5

“WE ARE A POWER BLOC”

The Congressional Black Caucus and Africa

I listened to those who said this is going to hurt blacks [in South Africa]; it’s going to hurt corporations. But human beings will struggle for their freedom, in peace if they can, in violence if they must. . . . That pales every single argument you have made. We must end the madness of apartheid.

—Representative Ron Dellums (D-Calif.), House chamber, August 12, 1988

For some reason, Mr. Archer [the chairman of the committee] will not allow the amendments that are necessary to protect the textile and apparel industry, when they know full well that’s what the Senate is going to do. But I understand the game. They would like for it to be said that your black congressman couldn’t protect your job, but your white senator did.

—Representative James Clyburn (D-S.C.), remarks reported in The Hill, July 7, 1999

On July 16, 1999, Representative Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.; serving 1992–present) took to the floor of the House of Representatives to deliver a speech against the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Because the bill advocated the creation of free trade linkages between the United States and African farmers, a speech by Bishop, a southern Democrat with strong ties to labor unions and agricultural interests, against the measure should have been anything but news worthy on Capitol Hill. On this day, however, reporters, lobbyists, and even other members of Congress crowded into the House chamber to hear Bishop’s arguments against the bill.

This unusual attention was a function of the fact that Bishop was also a well-respected member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), and his speech was the first (but not the last) to break ranks with the official CBC position in support of the bill. It is important to note that the interest in Bishop’s speech did not come simply from the fact that he was breaking ranks with his comrades. On the contrary, individual CBC members have always demonstrated a considerable willingness to go their own way on important issues. Moreover, a number of recent studies have demonstrated that the unity that characterized the CBC of the 1970s and 1980s has been more difficult to maintain since the expansion of the CBC in the 1990s.1 The interest in Bishop’s speech stemmed from the fact that he was breaking ranks with the CBC on the AGOA—the one issue area on which Hill insiders and watchers expected the CBC to maintain the unity that had been their hallmark in previous decades is U.S. foreign policy toward Africa.

This expectation stemmed from the fact that the CBC’s greatest legislative achievement was in the field of African affairs. In 1986, the CBC engineered the passage of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA) over Ronald Reagan’s veto. This was the first time in U.S. history that a racial or ethnic minority successfully challenged the authority of a sitting president on a foreign policy issue and won.2 In the wake of this victory, members of Congress came to view U.S. policy toward Africa as the special domain of the CBC. Moreover, despite the fact that the group has not pushed any major legislation in this area since the CAAA, many black legislators continue to view this policy area as a rallying point for their caucus.3

Many scholars suggest that the rift within the CBC over the AGOA grew out of principled disagreements among its members about the best way to help Africa develop.4 Without completely discounting the importance of these differences, I show in this chapter that CBC members who voted against the AGOA did so out of a desire to protect the interests of their constituents and gain reelection. In other words, the terms of the AGOA placed some CBC members under tremendous cross-pressures that made it impossible for them to both support the initiative and maintain their electoral coalitions.

In this chapter, I also demonstrate that such balancing acts have been an omnipresent feature of the experiences of black legislators since the first CBC engagements in African affairs in the late 1960s. Indeed, even the seventeen-year CBC campaign for a sanctions bill, which most previous studies cite as a prime example of foreign policy activism motivated by transnationalism, was shaped by this dynamic.5 In other words, CBC members shifted their commitment to pushing sanctions legislation to balance their pursuit of transnationalist goals against their goals on the home front.

The analytic narrative presented here draws on evidence derived using both qualitative and quantitative research methods. An examination of published historical works forms the backdrop of this chapter. Most of the causal inferences I make in the chapter emerge from semistructured interviews with twenty-six members of the CBC.6 Finally, I employ logistic regressions to bolster and refine the conclusions that emerge from the historical record and interview data.

Welcome to the House

Political scientists segment the history of black representation in the U.S. Congress into three distinct periods. The first period is the Reconstruction Era, running from 1870, when Joseph Rainey (R-S.C.; 1870–1879) became the first black person to serve in Congress, to 1900, when racial gerrymandering removed George White (R-N.C.; 1897–1900) from office. The second period is the Civil Rights Era, running from 1928, when the residents of the historic South Side neighborhood of Chicago made Oscar De Priest (R-Ill.; 1928–1934) the first African American to hold a seat in Congress in the twentieth century, to 1972, when opportunities stabilized for black Americans to send representatives of their choice to Congress. The final period, the Post–Civil Rights Era, runs from 1972 to the present. Scholars assume that legal struggles for inclusion are now over and that the most pressing questions about black political behavior in the Congress revolve around the content and quality of the representation elected officials offer their constituents.7 The origins of the CBC sanctions campaign are rooted in the experiences of black legislators during the closing days of the Civil Rights Era.

The transition from the Civil Rights Era to the Post–Civil Rights Era began with the election of 1968. This poll, which was the first real test of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, increased the number of blacks in Congress from five to ten members. The hope that these gains would translate into the fulfillment of long overdue substantive demands was so palpable among black Americans that Representative Charles Diggs (D-Mich.) was compelled to call attention to these sentiments in the remarks he entered into the Congressional Record announcing the formation of the CBC. “Our concerns and obligations as members of Congress,” stated Diggs, “do not stop at the boundaries of our districts; our concerns are national and international in scope.”8 He continued, “We are petitioned daily by citizens living hundreds of miles from our districts who look on us as Congressmen-at-large for black people and poor people in the United States.”9 Representative William L. Clay Sr. (D-Mo.; 1968–2000), one of the founders of the CBC, recalls a real sense of optimism permeating the group as their fledgling caucus set out to use the legislative process to address the very challenging problems that confronted black Americans in the late 1960s:

We decided that the nine of us [Senator Edward M. Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts, did not join the group], representing such a collage of talent and experience, and coming mostly from politically safe districts, now constituted a power-bloc deserving of respect in the institution. It was our opinion that the establishment of a caucus would lead to the solidarity of purpose and program necessary for us to realize this potential.10

