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 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 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.

None of this black economic empowerment happened without commitment or muscle. There were naysayers at every turn, in government, business and even in the civil rights community. Fortunately, we also had many allies, among them the National Bankers Association and National Business League. Seeing these efforts pay off was for me a high point of the administration.

These were far from the only Nixon administration measures aimed at establishing a black foundation for black progress. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, for example, ushered more and more African Americans into elective office. In 1970, President Nixon signed a bill extending that law to 1975. In 1971, when the Congressional Black Caucus was formed, the president followed the advice of some senior staffers and refused to meet with the caucus. In subsequent months, however, some of us in the administration convinced him to meet them. After that meeting, Nixon formed a task force to consider and act on the caucus' recommendations.

Promoting black colleges was a priority with me. Toward this end, I arranged a series of meetings between Nixon and black college presidents, knowing that the president saw education as a great equalizer. The president doubled aid to black colleges to more than $600 million. He also became the first president to issue an executive order denying tax deductions for contributions to segregated schools.

In my time in the White House, I also wanted to ensure that African Americans were on the guest list for every White House dinner and were regularly invited to use the president's box at the Kennedy Center when it was available. These were not frivolous matters. Such occasions were welcome reprieves from the pressures of Washington, D.C.; more important, they were opportunities to network and to be seen as an emerging element of America's decision-making process.

On a more personal note, I well remember one of my most solemn tasks during those years-bringing home the body of National Urban League President Whitney Young Jr., who had drowned while visiting Africa. At the president's request, General Daniel "Chappie" James, the U.S. Air Force's senior black general, set up a special mission plane. With Young's family and a group that included several African-American leaders, we flew to Nigeria to bring the body home. Several days later, I accompanied President Nixon to Young's funeral, where he delivered a memorial tribute.

I am privileged to have been a part of a continuum of black White House staffers that began with E. Frederic Morrow in the Eisenhower administration and is sure to continue till race is no longer a central feature of American society. I am richer for the chance to have played a small part in history during my White House days; richer still for the many lasting friendships I made in Washington, across the nation and around the globe. Roben J. Brown is president and chief executive officer of B&C Associates Inc.

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