Two of the Texans, Wallace Jefferson and Dale Wainwright, were elected to the state Supreme Court, which has nine justices. The third is Michael Williams, 49, who in 1998 became the state's first African-American to hold a statewide executive position when he was appointed by Governor George W. Bush to complete the term of a departed member of the Texas Railroad Commission. He was elected to the commission in 2000 and reelected last year.
The commission has precious little to do with railroads. It regulates the state's oil and gas industries. Which is to say, it matters. Being born in Midland, Texas, was a shrewd career move by Williams, who returned there after attending the University of Southern California and staying there for law school. In 1978, at age 25, he ran for county attorney in Midland, and was, he cheerfully says, ''slaughtered.'' Part of the problem may have been his campaign manager, a callow whippersnapper named George W. Bush.
In 1990 the first President Bush appointed Williams as assistant secretary of education for civil rights and he soon riled the civil rights lobby by ruling that college scholarships exclusively for minorities are illegal. Today his head is full of thoughts about how Republicans can make inroads with African-American voters. This, he says, is how: slowly, state by state, with statewide candidates. Ken Blackwell agrees.
Blackwell is Ohio's secretary of state and the nation's senior African-American holder of a statewide office. A conservative who supported Steve Forbes for the 2000 presidential nomination, Blackwell notes that if Al Gore had received the votes Ohioans gave Ralph Nader, Bush would have carried the state by just 1 percentage point instead of 4. So it might be momentous if in 2004 Bush increases his share of Ohio's African-American vote from 9 percent to, say, 15 percent.
Winning reelection last year, Blackwell won 50 percent of the African-American vote, but does not think this helped the gubernatorial candidate, Bob Taft, who won without significant African-American support. However, Blackwell believes that his own success made it easier for Taft to select an African-American, Jennette Bradley, as his running mate for lieutenant governor.
The second African-American elected lieutenant governor last year is Michael Steele and the first ever elected statewide in Maryland. Robert Ehrlich, who selected Steele and is now governor, may have received as much as 14 percent of the African-American vote, while his opponent, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, did not get the turnout she needed.
Before the 2000 election, the most prominent African-American in public life was Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is prominent because of a Republican, the first President Bush. Never have African-Americans been as prominent in a presidential administration as they are in the current one, given the war against terrorism and the prominence of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice in the waging of it. Before the war eclipsed domestic policy, the president was particularly interested in education policy, which is the purview of Secretary of Education Rod Paige, an African-American.
Britain's Conservative Party gave the country a Jewish prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, and a woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. The second African-American elected governor of an American state since Reconstruction -- Douglas Wilder was elected Virginia's governor in 1989 -- may come from America's conservative party, the ranks of whose elected and appointed officials are decreasingly monochrome. And the successes of African-American Republicans in statewide elections will begin to produce modest -- and tremendously consequential -- Republican gains among African-Americans in presidential elections. [End]
George F. Will is a syndicated columnist. This story ran on page A15 of the Boston Globe on 4/28/2003. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
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What Rod Paige Really Said - The trigger-happy media target the secretary of education By Kenneth L. Woodward 04/28/2003, Weekly Standard Volume 008, Issue 32 [Full Text] EDUCATION SECRETARY Roderick R. Paige, it appears, is the latest victim of gotcha journalism. In his private life, Paige is a deacon at Houston Baptist Church. Last week the Baptist Press, a denominational news service, asked him in an interview, "Given the choice between private and Christian, uh, or private and public universities, who do you think has the best deal?"
To which Paige replied: "That's a judgment, too, that would vary because each of them have real strong points and some of them have vulnerabilities, but you know, all things being equal, I'd prefer to have a child in a school where there's a strong appreciation for values, the kind of values that I think are associated with Christian communities." As a transcript later released by Paige's office showed, this was amended by the Baptist Press reporter, fired for changing Paige's words, to read: "All things being equal, I would prefer to have a child in a school that has a strong appreciation for the values of the Christian community, where a child is taught to have a strong faith."
Gotcha! Once the interview made its way into the Washington Post and other secular publications, Paige became the target of liberal assault. Civil rights groups, educational organizations and, of course, Democrats in Congress expressed their ire. Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York circulated a letter among party colleagues demanding an apology "to the many American families whose faiths and educational choices your remarks have denigrated. If you are unprepared to make clear that this sort of religious bigotry has no place in the Department of Education, then we would urge you to resign."
