After twelve years of the Republican brand of civil rights, African-Americans rejoiced at a change in the White House. Will this change in 1993 – or any other Democratic victory in the 1990s – put blacks back on the road to greater equality? What could a Democratic president do to make that happen, and what are the constraints that might keep him or her from taking any major actions on the race issue?

Candidate Clinton's populist economic message during the long and victorious campaign portrayed a nation that would recover its multicultural energy and build a more cooperative society from the bottom up. Clinton argued for greater economic equality as one of the bases for more balanced and sustainable economic growth. He talked about new types of social programs that would benefit middle- and lower-income Americans. And everywhere he went, he promised not only more jobs, but better jobs. Even though he did not specifically talk about race, that message sounded good to blacks and many whites – it represented the possibility that lower-income Americans would be paid attention to, that the nation's cities would be attended to, and that poverty and social disintegration would again receive the honest attention they deserved in a society as rich and innovative as ours. Almost half of America's voters wanted to believe not only that things could get better socially, but that Democrats were the logical ones to make it happen.