AN INTERVIEW WITH THE PRESIDENT By CARL SFERRAZZA ANTHONY

Last September, during the impressive ceremonies that marked forty years since the federally ordered desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School, President Clinton paused for an interview with American Legacy. For a President who has committed himself to racial healing, it was an appropriate setting to reflect on early experiences of life in a segregated society and remember a historic event that was a benchmark in his own personal development as a native Arkansan. It was in September 1957 that, after several years of obstruction, the Little Rock school board finally agreed to admit a small number of black students to its all-white Central High School. In the tumultuous days that followed, Gov. Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to bar the students, after which President Dwight Eisenhower reluctantly brought in paratroopers of the 101st Airborne to effect the students' entry. This was the first time since the Civil War that Federal troops had been used to override what had been thought of as States' Rights.

During his speech at Central High, President Clinton not only reflected on the heroism of the Little Rock Nine, those African-American teenagers who day after day had to defy strident hatred, but also discussed the steps still to be taken to vanquish intolerance. Our talk took place the next morning in Little Rock's "Little White House," a private home next to Clinton's mother-in-law's house, where the President and Mrs. Clinton stay when they are in the city.

Mr. President, I'd like to ask you about your personal memories of a segregated South and about your forecasts for the future of race relations in this country. Yesterday, as we gathered to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School, you said, as you have on previous occasions, that Central High was a turning point for you. Where were you as the events unfolded?
I was a sixth-grade student in Hot Springs, and I saw it, obviously, on television. It dominated every Arkansas newspaper for weeks and weeks, every news program on TV. And we watched a lot of television then, because we'd only had one for a year. It was all that the grown-ups talked about, you know, and eventually the kids got into talking about it; at least most of us did.

You were then living with your mother and stepfather?
Yes. My brother was born by then, and my maternal grandparents also had moved up there to Hot Springs, Arkansas, from Hope, so they lived near us, and I saw them all the time.

I know that your mother had said that even though you were only eleven years old at the time, you were an influence on her regarding race relations.
I think that she was less political about it. She was less political about everything than I wasóuntil she got into it. I don't know how much racism was discussed in her home, but it was a real issue when I was a little boy and spending a lot of time with my grandparents. They talked to me a lot about it.

Was equality among the races just an idea you were naturally raised with?
In the beginning it was, but later we talked about it. And then, of course, from 1954 on, it was discussed in the South, because that's the year that Brown v. Board of Education was decided, that's the year people were beginning to organize, to demonstrate, to press for their rights. So there was a lot of discussion about it, from the mid-fifties on. ìOne of the problems with this issue is that you can win a lot of arguments, yet you look in peopleís eyes and you see that you havenít changed them. There is some core you havenít touched.î

Your grandfather had a general store where he served both white and black customers and even extended credit to African-Americans at a time when most white shopkeepers would not, and your grandmother was a nurse who often went into African-American neighborhoods to treat children. What did they tell you about treating others equally?
Oh, just simple, self-evident things. I mean, it was no big deal. They just felt that black people were not making, and could never make, a good living and would never have a fair chance unless their kids had the opportunity to go to the good schools. It was very simple, straightforward stuff. They thought that Southern society was too segregated, and that it was a bad, bad deal. But for reasons I never could figure out, they were free of the kind of social insecurity found in many white people with limited educations and limited incomes. For years politicians made a living off of people like my grandparents by inflaming racial hatred in them, and there were a lot of people who openly said, "These Southern rednecks need somebody to look down on; we're going to give them the blacks and they'll be with us from now on." It was a very crass, callous, calculating thing, but a lot of people in politics did it. And somehow my grandparents were free of that. They came from this little-bitty place out in the country. My grandfather was instinctively a liberal Democrat. He lived for Franklin Roosevelt. But he also believed in civil rightsóalthough he never read a book about it, I'm quite sure, and never attended a meeting about it. He was just a poor guy struggling to make his life work, and he just thought that what was going on in terms of racial division was crazy.

