The early life of Abigail Thernstrom was about as impeccably liberal as it was possible to be in mid-20th-century America.
Born to communist parents in New York City, she spent much of her childhood at her father’s Westchester County communal farm, which served as a refuge for European political exiles. She sang alongside Pete Seeger at the Little Red School House in Greenwich Village. As an undergraduate in the late 1950s, she picketed against segregation at Woolworth’s. As a Harvard graduate student, she met her future husband at a lecture by the left-wing journalist I.F. Stone.
When she died last week at 83, however, Thernstrom was the most distinguished and certainly the most influential conservative writer on the subject of race in America. When, in 1997, President Bill Clinton conducted two town hall discussions on race, she was one of a select trio of scholar participants. The onetime campaigner for George McGovern was a President George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and, along with her historian husband Stephan Thernstrom, co-author of the authoritative account of the state of contemporary race relations, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible.
That shift along the ideological spectrum was driven by the transformation of the civil rights movement during the past half-century. “I’d say we’ve stuck to our principles,” she once told an interviewer. “Don’t judge people on the basis of the color of their skin. … The classic civil rights message is now called conservatism.”
Her evolution was also an artifact of its time. For example, Thernstrom’s scholarly progress had been interrupted by her husband’s career: Stephan Thernstrom taught at UCLA for a dozen years while his wife raised their two children. When he returned to Harvard in 1973 to teach, she resumed her graduate studies in political science, earning her doctorate two years later. She began teaching part time at Harvard and contributed articles to journals of opinion, including the Economist, the New Republic, and the pioneering neoconservative Public Interest.
The 1970s were a decade of ferment on the intellectual Right. The great legislative achievements of the civil rights movement — the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act — were already a decade old, as was the vast expansion of federal power and social welfare programs envisioned by President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Lifelong liberals such as Thernstrom had always championed the objectives of racial integration and, in particular, Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a colorblind society. But they were dismayed that the Great Society had not only created programs that fostered dependence on state welfare but instituted racial preferences and race-conscious regulations that, under the rubric of “affirmative action,” were both practically ineffective and deeply divisive in a nation where, as she put it, “race is the American dilemma [that] keeps the country in agony.”
Moreover, the Voting Rights Act, which had been designed to enfranchise blacks in the Jim Crow South and elsewhere, had devolved into a deliberate means of drawing “majority-minority” congressional districts that have yielded permanent safe seats based on race. Three decades ago and more, Thernstrom drew the straight line connecting the Left’s racial cynicism to today’s corrosive identity politics.
Of course, then as now, Thernstrom’s principles, chiefly her unwavering faith in racial equality, along with her fidelity to those principles, required a certain measure of courage in our fractious age. She was “controversial” in the sense that, recognizing the extent to which urban school systems fail black students, she supported charter schools and voucher programs. Yet, her radical background also insulated her against accusations of bad faith. Only someone who fully understood and acknowledged past injustice could point instructively, as she did in her trenchant writings, to the racial progress of the postwar era and the value of honesty.
“When it comes to race,” she once explained to the New York Times, “the test of any public policy is: Will it bring us together or divide us?”
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
