Clinton’s Gradual Education on Issues of Race (NYT)

[jefferson_dem]

Clinton’s Gradual Education on Issues of Race


Hillary Clinton, center, in an undated photograph from her days at Wellesley College, which she attended from 1965 to 1969.

MARK LEIBOVICH
Published: February 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).

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/02/us/politics/02race.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[MethuenProgressive]

1. "Obama said in a debate that he is “absolutely convinced” of Clinton’s commitment to racial equality

Buried in the NYT hit piece is Obama himself denying the premise of the hit pieces's theme.

[Evergreen Emerald]

2. "but it was just one of the items on her activism list "

the racist bitch. (Racism is all her fault).