Nixon's Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton

548 Pages·1995·87.888 MB·English

by  Kenneth O'Reilly

U.S. S:V >0
CAN $37.00
I
n 1970, President Nixon entertained, a mostly white
media elite at the annual Gridiron C b dinner with
a musical routine in honor of his racially divisive
“Southern Strategy. After a bit of banter, in which Vice
President Agnew answered the president in “darky
dialect,’ Nixon began to play the favorite songs of FDR,
Truman, and Johnson. A few bars into each, Agnew
drowned the President out with a manic “Dixie’ as the
crowd roared.
Kenneth 0 Reilly, whose Racial Matters blew the lid
off the FBI’s investigation and harassment of black
leaders, now scrutinizes each president’s record on race.
Nixon's Piano reveals that instead of being the agents of
progress in racial relations, American presidents have a
long and consistent history of supporting slavery,
obstructing civil rights, and deliberately fanning racism.
With the exceptions of Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon
Johnson, argues O’Reilly, every president has sacrificed
black rights for white votes.
Perhaps most alarming, 0 Reilly offers substantial
evidence of presidents whose repressive political policies
violated their own moral code. George Washington cor-
responded with Lafayette about the evils of slavery and
mused about establishing a plantation for freed blacks,
but President Washington kept his slaves and refused to
lend the weight of his office to the abolitionist move-
ment. Jefferson, certain and eloquent on the subject of
equality in the Declaration of Independence, found no
voice as president to oppose slavery. Lincoln, the first
president to allow blacks at White House social func-
tions and the eventual hero of the abolitionist move-
ment, opposed black efforts to vote, sit on juries, hold
office, or marry whites. Like many other presidents,
Lincoln supported the colonization movement as the
simplest solution to the nation’s racial strife. FDR, the
father of twentieth century social reform, but fearful of
offending white voters, refused to support an anti-
lynching law, banned black reporters from press confer-
ences, and undermined his own Fat Employment
Practice Committee.
More recent presidents, according to OML illy, have
pursued a racial politics ranging from the amid to the
devious. JFK wooed the black vote by mentionic: Africa
479 times in three months on the campaign trail while
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NIXON’S PIANO
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