Why Hillary Clinton's Stint as a Civil-Rights Secret Agent Matters Today
One of the most interesting holiday surprises was the revelation by Amy Chozick in The New York Times about Hillary Rodham, Covert Operative.
Playing down her flat Chicago accent, she told the school's guidance counselor that her husband had just taken a job in Dothan, that they were a churchgoing family and that they were looking for a school for their son. The future Mrs. Clinton, then a 24-year-old law student, was working for Marian Wright Edelman, the civil rights activist and prominent advocate for children. Mrs. Edelman had sent her to Alabama to help prove that the Nixon administration was not enforcing the legal ban on granting tax-exempt status to so-called segregation academies, the estimated 200 private academies that sprang up in the South to cater to white families after a 1969 Supreme Court decision forced public schools to integrate. Her mission was simple: Establish whether the Dothan school was discriminating based on race.
Make no mistake. Even in 1972, this took considerable guts. The segregated academies were the outward sign of the vicious backlash against the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement that only would intensify over the following decade as the Republican party, and the conservative movement that would come to be its essential life-force, discovered that, in many important ways, the whole country was Southern. The backlash was even more virulent at the local level. If Undercover Hillz blew her cover, very bad things could have happened to her.
"It was dangerous, being outsiders in these rural areas, talking about segregation academies," said Cynthia G. Brown, a longtime education advocate who did work similar to Mrs. Clinton's.
Why HRC declined to talk with Chozick about this undeniably heroic period of her life remains a mystery, but several of the possible answers are not flattering. (One of the less objectionable ones is that she's going to let the story sell itself, which is pretty good politics.) But the story obliges us to point out that she was doing this work at the behest of Marian Wright Edelman, the longtime crusader for racial justice and education who quit the Clinton Administration in disgust over the 1996 welfare "reform" bill. The relationship between HRC and the Edelmans was still a prickly one well into the current administration. (Marian's husband, Peter Edelman, who also resigned, was more scathing in his public criticism.) So even this indisputably courageous act is complicated in a campaign sense by what happened when HRC's husband was president, and by her too-cautious-by-half attempts to embrace the positive legacy of that presidency while distancing herself from the policy decisions that have grown unpopular with a changing Democratic base. It remains a presidential campaign based on weird ambiguities.
But, damn, at the time, doing this in a place like Dothan took some serious sand.
