Back to The Start

EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, the Reagan administration shows exactly what it means by "less government." The president's men have long advertised that their policies represented a bold departure from the traditional conservative agenda, but last week's decision to return tax-exempt status to segregated schools should clarify any confusion about labels.

For all its talk of "liberty," the White House has merely picked up where the segregationists and states' righters of the '50s and '60s left off. "Less government" has nothing to do with it. The tax decision will make it easier for whites in the south and elsewhere to abandon the public schools and form exclusive sanctuaries from their Black neighbors. These all-white academies have been among the most egregious attempts to block integration in the south, and with its decision, the Administration has offered its explicit support to these institutions of bigotry.

So it is not less government that Reagan and his associates want. It is merely different government--government dedicated to preserving hatreds instead of eliminating them. The goals are really little different than those of the men who stood at the schoolhouse doors 20 years ago and said Black students would never set foor inside their schools; the President's smiling face and amiable manner should not confuse the issue. Protests over the integration of schools and universities were the seed from which the civil rights movement grew and provided some of the proudest successes in three decades of domestic strife. Some optimists might have thought that the eighties were to be a time for the nation to address some of the economic injustice that the first stage of the civil rights movement left virtually untouched. But this decision makes it clear that the Reagan administration will return the struggle to its most elemental level. It is a clear challenge to all Americans who believe in civil rights; it is now up to all of us to stand and fight--again.