Clinton’s gradual education on issues of race

By Mark Leibovich

updated 4:33 a.m. ET Feb. 2, 2008

WASHINGTON - Growing up in the palest of Chicago suburbs, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had some of her earliest exposures to African-Americans through field trips. She sat in the back of her father’s Cadillac as he detoured through the inner city, cautioning her about the fate of people who, in his conservative Republican view, lacked the self-discipline to succeed.

She took a sociology course at Wellesley College that included a trip through Boston’s poor areas. On Tuesdays, she went to a housing project in Cambridge to mentor “underprivileged Negroes,” as she wrote to Don Jones, her minister back home, who had taken her to hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak in Chicago four years earlier.

In a presidential campaign in which race has become a dominant issue, Mrs. Clinton’s early brush with Dr. King has been a recurring theme, invoked as a kind of “a-ha” episode to explain her coming of age on race. Yet Mrs. Clinton’s passage from sheltered Park Ridge, through the ferment of the civil rights era, to competing for black votes across the South, has been more gradual and introspective.

She spent 1964 volunteering for the Republican presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, a fervent opponent of the Civil Rights Act. She awakened politically in the combustible 1960s, but took a cooler approach to the civil rights movement. She demonstrated for racial equality, but it was just one of the items on her activism list (which included protesting the Vietnam War, agitating to allow cars on campus and fighting for the legal interests of children).

In promoting her civil rights record, Mrs. Clinton takes a sweeping view, incorporating a great deal of her work for the vulnerable and underserved — taking on juvenile-justice issues for the Children’s Defense Fund, leading a commission on education reform in Arkansas promoting the Family and Medical Leave Act as first lady. (Her campaign’s two-page list of civil rights accomplishments begins, at age 14, with the King field trip.)

“I do have a broader definition,” Mrs. Clinton said in an interview. “Civil rights are what each of us as human beings are entitled to in relationship to our society. But it really is, at core, about the respect and dignity of each human being.”

Frayed good will
Mrs. Clinton has seen her support among blacks as central to her political identity. She has had many African-American friends and advisers, racially diverse staffs and a Senate voting record that has earned straight A’s from the N.A.A.C.P. Even her rival, Senator Barack Obama , said in a debate that he is “absolutely convinced” of Mrs. Clinton’s commitment to racial equality.

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But that career’s worth of good will became somewhat frayed after supporters of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign — and chiefly, her husband — were accused of racially tinged attacks and innuendo against Mr. Obama before the South Carolina primary. Mr. Obama went on to rout Mrs. Clinton on the strength of strong support from blacks, a constituency Mrs. Clinton had courted hard.

The tone of the Clinton campaign deeply dismayed some African-Americans who had been close to the Clintons, including Eric Holder, a former top Justice Department official and Obama supporter. “It places their legacy at risk,” Mr. Holder said.

Even as the charged rhetoric of South Carolina subsides, race will no doubt persist as a theme for as long as Mr. Obama is running, the contest is close and emotions run raw. “I think everyone is trying to find their way, here,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Just as Mrs. Clinton has enjoyed the residual benefits of her husband’s popularity with blacks, she has also been tarred with the perceived failures of his administration. Any number of African-Americans, despite their support for Bill Clinton in the 1990s, still bristle over some episodes — from his criticism of the rapper Sister Souljah during the 1992 campaign to his welfare reform bill in 1996 to the number of black prisoners incarcerated during his administration.

“The policy record of the Clinton administration on civil rights is more mixed than people generally acknowledge,” said Christopher Edley Jr., the law school dean at the University of California, Berkeley, who served in the Clinton administration. He cited Mr. Clinton’s unwillingness to intervene in Rwanda, where hundreds of thousands died in tribal war, and his signing of what Mr. Edley called “a horribly punitive crime bill.” Mr. Edley said he remains fond of both Clintons but is supporting Mr. Obama.

Circumstances have put Mrs. Clinton in a delicate position: as the main obstacle to the first African-American with a serious shot of becoming president. “Hillary’s in a tough spot. We’re all in a tough spot,” said Representative James E. Clyburn, the Democratic House whip, and influential black leader from South Carolina. “You have two big dreams converging at the same time.”

While she has built her presidential campaign on “35 years of experience making change,” her first 25 years were arguably more central to shaping her views.

The city of Park Ridge, 15 miles northwest of Chicago, was mostly devoid of blacks, Hispanics and liberals — which was fine with Hugh Rodham, who was not shy about flinging prejudices across the dinner table. “He had the views that people of that age and time did,” Mrs. Clinton said.

She recalled her father’s driving her through rough parts of Chicago. “We’d go by skid row, which is what it was called in those days,” Mrs. Clinton said, “and we’d see some fellow leaning against a lamp post, and my father would start in on one of his usual lectures.”

Over time, she said, he mellowed. “His experience really undermined and contradicted” his earlier views on race, she said.

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