Because scholars of Congress have long noted that the three-tiered committee system is the nerve system of the House of Representatives,11 the CBC would have to master it to become a power bloc within the institution. Mastering the committee system requires the ability to guide bills from the lowest tier (subcommittees) to consideration at the two higher levels of the system (standing committees and the committee-of-the-whole). Because this process becomes easier when one has influence at these higher levels of decision making, fierce competition ensues among all representatives for membership on the most important standing and control committees.12 Over time, the norm of seniority evolved to prevent the rationally egoistic behavior of members seeking committee assignments from paralyzing the House of Representatives.13

Despite the fact that the majority of CBC members lacked the seniority necessary to obtain plum committee assignments, the group had good reason to be optimistic about expanding its influence through coordinated action. The literature on the Congress also tells us that backbenchers, particularly those affiliated with the majority party, can expect to have their interests advanced by their partisans who occupy more potent institutional roles than they do. Indeed, because it is far better to be the chairperson of a standing committee than ranking-member, an honorific title reserved for the most senior member of the minority party serving on a committee, the leaders of the party-in-power have an incentive to make sure that they maintain a majority within the chamber.14 The easiest way to do this is to help more vulnerable junior members shore up their chances at reelection. Logrolling (or vote-trading) is the most common tool employed by party organizations to give their partisans who are disadvantaged by the committee system chances to feed at the pork barrel.15

“When [American] political institutions handle racial issues,” writes Dianne Pinderhughes, a leading scholar of minority politics, “conventional rules go awry.”16 Although penned in reference to machine politics in Chicago, Pinderhughes’s aphorism translates well to the experiences of the black Americans who served in Congress during the Civil Rights Era. Not only did the black members who served during this period suffer the indignities of a segregated work environment,17 but party leaders also excluded them from most of the opportunities for professional development that were normally extended to white members.18

Although passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it impossible to maintain Jim Crow rules within the institution, the House of Representatives in 1969 was still a racially charged environment that certainly was not changing quickly enough to accommodate a new power bloc of black legislators. “Democratic leaders not only expressed hostility to the idea of our forming the [Congressional Black] Caucus,” stated Clay, “but it was clear by the way we were treated that most of our colleagues doubted our abilities and preferred the composition of the party before the election [of 1968].”19 Clay continued, “It is certainly hard to consider yourself welcome in the [party] caucus when you call the leadership to talk about black issues and they simply hang up the phone on you.”20

Virtually locked out of the party caucus in the 91st and 92nd Congresses, the CBC pursued a number of extra-institutional activities—such as convening conferences and producing reports on the state of black Americans—to compensate for their legislative impotence. Because all these activities essentially duplicated the efforts of groups such as the NAACP and the Urban League, many rank-and-file African Americans began to raise questions about the long-term potential of the CBC members as substantive representatives.21 It was in the context of this crisis of performance legitimacy that black legislators decided to make passing a sanctions bill the highest priority of the CBC.

The Diggs Plan

Carol Swain, in her book on black political behavior in the U.S. Congress, depicts the CBC campaign for a sanctions bill as purely symbolic behavior.22 Swain also argues that CBC members run the risk of alienating their constituents by “turning to foreign policy issues that appear easier for them to tackle than domestic issues”;23 in other words, she characterizes the foreign policy activism of black legislators as arising from a cynical politics aimed at distracting their constituents from their lack of efficacy on domestic issues. The historical record and testimony from three of the surviving founders of the CBC, however, challenge Swain’s interpretation on both counts.

First, Representative Charles Diggs, the principal architect of the sanctions campaign, used his position as ranking member of the CBC to push his colleagues to take up the sanctions issue precisely because it was likely to be an uphill fight within the institution. There is also considerable evidence attesting that Diggs’s colleagues bought into his plan mostly because they believed it would help them overcome the CBC’s crisis of performance legitimacy and pave the way for them to generate particularistic benefits for their constituents. Thus, although it is true that none of the sanctions bills introduced in the 91st and 92nd Congresses contained provisions that delivered pork to their districts, the CBC members who sponsored these bills clearly believed that their actions in the foreign policymaking arena were ultimately about such substantive gains and not merely about symbols.

This claim gains greater coherence when placed in the context of the literature on legislative behavior. Political scientists have frequently noted the unique position that foreign policy questions occupy in the consciousness of most members of the House of Representatives. Robert Dahl, for example, describes foreign policy as one of the few issue areas in which members of Congress are free to act on their private preferences.24 This is so, Dahl believes, because foreign policy questions remain so far removed from the issues that concern the proverbial man-on-the-street that members of Congress are rarely given much instruction from their constituents on them.25 Dahl also suggests that, even though the executive branch circumscribes their ability to carve out leadership roles,26 members of Congress cherish the opportunities for independent action that foreign policy questions afford them.27

Writing some twenty years after Dahl, Richard Fenno found that few members of the House of Representatives relish opportunities to become involved in foreign policy debates. On the contrary, he reported that most members of Congress actively avoid service on the Foreign Affairs Committee because its work is devoid of opportunities to engage in the types of distributive behavior that individual members seek to strengthen their chances at reelection.28 Fenno also finds, ironically, that members of the House of Representatives hold their colleagues who forgo the temptation to view their service in purely careerist terms by engaging the “important” and “exciting” issues that come before the Foreign Affairs Committee in high esteem.29

It was this cluster of attitudes that Representative Diggs hoped to exploit by encouraging his colleagues in the CBC to become engaged in foreign affairs. Indeed, by the time his colleagues anointed him the first chair of the CBC in 1969, Diggs had accumulated fifteen years of personal experiences within the chamber that suggested this was possible.