At what point in your own youth did you first start encountering other white children or friends in school who might question your views on equality, or taunt you?
Little Rock. Little Rock. Little Rock changed it for everybody, because then, all of a sudden, everybody not only had to think about it but had to have an opinion, and then you had to say what your opinion was. So everybody knew how you felt, and that changed everything. It was very interesting. In my hometown we probably had relatively more white people who were sympathetic to integration because we had a very large Jewish population and we had a lot of recent immigrants. I was in a Southern town of thirty-five thousand that had two synagogues and a Greek Orthodox church. That was unusual back in the fifties, and so, I think there was a lot of understanding of oppression and discrimination. My hometown also had a lot of people who had been Lincoln Republicans. The town was a little pocket of nationalism, going back to the Civil War. Most Republicans in Arkansas, and throughout the South, lived in the hill counties in the north ern part of their states where there was no slave culture. And for reasons I'm not quite sure of, we always had a big, progressive Republican population. So those people were backing Eisenhower when he sent the troops in. But they were a distinct minority. It still wasn't all that great.

When, as a result of the 1957 desegregation order, Little Rock's public schools were closed during the 1958-59 academic year, did any of those students go to school up in Hot Springs?
Yes, a few did, but I didn't know any of them. Most of them tried to go to school a little closer to home, but we did have a few children come all the wayóas far as Hot Springs. All of those kids, black and white, had to find someplace else to go to school.

Did other white students confront you for your belief in racial integration? What did you say to change the minds of the classmates who disagreed with you?
A lot of white kids thought I was crazy, but they didn't show any personal grudge towards me. I argued with my classmates all the time. I don't know whether I changed anyone's thinking, but I just said the obvious things you would say about why you thought it was wrong. And usually I could win an argument. I'd explain why they were wrongóin vigorous terms. I was more verbal than most of my classmates; I could win any argument. But then, as I said, winning an argument was not the same thing as changing somebody. One of the problems with this issue is that you can win a lot of arguments, yet you look in people's eyes and you see that you haven't changed them. There is something still being held back, some core you haven't touched.

Did you ever encounter any African-Americans who might have made assumptions about your views because you were a young, white Southern man?
I never had any adverse encounters with blacks when I was little. My father was the parts manager of my uncle's car dealership, and I spent a lot of time there. It was one of the few integrated workplaces I knew of. In the back of the car dealership, where all the cars were repaired and prepared for sale, many of the mechanics were black. I spent a lot of time back there, down on the ground, looking up under cars, talking to people, getting to know them. To me it was all easy and normal. That's one of the reasons I never could figure out what the deal was about segregation. It seemed so normal to me for people just to relate to each other.

Yet all around you at that time you saw the segregated South. Can you describe some of the shocking things you witnessed that are no longer a part of our society?
Yes, I remember people selling poll taxes. I remember people buying poll taxes for blacks in packages of one hundred and going into neighborhoods and filling out the names and then telling black people who they were to vote for and lining them up in pickup trucks to take them to voting places on Election Day. I remember a campaign in the early sixties, when the candidate I was with asked an elderly black woman to vote for him. She said, "I can't do that, mister, I don't have a poll tax anymore." And he said, "The Supreme Court said two years ago you don't have to have that." She didn't know it.
There are all sorts of dark manifestations of how things used to be. A lot of people didn't vote because they knew what the whole poll-tax system was about. I used to go over to the Mississippi Delta when I was in college and just drive around and talk to sharecroppers. I can remember, even as late as the mid-sixties, going into courthouse squares in the Delta and seeing public restrooms marked "White" and "Colored." The beginning of slavery was an economic system that then had a social, psychological, and political justification built for it.
Many people have no idea that even a hundred years after the Civil War, some of the oppression was still alive and well in the sharecropper system. I remember in 1968, Sen. Bill Fulbright was running for re-election and he asked this Delta planter how his sharecroppers were doing. And the guy looked at him and he got a kind of hard look in his eyes, and he said, "Well, if we have a bad year they break even. And if we have a good year they break even." I remember meeting another white guy named Bo ReeseóI never will forget this guyówho lived in a county with a big black population. He was talking to Fulbright about this very encounter, because he knew this planter. And this sixty-something-year-old white guy in 1968 said, "You've got to do something about that. This is wrong." So there were always a few people like that, in the most unlikely circumstances, who would stand up for what was right.

