Thomas Sowell writes about Alan Keyes.

Back during the first Bush administration, the President invited some civil rights leaders to meet with him at the White House. They set a precondition -- that neither Alan Keyes nor Thomas Sowell be present at that meeting.

The Wall Street Journal was incensed that the elder President Bush agreed to these preconditions but I was more amused than anything else. For one thing, I had been to the White House the previous week and said what I had to say, not that it did any good.

Had there been a meeting that included Alan Keyes and myself, I could have sat back with folded arms and enjoyed watching Keyes make mincemeat of the intellectual lightweights who call themselves black "leaders." Keyes is both savvy and fearless, and is wholly undeterred by the name-calling that black "leaders" direct at other blacks who dare to disagree with them.

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On today's issues -- especially education, jobs, and crime -- the Republicans have more to offer blacks as well as whites. Democrats are too much in hock to the teachers' unions to allow the fundamental changes needed to give black children a decent education, which is increasingly the ticket to a decent life. Democrats are too much in hock to other special interests like the environmental extremists and trial lawyers, whose activities have the net effect of destroying jobs for everyone.

On crime -- a major concern in black communities -- Democrats appoint the kinds of liberal judges who are quick to turn criminals loose and slow to impose the kind of serious punishment needed to take them off the streets and deter others.

Democrats have inertia and racial demagoguery on their side. Republicans need someone like Alan Keyes who can talk sense.

Loury's problems began with the left. Although his dissertation was written only a dozen years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, he saw clearly that the problems facing African-Americans had changed. The biggest barrier to progress was no longer active racism of whites but internal social problems of the black community. But black leaders, and to a lesser extent liberalism as a whole, flatly refused even to contemplate that possibility. He also found powerful pressures--"loyalty tests"--operating against any black intellectual who tried to challenge the orthodoxy.

Let's face it: Any articulate minority intellectual who reliably espouses conservative positions is automatically offered a ticket to a very nice lifestyle. No more rejections from picky academic journals or grubbing for sabbatical time. Instead there are cushy fellowships at Hoover, guest editorials in the Wall Street Journal, and invited articles in Commentary--maybe even a regular column in Forbes--and a steady stream of invitations to plush conferences in nice places.

I have learned a lot from reading Loury, but witness just how sad his recent shift in politics has been:

One Sunday evening early in the fall, Glenn C. Loury arrived at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Mass., where a group of distinguished black intellectuals, including Cornel West, Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates Jr., was gathering to discuss the Sept. 11 attacks. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the keynote speaker, had flown in to talk about possible shuttle diplomacy with the Taliban. Loury, an economist at Boston University who first achieved prominence as one of the nation's leading black conservatives in the Reagan years, was there on a diplomatic mission of his own: to mend the rift that has long separated him from liberal blacks like Jackson. He knew he might elicit more than a few hostile glances. ''I've been trying to figure out who you were for the longest time,'' one woman said coldly when they were introduced, according to Loury. But he decided to brave it.

Shortly before the meeting, Loury walked into a conference room where Jackson was chatting with Gates. As Loury shook hands with Jackson -- a man he had taken to task in print throughout the 1980's -- Gates effusively praised Loury's book ''The Anatomy of Racial Inequality,'' which will be published early next month by Harvard University Press. In it, Loury makes a striking departure from the self-help themes of his earlier work, defending affirmative action and denouncing ''colorblindness'' as a euphemism for indifference to the fate of black Americans.

Jackson said to Gates: ''This man is smart. Whatever his politics, he's always been smart.'' When the conversation turned to the Middle East, Loury sheepishly reminded Jackson of an article he wrote more than 15 years ago in Commentary attacking him for embracing Yasir Arafat.

''You probably don't remember the piece,'' Loury said.

''Oh, yes I do,'' Jackson fired back.

''I looked him in the eye,'' Loury recalled a couple of weeks later, ''and said: 'I really wish I hadn't written that. It was a mistake, and I really regret it.' Jackson didn't say anything directly in response to it, but during his formal presentation he made a point of singling me out. He said: 'To say that Glenn Loury isn't black because he disagrees with me, well that's just stupid. We can't afford to leave brilliant minds like that by the wayside.'''

The next day, Loury e-mailed Charles Ogletree Jr., the Harvard Law professor who had organized the meeting. ''I came close to not showing -- for a variety of invalid reasons that have more to do with my scarred psyche than with anything in the real world,'' he wrote. ''You should know that I was deeply gratified by my reception on Sunday. Jesse was very generous. (I guess my 'political rehabilitation' is more or less complete now!)''

''That meeting was the defining moment for Glenn,'' his friend Orlando Patterson, a Harvard sociologist, later said. Or, as another scholar put it to me, ''Glenn is finally able to walk into a room full of black people who don't all hate him.''