Diggs won election to the House of Representatives from the Thirteenth Congressional District in Michigan in 1954. This is extremely significant because it means that he served his apprenticeship in the institution in the middle of the Civil Rights Era, a time when the racial climate of the Capitol was even more hostile to black members than in the period when the CBC emerged. Indeed, it was common practice at this time for white members of Congress (mostly southern segregationists in the Democratic Party) to use the epithet nigger in the course of legislative business.30 As if exposure to this language during the course of legislative business were not enough, black members and their staffers frequently found themselves victimized by racist verbal assaults.31 Moreover, because segregation of the races was official policy within the halls of Congress, every day at work reminded black legislators in a number of more subtle ways that their white counterparts (mostly their partisans) viewed them as second-class citizens.32

When Diggs arrived on Capitol Hill, he found that his two black colleagues coped with the limitations imposed on them by the racist environment of the House chamber in very different ways. Representative William Dawson (D-Ill.; 1942–1970) was the consummate party loyalist.33 “I play with my team [the Democratic party],” Dawson was once overheard remarking to a group of his constituents who pressed him about why he did not use his position in the House to speak out more aggressively against segregation.34 Political scientists attribute Dawson’s behavior to his being deeply ensconced in the powerful Chicago Democratic machine.35 The leaders of the machine used their influence with the national party to protect his status in the House of Representatives. In return for this patronage, Dawson did not make any waves about race matters.36

Without a political machine to advocate on his behalf, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (D-N.Y.; 1944–1970) had to take a circuitous path around the racist southern Democrats (or Dixiecrats) who controlled the committee structure.37 First, he made himself a national figure by speaking out aggressively on race issues in the press.38 He then used the fealty that he earned from the black community for lifting this heavy mantle to bolster his reputation with liberal Democrats and Republicans in the chamber.39 Finally, Powell also demonstrated a willingness to buck the party system in very public ways to achieve his legislative and political objectives.40

Diggs’s service record, both as a student leader at Fisk University and as a member of the Michigan legislature, demonstrated that his personality was far better suited to protest than accommodation.41 Given his temperament, it is not at all surprising that Diggs gravitated toward the maverick Powell when he arrived on Capitol Hill in 1955. Happy to have another race man42 in the Congress, Powell gladly took on the responsibility of mentoring his young colleague.43 It was through this relationship that Diggs first came to believe that foreign policy activism was an important resource for black members seeking influence within the racist environs of the House of Representatives.

Powell’s masterful performance at the Bandung Conference was the critical juncture through which he made an internationalist out of Diggs. In January 1955, the emerging nations of Asia and Africa announced that they would gather at the resort town of Bandung, Indonesia, to discuss their place in the world order.44 Believing that it was in the best interests of the United States to recognize the conference,45 Powell lobbied the Eisenhower administration to send him to Bandung as its official observer.46 Fearing that the resolutions coming out of this gathering would contain unfavorable appraisals of the foreign and domestic (race) policies of his administration, Eisenhower balked at Powell’s request.47 Undaunted by the objections of his political ally in the White House,48 Powell headed to the conference on his own accord.49

As predicted, the Eisenhower administration’s shabby record of countenancing racial discrimination at home and abroad quickly emerged as a major theme in the plenary sessions at Bandung.50 When Powell arrived on the scene on the second day of the meetings, he promptly called a press conference to address the charges against the United States.51 Virtually everyone attending the conference expected Powell to deliver a speech that would further inflame the anti-U.S. sentiments of the gathering by detailing the hardships of black Americans.52 Powell surprised them all by offering a stirring defense of the record of the Eisenhower regime on civil rights and presenting the United States as a land where “[being] a Negro is no longer a stigma.”53

Reactions to Powell’s speech at home were swift and varied. Although a few Republican-leaning black newspapers showered praise on Powell,54 most press outlets in the black community ran articles and editorials that registered a deep annoyance with the Harlemite for having “sold the colored people down the river.”55 By contrast, the mainstream (white) press in both the North and the South unequivocally lauded Powell for doing, as Ralph McGill, an influential southern journalist, called it, “a great service for the country.”56 When Powell returned to work on Capitol Hill, he found that his popularity with the mainstream press had expanded his influence within the House chamber.57

Powell’s behavior at Bandung was not a calculated move designed to build political capital in the House of Representatives.58 On the contrary, a sincere desire to protect the Eisenhower administration from losing ground in the Cold War motivated Powell’s actions at the conference.59 Nevertheless, he certainly did relish the positive externalities that his performance generated for him in the chamber. Indeed, in the aftermath of this episode, Powell began to look for ways to use the foreign policymaking arena to continue to bolster his growing influence in the House.60 Diggs’s former colleagues and staff members suggest that Powell also encouraged Diggs to look to the international context for opportunities to build his own reputation in House.61 According to the documentary record, two years later Powell literally pushed his young protégé into the foreign policymaking arena.

In 1957, Britain’s Gold Coast colony was set to become the first nation in sub-Saharan Africa to join the community of independent nations. Finally recognizing that Powell’s interpretation of the importance of the new states in the Cold War struggle was correct, the Eisenhower administration decided to send a full delegation, headed by Vice President Richard M. Nixon, to the independence ceremonies.62 When Powell requested that he be a member of this delegation, the White House moved with great alacrity to fulfill his request.63 It soon became clear, however, that partisan politics was going to prevent Powell from making the trip.64 Because Powell had already suggested to the administration that Representative Diggs would also make a fine delegate, the Michigander went to Ghana in Powell’s place.65

The fact that nothing extraordinary happened for Diggs on this trip to Ghana did not stop him and Powell from parlaying his experience in Africa into a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.66 Diggs was an outstanding member of this committee in the period between 1957 and the formation of the CBC. Although he was still too junior to leave much of mark in terms of legislative output, Diggs quickly earned the respect of his colleagues for both his mastery of substantive issues and his political skills.67 And these skills helped Diggs achieve one of the most significant victories of his legislative career.

During the height of the search by the Lyndon Johnson administration for a clear policy on South Africa, the New York Times reported that the USS Roosevelt intended to dock in Cape Town for refueling. Coming just one day before the third ANLCA conference, this report greatly antagonized the organization, which immediately wrote to President Johnson in protest. The Johnson administration argued that the Roosevelt ’s refueling mission was a legitimate action under the embargo and decided not to budge on this issue. With the ANLCA and the administration at loggerheads, Representative Diggs decided to get involved. Diggs generated a letter opposing the stopover; had it co-signed by thirty-five House Democrats, three House Republicans, and three powerful senators; and forwarded it to President Johnson.