At a press conference, Paige said he saw no reason to do either, adding that he had intended to convey only his personal preference to have a child in a college that emphasizes strong Christian values. But the liberal media saw a chance to play Toto, ripping away the curtain of educational impartiality to expose the Bush administration's hoaxing Wizard of Oz. A Washington Post editorial claimed the secretary's remarks revealed that the administration's support of school choice "is a cover for Christian school advocates who have given up on public education." Gotcha! A New York Times editorial the next day mongered the same fear. Paige's statements, said the Times, "reinforce suspicions that the administration is in sympathy with the religious right's drive to undermine the public school system in favor of a voucher-financed nationwide network of religious schools." Gotcha Deacon Paige!
Do Paige's critics really believe a pious Southern Baptist--or devout Muslim or observant Jew--cannot, should not, run the federal educational establishment if, as a parent, he would prefer to see his own kids in a religiously run school? The Post editorial at least acknowledged Paige's extraordinary achievements as superintendent of Houston's public schools. But neither the Times nor the Post seems to realize that thousands of public school teachers, principals, and superintendents send their own children to private and parochial schools for much the same reason--values--that Paige cites. So, one has to believe, do some of those who write editorials for our elite newspapers--at least those editorialists who are old enough to have school-age children.
The difference between religious and public schools lies less in values than in ethos: Elements of the ethos that makes Catholic schools work so well--things like discipline, esteem for students, personal attention, and equal academic demands on all students, not to mention on-site educational direction--can and should be duplicated in public schools. But there are other elements that only a religious education can provide. Study of the faith is one of them, but more important is the ethos of the school community and the explicitly religious formation it provides. A difficult virtue like forgiveness of enemies, for example, is more likely to impress students when it is presented as necessary to the formation of a Christ-like character, just as the compassion of the Buddha or the justice demanded by the Torah is best taught in a Buddhist or a Jewish school setting. This kind of formation cannot--should not--be part of the public school experience.
But the heavy-handed reaction to Secretary Paige is more than just the public education lobby acting on alert status. There is vincible ignorance at play here, as well as ideological bias. One has to ask where the editors of the Times get their information on parochial schools. No reporter at the Times, or at New York's tabs for that matter, is assigned to cover non-public schools. In Chicago or Cleveland or Dallas or Houston, the media recognize that Catholic, Lutheran, and other parochial school systems serve the public and are therefore news. But readers of the Times and those in Congress who echo its editorial views know more about the Muslim madrassas in Pakistan than they do the religious schools in New York or Washington. For more than 30 years I have been reading the Times's annual Education supplement, and only once have I seen a story on what is one of the largest Catholic school systems in the country.
Running throughout the ongoing debates in American education is the assumption that public schools are, by their very public-ness, more diverse than religious schools. Many of them are. But check out almost any inner-city Catholic school and you will find that black Baptists, Hispanic Pentecostals, and even Muslims may constitute the majority of the students. When last I visited the Catholic grammar school that my relatives attended in Detroit, I found in the classroom a statue of the Madonna in one corner and an open Bible, an icon for the school's many black Baptist students, in another. A few years ago, the winner of the annual award for the best religion essay at Rice High School, a private Catholic school near Harlem, was a Muslim. But that story never made the New York Times.
Diversity, it appears, is in the eye of the beholder. In my own public school district, one of those Westchester County upper-income enclaves that promise "private school education at public school expense," students are far more uniform--in terms of family income, parental background, and cultural capital--than those I studied with in a Midwestern Jesuit high school half a century ago. My own experience has since been reinforced by a study of Catholic education published a decade ago by two scholars from Harvard University. They found that in terms of real diversity--namely socioeconomic background, including ethnic mix--and in terms of providing all students with a demanding curriculum, the Catholic rather than the public schools are the true heirs of the American "common school," as envisioned by public education's founding fathers. The irony, of course, is that the common school those fathers fashioned, with its mandatory reading of the King James Bible, was designed to make good Protestants out of everyone, especially immigrant Catholic children. Indeed, as late as the 1930s, when my mother-in-law got out of normal school, a Catholic like her could not get a job teaching in a public school in rural Iowa because of her religion. A further irony is that until the 1960s, when the Supreme Court banned prayer in public schools, there were few if any evangelical grade or high schools, and leaders of Paige's own Southern Baptist denomination routinely criticized Catholic schools for being divisive and un-American.
That kind of prejudice is long gone. But equally virulent forms of ignorance and bias still pollute our public discourse about how to educate our youth. As the overreaction to Secretary Paige indicates, any public official who expresses a personal preference for religious schools is still suspect in so-called liberal circles. Those who champion a state monopoly on education, it turns out, are the real enemies of diversity.
Kenneth L. Woodward is a contributing editor at Newsweek.