ìThe evidence from other countries is that it is too easy to slip from separatism into something much more destructive; separatism is not a practical alternative in a country with so much diversity.î Do you believe that because of the history of slavery, there will always be a degree of bigotry between the races in this country?
No, not necessarily. I just think it's a thing that takes a long time to get over. What I really believe is that our history will always provide a convenient excuse or psychological crutch for someone who is looking for a reason to be bigoted. That's what I think. It will always be there. If you talk to people in Bosnia, they can tell you what happened seven hundred or eight hundred years ago. You talk to the Irish and they can talk about all the battles they fought. The truth is, it doesn't have to have anything to do with the way people really live. Historical events become convenient excuses for those who want to drive people apart instead of bringing them together.

How, in a very practical way, can average working Americans, going about their business, fight prejudice within themselves and with othersóin the workplace, for example?
I think there are three obvious things Americans can do, assuming they work in an integrated workplace. One is to make sure that they have, or that they make it a point to try to develop, a genuinely meaningful personal friendship with somebody of another race, and then understand the whole fabric of that person's life, his family history, how he perceives the world, whether he's subject to discrimination todayóthe whole range of things that happen when people are really friends. The second thing I think an ordinary citizen can do is to make sure that there is some mechanism set up in the workplace where people can talk through these issues, and that they feel that they have a say in what is happening in the workplace and how it's coming down in their own lives. And then the third thing they can do is, through their church or a community group, genuinely be involved in some kind of community-service project where they work on a steady basis for some higher goal with a member, or people, of another race. If everybody in America would engage in these three practical things, I think there would be a measurable difference. There is still a lot of workplace discrimination out there, and there are still a lot of perceptions of discrimination. There is still a lot of subconscious profiling in every way. You know, we talk about profiling as if it's only a law-enforcement issue. The truth is that all of us profile all the time, in ways we're not even aware of. When I had a group of black journalists in the other day, I asked them about this. Virtually everybody in the room had been subject to some sort of recent encounter with law enforcement where they absolutely were certain there was no factual basis for them to be stopped or questioned or anything else, and these journalists are all college graduates, highly educated people. They were just profiled. They were black, so they were stopped, they were questioned, they were looked at in a funny way. I think that's the sort of thing that's going to happen in a lot of different contexts in this society until people don't just say the right things but also feel the right things. So you have to do things that change the interconnected patterns of life, those things I mentioned that ordinary citizens can do.
People like me, in positions of responsibility, have to recognize that we're never going to get rid of all of this until everybody can get a good education, until everybody can make a decent living, until all our children have safe streets and are more likely to be on a school sports or academic team than they are to be in a gang. I think this commemoration of Little Rock's desegregation really can be a very positive thingónot only for the high school, the city, and the state, but for the country as well. That's what I'm hoping.

One final question. What do you say to the people who have given up on full integration, to separatists, both black and white? What message would you give them?
That the evidence from other countries is that it is too easy to slip from separatism into something much more destructive. That you've got to find a way to hold the country together, and that separatism is not a practical alternative in a country with so much diversity. The Fairfax County School District in Virginia, for example, now has students speaking over a hundred languages. My argument is, you get all the separatism you want and need. We're all going to be hanging around with our own ethnic groups going to this, that, and the other thing. I go to the Irish-American dinner every year. We have our chances at that. But to actually withdraw, to pretend that you can hold the country together while being in separate enclaves, is an illusion. All you have to do is look around the world to see what happens when people have tried that. That, I think, is the trump card. Besides, when you withdraw, life isn't as much fun.