With Jacob Javits, Walter Mondale, and other powerful figures signing the Diggs letter, the administration had to take notice. Indeed, one day after the president received the letter, two members of his foreign policy team—Deputy Defense Secretary Cyrus R. Vance and Navy Secretary Paul H. Nitze—were sent to meet with the signatories. After this meeting, the administration announced that, although it would go ahead with the Roosevelt ’s docking in Cape Town, it had reformulated its policy. Not only would all future refueling be done at sea, but also the captain of the Roosevelt was instructed to cancel shore leave unless he was given a guarantee by the Pretoria government that black sailors would be treated as equals by the people of South Africa. Because there was no way this was going to happen, the Navy was in effect canceling the Roosevelt ’s leave.68

In light of Diggs’s personal history, it is not surprising that he pushed the five new black members who won election to the House in 1968 to cut their legislative teeth in foreign affairs. Indeed, oral tradition among the founding members of the CBC clearly paints Diggs, who was the first CBC chairperson, in the role of mentor and leader.69 It also makes explicit that the robust sanctions campaign that emerged in the 91st and 92nd Congresses was a direct result of Diggs’s ability to convince them that such activism would accelerate their rise to power in the House. “Diggs, being the great leader that he was,” Representative William Clay remembered, “reckoned that getting us involved in foreign policy would make a big splash on the Hill.” Clay continued, “[Diggs] knew that there would be no way that the [party] leadership could continue to doubt our abilities or ignore [the CBC] because of our race if we demonstrated real competence in that arena.”70

This is not to say that the black legislators lacked a genuine interest in obtaining justice for blacks in South Africa. On the contrary, most CBC members issued statements to the popular press and entered remarks into the Congressional Record throughout this phase of the sanctions campaign that revealed that they felt deep empathy for blacks suffering under apartheid. Moreover, these same statements also show that sentiments derived from transnationalism intensified these feelings for many CBC members.71

These sentiments were simply not enough of a push factor on their own, however, to generate the incredibly robust movement for a sanctions bill that emerged within the CBC during the 92nd Congress. Representative Louis Stokes (D-Ohio; 1968–1998), another pivotal figure in the formation of the CBC, clearly recalled that, in the absence of Charles Diggs, any political impulses that he and his colleagues derived from transnationalism would have taken a backseat to servicing the needs of their home districts. According to Stokes,

We all came to the Congress with some diffuse interest in the South Africa problem. In other words, we knew that it was important, but it certainly did not register with most of us the way that say health care, full employment and education for our constituents did. It really was not until our ranking member, Congressman Charles Diggs, chairman of the Subcommittee on Africa at the time, showed us the importance of the connection between [the South Africa] issue and the achievement of our domestic goals that [passing] sanctions legislation [became] part of our legislative agenda.72

But, as soon as the connection between passing a sanctions bill and achieving their domestic goals became somewhat muddled, the vast majority of CBC members significantly scaled back their activism on the issue.

New Directions

As we have seen, the early efforts of CBC members to pass a sanctions bill were not merely a ploy designed to distract their constituents from their inability to deliver on the domestic front. In addition, the sharp decline in bill sponsorship in the 93rd and 94th Congresses (see fig. 5.1) was primarily a response to signals that the black legislators received from their white colleagues that led them to question the utility of the Diggs plan as a means for raising the CBC profile in the House chamber. The changes in sponsorship shown in figure 5.1 can also be considered, in a wider context, to be a function of CBC members’ efforts to balance their ideological commitment to the sanctions issue against the kinds of electoral, policy-oriented, and institutional goals that scholars of the legislative process, such as Fenno, David Mayhew, and Keith Krehbiel, see as the driving force behind the behavior of most members of Congress.73

FIGURE 5.1 Percentage of CBC members sponsoring sanctions bills, 1969–1987. CBC, Congressional Black Caucus.

Source: Congressional Record

Even with Diggs firmly in control of the Subcommittee on Africa, the CBC’s push for a sanctions bill floundered because, despite the respect that Diggs commanded within the beltway on issues of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa,74 few white members of the 92nd Congress were ready to buy into the sanctions framework. On the contrary, the vast majority of white members (on both sides of the aisle) were far more comfortable standing with the Nixon administration as he moved to return relations between the United States and the white-minority regimes in southern Africa to the status quo ante that existed before the Kennedy administration. Diggs and his protégés in the CBC received this message quite strongly when a large bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress passed the Byrd Amendment on April 20, 1972. The bill, named for Senator Harry Byrd (D-Va.; 1965–1982), its chief sponsor, cleared the Nixon Defense Department to import strategic materials from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in direct contravention of an embargo resolution that had recently passed the UN General Assembly.75

In the wake of the Byrd Amendment, it became painfully obvious to CBC members that their campaign for a sanctions bill was far out of line with the prevailing mood of the House of Representatives. If the sanctions campaign were purely (or even primarily) a function of transnationalism, such a signal would have had no affect on the behavior of the CBC members who had demonstrated a commitment to the issue before the Byrd Amendment became law. But the passing of the Byrd Amendment did alter the behavior of the majority of CBC members in two significant ways, showing that the early sanctions movement was primarily a response to institutional imperatives.

First, the vast majority of CBC members simply stopped introducing sanctions bills after the close of the 92nd Congress. Returning to figure 5.1, we see that thirteen members of the CBC (92 percent) made at least one bill calling for sanctions a part of their individual legislative portfolios in the 92nd Congress. By contrast, only one other CBC member in the 93rd Congress, Representative Robert Nix Sr. (D-Pa.; 1957–1978), felt moved enough by the issue to join the stalwart Diggs in sponsoring a sanctions bill. By the close of the 94th Congress, the number of CBC members sponsoring sanctions bills declined to 20 percent of the level established in the 92nd Congress.

