Mike Espy 1953–

Member of the U.S. cabinet

At a Glance…

Mississippi’s First Black Congressman Since Reconstruction

Embraced Political Center

Delivered to Constituents, Lobbied for Cabinet Post

Named Secretary of the USDA

Sources

Soon after his 1993 confirmation as secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)—making him the first African American to hold that venerable position—Mike Espy poured over an old file he had requested from the agency’s archives. The file contained quarterly reports submitted in 1937 by a black county extension agent who surveyed farms in Crittenden County and West Memphis, Arkansas, for the Agriculture Department. In the reports were recommendations for improving Arkansas farms and bettering the standard of life in rural America—forward-thinking ideas about increased farm income, alternate crop development, and expanded trade. The author was Henry Espy, the new secretary’s father. For Mike Espy, the documents were a useful time capsule. He proceeded to dust off this piece of posthumous fatherly advice and use it in setting policy for the largest producer of agricultural products in the world.

But family heritage within the department will not make Espy’s job any easier, for he inherits a bloated USDA that has not been reformed since the 1930s, even though the face of farming in the United States has changed dramatically in the last half-century. Jack Anderson and Michael Binstein, writing in the Washington Post, quoted a congressional source as likening Espy’s task to facing a “charging elephant and trying to turn it on a dime.” But Espy has worked miracles in the past: he was the first black congressman from Mississippi since post-Civil War Reconstruction, and he gained popularity as a legislator who won the support of doubting whites by delivering on his promises and refusing to sacrifice his constituents’ interests to the Democratic party line.

Espy was bom November 30, 1953, in Yazoo City, a part of the poverty-racked Mississippi Delta, often called America’s Third World. Like other black children, Espy grew up in an atmosphere of virulent racism—he drank from black-only water fountains and carried a stick with him for protection when he went to the mostly white local high school—but he was spared impoverishment. His grandfather had founded a chain of 28 nursing homes and spearheaded the building of the first black hospital in Mississippi. After graduating from high school as senior class president, Espy attended Howard University and the University of Santa Clara School of Law.

With degrees in hand, Espy returned to Mississippi, where he worked as managing attorney at Central Mississippi Legal Services before entering the government sector, first as

At a Glance…

Born Alphonso Michael Espy, November 30, 1953, in Yazoo City, MS; son of Henry Espy (a county agent for the U.S. Department of Agriculture); married Sheila Bell (divorced); two children. Education: Howard University, B.A., 1975; University of Santa Clara School of Law J.D., 1978.

Central Mississippi Legal Services, managing attorney, 1978-80; State of Mississippi, assistant secretary of state for public lands, 1980-84, assistant attorney general for consumer protection, 1984-85; member of U.S. House of Representatives, 1987-93; served on Agriculture Committee, Budget Committee, and Select Committee on Hunger; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, DC, secretary, 1993—.

Addresses: Office —U.S. Department of Agriculture, Room 200A, Administration Bldg., 14th and Independence Ave. S.W., Washington, DC 20250.

assistant secretary of state for public lands and then as assistant attorney general for consumer protection. Ambitious and articulate, Espy believed that as a mid-level government appointee he would have only limited impact on those around him, black and white laborers in the poorest section of the poorest state in the country. Only in elected office could Espy champion those so often forgotten in the back rooms of political halls: the unemployed, the pregnant teenagers, the high school drop-outs, the small farmers struggling to subsist.

Mississippi’s First Black Congressman Since Reconstruction

Espy’s first foray into politics came at an opportune time, as the Justice Department had recently supervised the redrawing of district lines in Mississippi to increase the number of black voters, and another black candidate, in two unsuccessful political runs, had helped build black registration and participation in the electoral process. Still, the task, particularly for a political newcomer, was daunting. In a Boston Globe interview, he revealed his strategy for success in the racially charged Delta: “You must excite your black voters and not incite your white voters.”

Espy relied on the lingering vestiges of racism to “excite” black voters. Mississippi was then the only state that still kept drivers’ licenses categorized by race, so he bought from the state a list of black drivers in his district and immersed himself in the nuts and bolts of campaigning: direct mailing and door-knocking. By getting out the black vote in his bid to become the area’s next U.S. representative, Espy won the democratic primary over two white candidates: Paul B. Johnson, a grandson of a former governor, and Hiram Eastland, a cousin of the late Senator James Eastland, a segregationist renowned for burying civil rights legislation in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Confident that black voters would turn out at the polls to support him in the general election, Espy aimed to counter the skepticism with which the minority white landowners and business owners greeted him. Though largely in agreement with his democratic economic message, it seemed that conservative whites were hostage to a tradition that had never even considered black political representation. Espy understood that he could not excise racism from the Delta overnight, but with the skills of a veteran politician he seized on the issue that crossed racial lines: the pocket book. He talked with whites about agricultural issues, telling them that as a Democrat in the majority party in Congress he could do more for the district than his Republican opponent, two-term incumbent Webb Franklin. He paraded a letter from the incoming House Speaker Jim Wright, a Texas Democrat, promising to assign Espy to the Agriculture Committee, thus giving the neglected Delta area a strong voice in the formulation of farm policy.

Espy beat Franklin by fewer than five thousand votes, having garnered 98 percent of the black vote and 12.5 of the white vote, a monumental achievement in the racially polarized Delta. In 1986 he became the first black congressman elected from Mississippi since Reconstruction and the only black congressman representing a rural district.

Embraced Political Center

Once in office, Espy labored to preserve the coalition that had elected him, suffering the criticism that in reaching out to the white minority he was abandoning the core black support that had provided the real momentum for his candidacy. But Espy, a shrewd and innovative politician, raised his post-civil rights voice, stressing issues like rural economic development instead of racism. And he recognized that his power in raising the Delta out of abject poverty derived from his ability to speak the conservative language of the South.

