American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [214]
The civil rights movement was about more than just changing laws; it was about the expression of racial pride and the inclusion of groups previously left on the margins of the nation’s historical narrative. Both themes would become tied up with the post-1960s history of Ellis Island. As immigrants took their place in the American mainstream, other groups looked to Ellis Island as they made their pleas for acceptance.
In the early morning hours of March 16, 1970, a small group of American Indians attempted to set off for Ellis Island undetected before daybreak. Their goal was to turn the island into a center for Indian culture, but a gas leak foiled their plans. After that, the Coast Guard stepped up patrols and proclaimed a zone of security around the island.
Perhaps the most bizarre incident occurred later that same year. It was an event that demonstrated what happened when you mixed the machinations of the Nixon administration with Black Power and Black Capitalism.
In 1966, a neurosurgeon named Thomas Matthew formed a group called NEGRO, the National Economic Growth and Reconstruction Organization. Arguing that welfare dependency had harmed blacks, Dr. Matthew called for a program of self-help. To that end, NEGRO would build hospitals, start black-owned businesses, and rebuild the inner city. Matthew planned to fund the organization by selling bonds at a block party and using the money raised to leverage government funds.
But the bond issue didn’t quite work, and in a few years Matthew found himself convicted of failing to file his income tax returns since the early 1960s and accruing as much as $150,000 in back taxes and penalties. In late 1969, he began a six-month jail sentence and also agreed to make restitution to the IRS.
While Matthew’s rhetoric was out of step with the Great Society and mainstream civil rights movement, his views caught the attention of Richard Nixon and his aides. Once in office, Nixon was stung by criticism that he was insensitive to civil rights. His administration would never win over traditional civil rights groups, so it took another tack by proclaiming its support for black capitalism to help minorities enter the nation’s economic mainstream. The Nixon administration made money available to assist blacks with business opportunities. It was the perfect way to mix opposition to welfare with concern for blacks. And Dr. Thomas Matthew seemed made to order for Nixon.
Perhaps that was the reason that Nixon commuted Matthew’s sentence for tax evasion, the administration’s first executive clemency. Matthew could be useful to the new administration, a black voice supporting Republican policies. In fact, the move began paying political dividends almost immediately when Matthew came out to support Nixon’s embattled Supreme Court nominee, G. Harold Carswell. Matthew’s views did not win him friends among other civil rights leaders, but it did give him political access to the Nixon administration, which was eager to have its Commerce Department and Small Business Administration assist black entrepreneurs.
It would prove to be an uneasy relationship, as a 1971 discussion made clear. In a White House meeting discussing the possible pardon of Jimmy Hoffa, Nixon and his aides brought up the case of Matthew in ways that laid bare their mixed feelings about the NEGRO leader and blacks in general. “He stole everybody blind,” Nixon said of Matthew, referring to his earlier trouble and somewhat confusing Matthew’s actual crime, “after all he was trying to do well by his people so we let him out. . . . They all steal—I mean not all. . . . People do when they are over their heads. He probably didn’t know that he was stealing.” At that point, one of the aides joked that Matthew “just liberated that money,” to which Nixon responded in a more sympathetic vein that Matthew “was a very nice man, very