The passage of the Byrd Amendment was also a contributing factor in Diggs’s and his colleagues’ coming to the agreement that it was in the best interests of the CBC for him to relinquish the role of chairperson to Representative Stokes.76 Representative Clay described the role that the Byrd Amendment played in leading to this shift in the following terms:

The exciting thing about being in Congress is that when something grabs your conscience, like southern Africa did with all of us [CBC members] in the early 1970s, is that you are sometimes in a position to help. You always have to remember, though, that it can cause real [political] problems when pressing these issues takes you too far afield from responding to the immediate demands of your constituents; so striking a balance is definitely the key to being successful in those cases. The problem with our first big push for sanctions was that we were so far ahead of everybody [on the issue] that it really made it hard for us sometimes. In other words, it is certainly no fun to go home and face a lot of questions about what you are doing [in Washington, D.C.]. These pressures pushed all of us in new directions after the [Byrd] Amendment.77

For most CBC members, moving in “new directions” primarily meant moving away from issues that did not resonate directly with their constituents.78

It is important to note that it became easier for CBC members to pursue their own legislative priorities based on constituent demands in the 93rd Congress. This was so because the Democratic Caucus had passed a set of institutional reforms at the close of the 92nd Congress that diminished the Dixiecrats’ stranglehold on both the committee assignments of their junior colleagues and the legislative process.79 These reforms were essential to normalizing the experiences that black legislators had in the House.80 This is one of the chief reasons that scholars tend to see them as completing the transition from the Civil Rights Era to the Post–Civil Rights Era in the historiography of black representation.81

There were two crucial differences between Diggs and most of his colleagues in the CBC in the 93rd Congress. First, his interest in South Africa was anything but diffuse. On the contrary, Diggs possessed a firm ideological commitment to getting a sanctions bill through Congress. Second, Diggs, who was incredibly safe in his district,82 had wide latitude by virtue of his seniority on the Foreign Relations Committee to continue to pursue this goal. Not surprisingly, then, Diggs pushed even harder to make sanctions the law of the land once his colleagues moved away from the issue after the Byrd Amendment.

Diggs personally sponsored more sanctions bills in the 93rd Congress than during any other time in his career. He also continued to use his institutional position as a senior member of the House Foreign Relations Committee as a platform for keeping the issue before his colleagues on the Hill.83 When these measures failed to generate a new enthusiasm for sanctions under the Capitol dome, Diggs realized that only a “massive groundswell of support” at the grassroots level would convince his colleagues in the Democratic Caucus to come around to his viewpoint.84

At the start of the 94th Congress, Diggs took his first step toward generating this groundswell when he formed the Black Forum on Foreign Policy along with several prominent black activists and intellectuals.85 He also embarked on a barnstorming tour of Democratic-leaning districts with substantial black populations.86 Although he billed this tour as an effort to raise black Americans’ consciousness about their “stake in Africa,” Diggs never failed to find the time to urge his listeners to contact their representatives about sanctions legislation.87 And because reapportionments were already shifting the black population into majority-minority districts in the mid-1970s,88 these new demands fell disproportionately on the ears of Diggs’s fellow CBC members.

Evidence that the consciousness-raising efforts that Diggs (and the Black Forum on Foreign Policy) initiated were beginning to work came in 1976. In that year, grassroots mobilization in the black community surged in response to media coverage of the Soweto uprisings.89 As the small spike in figure 5.1 at the 95th Congress illustrates, many CBC members reincorporated sanctions bills into their legislative portfolios once their constituents began to demand action.90 Representative Clay described the link between constituent demands and this sudden flurry of activity on the House floor:

Although we knew that we faced an uphill battle to get a bill [through Congress]—given the deference that our [white] colleagues had toward the President—we were just happy that our constituents had caught up [with us] on the issue in such a short time. Most of us were safe politically . . . so it was really about doing the right thing. At the same time, I did [not] know of anyone in the Caucus who wanted to go home and face the opposite of the question that we talked about earlier: what are you doing for South Africa?91

Thus, the surge in bill sponsorship in the 95th Congress was primarily an attempt on the part of CBC members to engage in what David Mayhew calls “position-taking” through legislative action.92

Historians have corroborated Clay’s remark about the CBC push for a sanctions bill being an uphill fight because of the deference that his white colleagues afforded the executive branch on foreign policy issues in the mid-1970s. According to most secondary sources, few outside the CBC believed that the Congress should drive U.S. foreign policy toward South Africa in the late 1970s.93 As a result, all the sanctions bills that CBC members placed in the hopper in the 95th Congress died well short of passage.

The percentage of CBC members introducing legislation calling for sanctions declined markedly after the 95th Congress (see fig. 5.1). Representative Stokes recalled that a desire not to appear to be pursuing symbolic issues to the detriment of substantive commitments contributed to this shift.

Every member of the [Congressional Black] Caucus has their own set of legislative priorities, interests and pet projects in their districts—mine have often been in the field of public health. No matter what we are doing as a group, members are always going to pursue these priorities. Thus, if there was a shift in behavior [after the 95th Congress], I suspect part of it was that members were falling back on these core interests. This is not to say that we lost interest in sanctions. Sometimes, with these big [national] issues, it is necessary to take time to regroup and develop new strategies.94

Had CBC members initiated the campaign for sanctions to send purely symbolic signals to their constituents, there would have been no incentive for them to be so sensitive to public opinion in their districts. There also would have been little incentive for them to invest much time in the development of “new strategies” to push a sanctions bill through Congress.

According to the historical record, this period of reflection led most CBC members to share Diggs’s view that they must bolster their legislative efforts with extra-institutional behavior. Indeed, the majority of CBC members attended the Black Foreign Policy Forum Leadership Conference on Southern Africa in the fall of 1976, illustrating the sea change that had taken place in the group since it had deposed Diggs in the 92nd Congress.95

TransAfrica was by far the most significant development to come out of the Leadership Conference on Southern Africa.96 Under the leadership of Randall Robinson, who had previously served as a staff aide for Clay and Diggs, TransAfrica emerged as the most effective lobby for Africa in U.S. history97 for two reasons. First, the organization was able to draw on a deep reservoir of financial, logistical, and moral support from the CBC (and other black politicians) while it was still in its infancy.98 Second, Robinson, who had cut his political teeth as a leader of the student protests against apartheid that sprang up at Harvard University in the early 1970s,99 quickly proved to be a master at unifying the ethnically and ideologically diverse groups that became the core of the Free South Africa Movement (FSAM).100

