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Nixon's Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washingtion to Clinton

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of presidential racial politics throughout our history. The rather whimsical title, Nixon's Piano, refers to a minstrel show presented in the White House in 1970 with president Nixon on the piano. The author, Kenneth O'Reilly, sounds like a rather angry man in this indictment of presidential action & inaction for over two centuries. None of our presidents are safe from his scorn save two. Lincoln & LBJ get a pass. Lincoln for his part, may be the only president to pursue his conscience, that being in very special circumstances. Some of our presidents had the very best of intentions & guilt. Washington & Jefferson knew of the the inherent evil of slavery. They talk piously but in the end did nothing that would jeopardize their wealth & lose their privileged position & fine life. That their peculiar institution must someday end they surely knew. But they also knew by that time they'd be dead anyway. In our first 72 years, 9 out of 16 presidents had slaves. The Civil War changed that of course. After a brief reconstruction, the old southern power structure reasserted itself & things got decidedly worst for the black race. Most early presidents seem to have some sort of return to Africa or anywhere but here scheme. These were failures. The idea of moving millions of people to a land that was unknown to them was patently impossible, except on a very small scale. So you'd think that the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt would bring some relief to southern blacks. You'd be wrong. His best instincts told him blacks were equal under the law with the rights of every man. His baser instinct told him that blacks were inferior. He broke bread with Booker Washington in the White House & provide patronage jobs. Meanwhile, throughout his term an average of 80 blacks were lynched in the south every year. This marked the end of the Lincoln's Republican party. The GOP became as lily-white as the Democrats. Taft was worse & the last time, Blacks as a block voted for a Republican. At this point, there were not that many blacks voting. The book covers Plessey v Ferguson from 1896. The infamous Supreme Court decision that as late as 1953 was being praised by future Justice William Rehnquist. It covers the Jim Crow laws & the dishonorable discharge of over 100 black soldiers in the 1906 Brownsville riots. That wrong was not corrected until 1970 by Nixon.
This review by & large covers the mostly historic & interesting first half of this long book.

for those that yearn to understand presidential politicss impact on race & the shortcomings of the individuals that are so often placed on a pedestal--unjustly. To elaborate, former presidents are often looked upon with prestige and honor that frankly, they don't deserve--this book breaks these issues down in detail with the goal of providing a more complete context to these individuals.