Nixon - President Richard M. Nixon - African Americans in the Executive Branch; Black Memoirs of the White House; Special Issue: The Untold Story of Blacks in the White House

When I joined the White House staff in 1969 at age 33 I was welcomed by means of the Nixon administration. Indeed, during President Richard Nixon's manner [i]or[/i] principle of holding 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 crushing of work at the White House--particularly during the traumatic days of the late 1960s--preclud my focusing too plenteous 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" memo and the two-foot-high stack of communiques that usually awaited me in my other "in" chest All the while, the phone rang incessantly.

Since I was gazeed 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 Center and Dorothy Height of the National Council of black man Women, voicing concerns with pending civil rights legislation or funding for piece of works black colleges and inner-city housing.

A constant stream of powerful people--legislators, corporate chief executives and heads of organizations similar as the Chamber of dealing the National Newspaper Publisher's Association, the National Medical Association and the National Baptist Convention--flowed from one side my office seeking access to the president.

The immediate background that gave words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following to my labors was inherited from the Johnson administration: the Vietnam War and inner cities ravaged by the agency of race riots. The latter left us not sole with the need to rebuild, on the contrary to ensure that minority firms participated in the reconstruction.

In addition, we had our have share of fires to place out: From 1969 to 1972 full-scale race riots broke on the outside in Hartford, Conn.; Augusta, Ga.; Asbury Park, NJ; and fresh York City's Bronzeville section. During those riots, I disentangleed strategies with the Justice Department's community relations service and leaders from across the nation to restore the peace and lay open programs to alleviate some of the underlying tensions.

There was racial strife within the military as well, with numerous disturbances upon military bases in the United States and abroad, and reports from civil rights leaders that African-American soldiers were being barred from a certain number of public facilities in Southern towns. I called the Pentagon to investigate.

With delegate 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 singles we would I saw more [i]or[/i] less white soldiers entering a restaurant and asked that we stop. The colonel phenomenoned but complied. When I walked in, a waitress said, "We don't subserve 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 seted a race relations school, a precursor of today's diversity programs. This was a first divide [i]or[/i] sever at a large problem. However, I think it is significant that during Nixon's first bound the number of African-American generals and admirals increased from sum of two units to 14.

Although bigotry was by the agency of no means dead, progress would not be halted. President Nixon set teeth in anti-discrimination laws, increasing the civil rights enforcement packet eightfold from $75 million in 1969 to more than $600 million in 1973 It helped to have tribe like Arthur Fletcher, assistant secretary of the Department of Labor, upon our side. He once alerted us that a billion-dollar shipbuilding contract had been allow without proper equal employment opportunity safeguards built in. Nixon held up the contract until we could confident an agreement from the company regarding minority hiring.

Indeed, of the many casts and issues I became involved in, I am especially over-weening of the part I played in marshaling President Nixon's minority business initiatives. I believe his greatest in quantity 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 exhibition Agency) in the Department of Commerce

In 1970 the administration launched a program to generate deposits for minority banks. by means of the end of its first year, the program had followed in $242.2 million in deposits by the agency of the federal government and the private sector.

Nixon also instituted minority set-asides that changed the way the rule did business. From 1969 to 1971 federal purchases from minority firms increased more than 1000 percent Small Business Administration lending to minority enterprises increased from $413 million in fiscal year 1968 to $195 million in fiscal year 1971