In November 1984, TransAfrica initiated a campaign of nonviolent protests against apartheid.101 Mostly staged at the South African embassy in Washington, D.C., and frequently drawing on the popular appeal of celebrities, these marches and sit-ins were made-for-media events.102 When not staging public protests, TransAfrica encouraged its supporters to keep the pressure on both the Congress and the White House through mass letter-writing campaigns.103 By the close of the year, the FSAM had become such a potent force in U.S. politics that it forced virtually every Democrat on the Hill to try to establish anti-apartheid credentials.104 Representative Ronald V. Dellums (D-Calif.; 1971–1998), who emerged as the most active CBC member on the sanctions issue after a federal investigation forced Representative Diggs to resign from the House in 1980,105 described the impact of the FSAM:

It was very interesting to see colleagues from both sides of the aisle and of all races, who had previously paid little attention to our efforts, scramble to get arrested in front of the South African embassy and introduce sanctions bills when the [effects of the] movement hit home in their districts. It really was amazing how quickly the environment [in Washington, D.C.] changed.106

Dellums’s reference to “all races” indicates that the spike in CBC members’ sponsoring sanctions bills in the 99th Congress (see fig. 5.1) was also partly a function of the political dynamics created by the FSAM.

Dellums also makes it clear that members of Congress who demonstrated a greater commitment to the sanctions issue in the wake of the pressures generated by the FSAM faired very well in subsequent elections. “Members of the House [who supported the push for sanctions],” Dellums writes in his memoir, “no longer had to worry about disinvestment as a barrier to their reelection (and fear of defeat provides the greatest motivation for members in evaluating their vote on an issue).”107 Only one member of the CBC who sponsored a sanctions bill lost his bid for reelection, corroborating Dellums’s recollection of the period.108 This also challenges Swain’s thesis that anti-apartheid activism carried some political risks for black members of Congress.

Representative Clay, however, cautioned against seeing the increase in bill sponsorship rates among CBC members in the 99th Congress as a product of individual black legislators’ desires to claim credit for the CAAA. “Most of us [in the CBC],” Representative Clay stated, “had been in the Congress for many years and were in very safe districts.”109 He continued,

Although there certainly was this sense of urgency among our constituents, I really don’t think that anyone would have lost an election just because they did not have their own version of the bill in the [Congressional] Record. Besides, the CBC had played a big role in the Free South Africa Movement—getting arrested at the [South African] embassy, leading community rallies, etc.—so most of us were incredibly visible on this issue before we even got to a point where we could get a vote on the [House] floor.110

Katherine Tate’s analysis of reelection rates for the period confirms Clay’s impressions about the safety of most CBC members. Indeed, she finds that black incumbents who served between the 94th and 99th Congresses had a reelection rate of 96.84 percent; moreover, this rate surpassed even the 93.52 percent that all House incumbents enjoyed during the same period.111

So, if reelection was not the prime motivation, why did most CBC members go to the floor with sanctions bills in the 99th Congress? Representative Dellums believes that, like the legislators portrayed in both Mayhew’s and Fenno’s writings that pursue committee assignments that will yield no particularistic benefits for their districts, a desire to make good public policy motivated most members of the CBC in the 99th Congress. Indeed, Dellums recalled that his colleagues went to the House floor primarily to push Democratic leaders to pass a tough sanctions law.

By the middle of the [legislative] session, it was clear to just about everyone in Washington that America wanted some action [on apartheid]. Suddenly, you had people in every branch of government—from our Democratic colleagues in the House to [President Ronald] Reagan—talking about reform measures. Most of these proposals fell far short of what we [in the CBC] wanted—a total economic withdrawal from South Africa—so we had to stay vigilant to make sure that we got a real sanctions law.112

Representative Clay largely concurred with this analysis. “We did not work so hard on this issue for a decade,” he stated, “to allow Reagan to get off the hook with some weak executive order or to allow the [Democratic] leadership to cut a deal with the Senate.”113 Although the CBC ultimately had to accept some compromises with Senate, most scholars agree that its efforts ensured that the CAAA was not a toothless measure.114 Were the CBC campaign for a sanction bill about generating a symbolic outcome, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which they would not have accepted one of these earlier compromises. After all, even these measures went far beyond what anyone in the CBC had thought was possible before the rise of the FSAM.115

Representative Clay suggested that a second institutional imperative also motivated CBC members to return to the floor with sanctions bills in the 99th Congress:

Above all else, we [the CBC] wanted to pass the CAAA to help free blacks in South Africa from a racist dictatorship; and it was such a great joy to all of us [in the CBC] to be able to finally deliver this victory. At the same time, we were also aware of the fact that getting this law on the books was going to be historic and make a real impact on party politics in [Washington,] D.C. So part of what you see with members drafting legislation and staying so active on this issue was a desire to preserve our control over this important issue. This was going to be one of our biggest legislative victories as a group . . . and we were not going to allow it to slip away. We also refused to allow others in our party push us to the side on this issue.116

Essentially, Clay’s argument is that a desire to claim credit as a group played some role in motivating CBC members to reintegrate sanctions bills into their legislative portfolios in the 99th Congress.

Mainstream media coverage of the politics behind implementing the CAAA between 1986 and 1988 suggests that the CBC succeeded in this task. Figure 5.2 summarizes the results of a content analysis of thirty-six New York Times and Washington Post articles on the CAAA. As we can see, the CBC, with eleven mentions, was second among the political actor most frequently attributed credit for the CAAA. Indeed, only Representative Dellums, who introduced the version of the bill that passed the House of Representatives on June 19, 1986, received more mentions in the press.117 Moreover, both the Democratic Party in Congress and House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’ Neill (D-Mass.; 1953–1986) received infrequent mentions. Surprisingly, the analysis also reveals that in the wake of the CAAA no one in the media remembered the important role that Representative Diggs had long played as the congressional conscience on the sanctions issue between the 93rd and the 97th Congresses.

FIGURE 5.2 NY Times and Washington Post coverage of the CAAA, 1986–1988; numbers of articles attributing credit for the bill to six political actors. CAAA, Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act; CBC, Congressional Black Caucus.

