” Wallace shot back, “That speaks for itself.”

Reagan responded quizzically, “Huh?” Wallace repeated, “That speaks for itself.” Reagan was adamant, “No. I can’t tell how many people are on the staff.” Wallace then stated, “But surely you can tell black from white.”

Actually, Reagan (according to “Great American Anecdotes” by John and Claire Whitcomb) “did have a little trouble with things that appeared black and white to others. “How are you, Mr. Mayor? How are things in your city?” is how he greeted his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and the only black man in his Cabinet. Had Reagan been at Harvard, he would have been a campus policeman, given that act of stereotyping.

On October 20, 1965, Ronald Reagan said, “I favour the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and it must be enforced at gunpoint, if necessary.” In 1968, he said: “I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

John F. Kennedy wasn’t much better. While he was still a Congressman, he told black baseball player Jack Robinson, “I haven’t had much opportunity to learn about the Negro.” Robinson’s response was, “He has been in Congress fourteen years and he tried to tell me he hadn’t an opportunity to learn about the Negro.”

President Eisenhower told Martin Luther King that he didn’t have time for Civil Rights, because there were so many problems, like Lebanon, Algeria etc. King commented, “President Eisenhower could not be committed to anything which involved a structural change in the architecture of American society. His conservatism was fixed and rigid…” When Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock to integrate Central High, he commented about the Arkansas whites, “These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.”

Eisenhower should have grown up in Trinidad, where all of us, black, Indian, Chinese, whites of all sizes and both sexes, sat together, some more overgrown than others. Unfortunately, he didn’t, and a lot of other people as well.

J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director, who said, “Everybody knows that Negroes’ brains are twenty percent smaller than white people’s.” Had he gone to school, like I did, with guys like Euric Bobb, he would never have said that. Hoover, who hounded Martin Luther King and constantly taped his conversations, was asked in 1961, by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, how many black FBI agents there were. Hoover listed five. Three were his personal servants whom he had appointed as agents to avoid the draft. The other two were chauffeurs who drove Hoover around when he went to the FBI offices in Miami and San Diego.

There are some Americans whom one would not expect to be racist and who disappoint you when they prove that they are. Donald Trump, for instance, is said to have complained to his former CEO, John O’Donnell, “I’ve got some black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”

I suppose if the present American political script was an episode of “The Apprentice”, Trump could point his finger at Obama and say, “You’re fired!” However, even the Donald has to accept that there is a new spirit in America, where a black man could go beyond Trump Castle and Trump Plaza and end up in the White House.

I know what Martin Luther King would have said when that happens. “I had a dream. I had a vision…”
* Tony Deyal was last seen saying that sometimes, if you try too hard, you end up with your foot in your mouth. George Bush Sr., campaigning in 1988, said: “I’m anti-bigotry, I’m anti-racist, and anti-Semitic.”