In his three terms in the House, Espy’s embrace of the political center cast him as a rising star at a time when the country was becoming increasingly conservative. Like President Ronald Reagan, Espy supported both the death penalty and U.S. funding for the Nicaraguan Contras, who were fighting the Marxist Sandinistas. (The Sandinistas assumed power of the Central American republic in 1979, after overthrowing the Somoza regime. The Contras demonstrated their continued support of the toppled government through armed resistance against the left-wing Sandinistas, and Espy felt that the United States should help finance their insurgent activities.) And, in another controversial move, Espy became the first federal lawmaker to appear in an advertisement for the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), of which he had been a member since 1974.

He worked with then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton on the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, which most black lawmakers shunned, and, in the eyes of some urban, liberal members of the Congressional Black Caucus, committed an act of political heresy by supporting several Republican-championed economic programs. Chief among these was the establishment of microenterprises, which would encourage welfare recipients to take out loans from community banks to form small businesses. Espy argued that U.S. foreign aid had supported, with impressive results, similar self-help programs in such impoverished nations as Bangladesh and the Dominican Republic, and that certain pockets of America, including the Delta, needed the same attention as a developing country. While liberals, including most Caucus members, lambasted microenterprises as a Republican do-nothing approach, Espy preached the conversion of the American welfare system into one that rewards self-reliance and entrepreneurship.

Though increasingly at odds with his black colleagues in the government, Espy consistently received high ratings from liberal groups, including Americans for Democratic Action, by backing funding for housing, job training, and Head Start. “If we cut these, we are cutting our own future,” he said in the Washington Post. In the eyes of most observers, Espy demonstrated a political courage rarely seen in Washington: a willingness to follow his conscience across party lines.

Delivered to Constituents, Lobbied for Cabinet Post

While his brazen independence played well in the South, Espy won the support of his constituents by bringing home the bacon. The Delta’s fastest growing business was catfish farming, with pools the size of soccer fields covering 98,000 acres in his district and providing 90 percent of the world’s pond-raised catfish. In addition to sponsoring National Catfish Day legislation, Espy obtained huge federal grants to build catfish processing plants in his district after securing an agreement with the Pentagon to increase the amount of catfish sold to the military. So rewarding was Espy’s representation that Mississippians handed him 78 percent of the vote in his 1993 reelection bid.

Given his popularity among whites and blacks, many local political analysts expected Espy to make a run for statewide office. After Bill Clinton’s election to the U.S. presidency, Espy was rumored to have designs on either a chairmanship of an agriculture subcommittee or a seat on the House Appropriations Committee. When neither materialized, he put himself forward for a presidential appointment. There was little doubt that Espy would receive the executive nod, as he had been one of the first black members of Congress to endorse Clinton and had co-authored Clinton’s program to overhaul the welfare system. Moreover, Clinton and Espy were perceived as political twins, centrists who had recognized the staleness of the traditional Democratic message. When the cabinet post Espy most wanted—secretary of Housing and Urban Development—fell through, he set his sights on Agriculture, delivering to Clinton a memo he had written titled “Ten Reasons Why Mike Espy Should Be Your Agriculture Secretary.”

Named Secretary of the USDA

Thus the first person from Mississippi nominated for the cabinet this century was a black man from the Delta region, asked to fill a post that had almost invariably been the province of white men from the Midwest. Though his congressional career had focused on agricultural issues and the rural poor, Espy lacked experience with some of the Agriculture Department’s largest commodity-producing groups, including grain farmers in the Midwest and fruit and vegetable growers in Florida and California. The nomination also caused a flurry of concern among some environmentalists, who noted that Espy had failed to support legislation to control global warming, protect old-growth forests, and strengthen protection for endangered species.

After Espy’s confirmation, the talk turned to whether he or anyone could reform the USDA, the fourth largest federal department, with a $67 billion annual budget and a scope of services ranging from agricultural subsidies to food stamps to feeding programs for pregnant mothers. On the one hand, it was Espy’s responsibility to pare down a governmental dinosaur that over the years had grown out of control, despite the shrinking number of American farms. On the other, he needed to prove that the department not only represented agribusiness but also the millions of Americans who consume the fruits of the land. Two early actions won him praise on both counts. He issued a hiring freeze, vowing to restructure the Washington bureaucracy, and, in the wake of three deaths and 500 illnesses caused by tainted hamburger, pledged to modernize the department’s meat inspection program. “Already he’s latched onto two key issues that are win-win situations for him—the meat issue and the restructuring,” the Washington Post quoted a source as saying. “It’s classic Espy. He’s approaching it as a department for consumers, whereas most people look at it as a department that’s just for farmers. He’s thinking about what USDA can mean for everyone in America.” In addition, Espy was instrumental in delivering federal aid to the state of Iowa in the wake of the devastating floods of the summer of 1993.

Sources

Black Enterprise, March 1993, p. 78.

Boston Globe, April 25, 1988, p. 10; October 23, 1990, p. 19; February 19, 1993, p. 12. Christian Science Monitor, December 30, 1993, p. 7. Ebony, May 1993, p. 62. Economist, January 23, 1993, p. 26. New York Times, March 30, 1989, p. B7; March 28, 1993, p. 26. U.S. News & World Report, July 23, 1990, p. 29. Washington Post, December 25, 1992, p. A23; January 14, 1993, p. A12; February 1, 1993, p. A17; Februar 11, 1993, p. B23.

—Isaac Rosen