Sources: New York Times; Washington Post

Growth and Decline

The CBC experienced considerable growth after 1986. Indeed, the continued enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (and its extensions) and the creation of majority-minority districts through gerrymandering more than doubled the size of the CBC during the next twenty years. A number of studies have explored the effects of this growth on the CBC. The conventional wisdom within this burgeoning literature is that, despite the fact that all CBC members are Democrats, the increasing variation in both their personal backgrounds and the nature of their constituencies made it increasingly difficult for the group to maintain the unity that was its hallmark in the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, the literature on black representation also suggests that the CBC has been able to hang together more effectively on issues that have traditionally defined the identity of the group.118

As we have seen, the role of the CBC in formulating U.S. foreign policy toward Africa is obviously one of these issue areas. Despite this fact, the behavior of the CBC in this arena has not come under as much scrutiny from scholars as we might expect. On the contrary, most scholars of black politics have returned their gaze to the behavior of the CBC in African affairs only in the wake of the controversy over the AGOA.

Figure 5.3 charts the growth of the CBC along with the number of CBC members sponsoring bills related to U.S. foreign policy toward Africa between 1969 and 2003. As we can see, despite the growth of the organization, black legislators have not pushed very many initiatives in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. Indeed, CBC activism in African affairs after the close of the 99th Congress quickly returned to roughly the levels that were present in the 93rd through 98th Congresses. The average number of CBC members sponsoring Africa-related bills was 4.0 per session in the 93rd–98th Congresses and 4.75 per session in the 100th–107th Congresses. Nevertheless, there is a critical difference between the two periods. In the 93rd–99th Congresses, the CBC roster averaged seventeen members per session. By contrast, in the 100th–107th Congresses, the ranks of the CBC had grown to an average of thirty-three members per session. In light of this expansion, the overall CBC activism in the field of African affairs actually declined by 11 percent in the 100th–107th Congresses.

FIGURE 5.3 CBC growth and number of CBC members sponsoring Africa-related bills, 1969–2003. CBC, Congressional Black Caucus.

Source: Congressional Record

This finding presents yet another challenge to the view that CBC activism in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa is primarily a function of transnationalism. After all, the 1980s and 1990s were decades when Africa’s humanitarian, political, and economic crises led the U.S. government into increasing contact with the continent. Although some black members of Congress worked on behalf of the continent with nonprofit organizations and the executive branch, the lack of floor activity from the CBC remains an empirical puzzle that challenges the covering law of black elite behavior in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena.

My alternative theory that Africa-related foreign policy activity reflected U.S. domestic concerns holds the potential to explain this shift. The twenty-six elite interviews that I conducted with CBC members between 1996 and 2003 also support this claim. Indeed, twenty-three of the twenty-six (88 percent) CBC members I interviewed reported that they pursued few initiatives in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa because they were concerned about how these issues would affect their primary responsibilities to their constituents. Moreover, twenty of the twenty-six (77 percent) respondents reported that their ability to sponsor legislation related to Africa was hampered by the fact that few issues in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa resonate with their constituents in the same way that the struggle for democracy in South Africa did in the 1970s and 1980s.

Describing the shifting interest in Africa of his constituency since the demise of the white-minority regimes in southern Africa, Representative John Lewis (D-Ga.; 1986–present) commented,

It is fair to say that most black Americans don’t feel the same kind of link with Africa today as they did during our civil rights movement and throughout their de-colonization movement. . . . In other words, because of the progress that was made both here and abroad, in terms of ending colonialism and segregation, we are witnessing something of a breakdown in that sense of solidarity that blacks in Africa and America shared when they were fighting against white domination.119

In this era of diminished constituency interest in Africa, the role of those CBC members who serve as the opinion leaders in African affairs has again become very pronounced. “The reality of the situation,” said Mel Foote, an experienced lobbyist on behalf of Africa, “is that the unified front that the CBC often projects to other members of Congress or to the public on African foreign policy issues typically stems from the group following the lead of one or two highly informed members.”120 For some of these opinion leaders, the tendency of their colleagues to take a backseat on issues related to U.S. foreign policy toward Africa is just as frustrating as that which Representative Diggs experienced in the 1970s. Describing his time as Vice Chairman of the CBC in 105th Congress, Representative Earl Hilliard (D-Ala.; 1992–2002) stated:

In 1993, I wrote to every member of the [Congressional Black] Caucus asking them to participate in a program to facilitate communication between the CBC and the African diplomatic corps by pairing-up every black member of Congress with the head of an African diplomatic delegation. Although there are thirty-eight Caucus members and more than fifty African nations, we only got eighteen CBC members to participate. Do I think that we should have had more participation? We certainly should, and it is something that I am committed to working on. The fact of the matter, though, is that most members are so oriented inwards, toward their own districts, that they just don’t feel enough of a connection with Africa to join such a program.121

This district-level focus described by Representative Hilliard is clearly observable in the legislative history of the AGOA.

Balancing Acts

The AGOA did not emerge from the CBC. On the contrary, Representative Jim McDermott (D-Wash.; 1992–present) first introduced the bill in 1996. Borrowing from the NAFTA framework, Representative McDermott hoped that the bill would shift U.S. foreign policy toward Africa from a donor framework to a development focus driven by trade and private-sector investment.122 The bill immediately drew the support of the African diplomatic corps, the opinion leaders of the CBC on U.S. policy in Africa, and many other prominent House Democrats and Republicans. Because McDermott had introduced the bill late in the second session of the 104th Congress, however, the leadership of the House tabled the measure for consideration in the next Congress. With so many powerful forces in the beltway already working for passage of the AGOA, the measure seemed destined to sail through the 105th Congress.

This did not happen, however, because deep opposition to the AGOA suddenly emerged from U.S. trade unionists. The opposition centered on one of the central provisions of the AGOA that called for lowering tariffs on textiles from Africa. Fearing that the reduction of protective barriers would further weaken the already soft domestic sector, the union movement initiated a vigorous campaign to sink the bill.123 Not surprisingly, many southern Democrats with ties to labor unions and agricultural interests responded to this campaign by voting to kill the AGOA.124

Despite the context provided by the opposition of labor to the AGOA, scholars of black politics have persisted in seeing the actions of the CBC members who opposed the bill through the lens of transnationalism. According to these studies, black opposition to the AGOA grew out of concerns that the bill did not do enough to help Africa.125 The problem with this view is that the CBC members who opposed the AGOA were largely forthcoming about the fact that they did so because they viewed the measure as a threat to their constituencies. Consider, for example, the following excerpt from Representative Bishop’s famous speech:

I want an Africa trade bill, but I want a good Africa trade bill. . . . This [procedural] rule will prevent that. I am disappointed that many Members of the House are not allowed to address the very real concerns that we have about the loss of over 400,000 jobs in the U.S. textile and apparel industry that has taken place across this country since 1995 and would be exacerbated by this bill. Despite my attempts last year and this year in the Committee on Rules and on the [House] floor to make sure that the African Growth and Opportunity Act does not do more harm than good, the bill as reported is not beneficial to all parties concerned.126

Moreover, even the CBC members who supported the AGOA saw a desire to protect the home front as the primary motivation of the dissidents. “Sanford, Jesse [Jackson], Jr. [(D-Ill.)], and Jim [Clyburn (D-S.C.)] have been very outspoken about their inability to support the African Growth and Opportunity Act because of their fear that the bill will take jobs out of their districts,” stated Representative Carolyn C. Kilpatrick (D-Mich.; 1997–present) in an interview shortly before the measure came to the floor of the House for a vote. “I can’t agree with their claims,” she continued; “however, I do understand that members face constituency pressures, and that losing one job within a district could be politically problematic. In the end, who can argue with a member’s desire to protect their district? It is pretty clear, then, that these district-level priorities are going to split the vote of the Caucus on this issue.”127

Quantitative analyses of the voting behavior of CBC members confirm the prescience of Kilpatrick’s remark. A direct comparison of CBC members who voted for the AGOA and those who voted against it based on the mean number of jobs in their districts linked to textile industries, shows that the twenty-one CBC members who voted in favor of the bill had an average of 17,000 jobs in their districts linked to textiles. By contrast, the fifteen black members of Congress who voted against the bill had an average of 51,000 jobs in the textile industry or a closely linked sector in their districts.128

Table 5.1 reports the results of logistic regressions on CBC members’ individual roll call votes on the AGOA. These results further demonstrate that district-level factors drove the decision making of black legislators on this measure.129 Indeed, CBC members whose districts had higher unemployment rates, lower median incomes, and were located in the southern United States—the seat of the U.S. textile industry—were far more likely to vote against the AGOA.130 Neither the percentage of black voters residing within a member’s district nor their individual ratings on the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organization’s (AFLCIO) scorecard on key labor votes for the 109th Congress were statistically significant predictors.

Using the logistic regression technique, we can also estimate the impact of individual predictor variables on the likelihood that the dependent variable—in this case that a CBC member voted yes (or no) on the roll call vote for the AGOA—occurs.131 The logistic regression model calculates the odds ratios associated with the value of each predictor variable, and the best way to interpret these odds ratios is as the relative amount (or probability) by which the odds of the outcome increase or decrease in the presence of the predictor variable. The odds ratios for the three statistically significant variables (MEDINCOME, SOUTHREG, and UNEMPLOYMENT) in the logistic regression model of the CBC members’ votes on the AGOA shows that the probability that a CBC member voted for the AGOA is 0.62 if the constituents living his or her district had annual household incomes that exceeded the median income for the thirty-six districts in the sample. By contrast, CBC members whose districts were located in the southern United States had only a 0.14 probability of voting in favor of the AGOA. Finally, black legislators whose constituents had higher than average unemployment rates had a 0.32 probability of voting to pass the AGOA. Thus, the statistical analyses provide further evidence that the CBC members who took stands against the AGOA did so primarily out of a desire to defend the interests of their constituents on the home front. These voting records are completely consistent with the strategic behavior model of black engagement with issues in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa that I develop throughout this book.

Table 5.1 Results of Logistic Regression Analyses of CBC Members’ Roll Call Votes on AGOA

• • •

Most studies of ethnic and racial groups’ seeking to influence U.S. foreign policy toward their ancestral homelands see the motivations of these groups through the lens of transnationalism. This chapter has demonstrated that sentiments derived from transnationalism are not always a sufficient condition for group mobilization. More specifically, the analytic narrative presented here shows that the initial push by the CBC for sanctions legislation grew more out of rationalist concerns derived from institutional imperatives than from affective ties to Africa. In light of this evidence, it is best to understand the early sanctions campaign as a two-level game in which winning in the domestic environment (the House chamber) took precedence over achieving the desired outcome in the international context. Moreover, my findings suggest that black members of Congress pushed the sanctions issue through two distinct streams of activism and not, as scholars have tended to assume, one long movement.

The analytic narrative also refines our understanding of black political behavior in the Congress. Most studies of the CBC suggest that inexperience led the group to develop collective goals that centered primarily on symbolic issues before the group became institutionalized at the end of the 93rd Congress.132 The narrative presented here undermines this conventional wisdom and shows that the early activism by the CBC on the sanctions issue was part of a complex strategy for achieving institutional clout that was devised by its most experienced member, Charles Diggs. Moreover, because the Diggs plan was predicated on the notion that CBC members’ work on such a difficult issue would earn the respect of their white colleagues, the narrative dispels the myth that black legislators invariably press African issues because they are, as Carol Swain argues, “easier to tackle” than the tough issues in their home districts.133 Finally, the fact that most of the black legislators withdrew from the sanctions campaign when it proved to be a losing internal strategy but returned to the issue when calls for activism emanated from their own districts proves that black members of Congress are indeed responsive to the demands of their constituents.

The analysis of the disagreements that emerged within the CBC over the AGOA also demonstrates that transnationalism is often an insufficient basis for mobilizing the black elite in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. Indeed, following the pattern established by CBC members in the 93rd–99th Congresses, those CBC members who deemed the AGOA a threat to their constituencies refused to support the measure. This finding also contradicts Swain’s thesis that black members of Congress place symbolic action in the realm of African affairs above their duty to serve as effective representatives of their constituents in the domestic arena.