President Bush’s speech Tuesday at Goree Island in Senegal surprised and gratified me. His acknowledgment of black Americans’ still raw wound is rare among white Americans, even though the Atlantic slave trade was a business of monumental proportions. If only his actions at home backed up his words in Africa.

By recounting details of slavery’s shameful history, Bush took an important step in making the story more widely known. Between 1 million and 2 million captives were shipped out to the New World from the Senegambian region, of which Goree’s door of no return was the main point of embarkation. Conservative estimates put the total numbers exiled from their African homeland between 10 million and 12 million.

Before the massive European immigration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more Africans than Europeans entered the Americas. By the time the American Civil War broke out in 1861, the largest enslaved population in the world lived in the United States.

Perhaps the power of that chilling place awakened Bush to the viciousness of the institution that created the American political economy. Most of the founding fathers were slave owners, including Benjamin Franklin. And the power of slavery shaped the compromises of the constitutional convention, the United States Constitution and the first half of the 19th century. Slavery, as Bush noted, was no little thing.

Echoing slave owner Thomas Jefferson, Bush tallied up the usually forgotten costs of slavery to the owners: “Years of unpunished brutality and bullying and rape produced a dullness and hardness of conscience. Christian men and women became blind to the clearest commands of their faith and added hypocrisy to injustice.”

Bush mentioned the trauma of transportation and sale. He listed the main economic handicaps related to enslavement: Unpaid labor, restrictions on marriage and, therefore, on inheritance, no property, no accumulation of wealth, and virtually no education meant black people were penniless at emancipation.

When blacks became U.S. citizens in the 1860s, they started at economic ground zero. For three or four subsequent generations, racial discrimination and exclusion from public life kept black people the poorest people in the nation. The era of legal segregation ended within my lifetime, but the enduring lack of wealth keeps black people the poorest in the nation.

American presidents — Bill Clinton in 1998 as well as Bush in 2003 — seem more able to face the slave trade and slavery outside the United States. In Senegal, Bush said: “My nation’s journey toward justice has not been easy and it is not over.” But back home he seems perfectly willing to thwart remedies for disabilities he recognized in Senegal.

Two effective remedies for the legacy of slavery are affirmative action and voting rights. In both cases, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft’s Department of Justice has worked against the correction of blacks’ relative poverty and disfranchisement.

A Justice Department against affirmative action and black voting rights runs this Bush administration’s leg of the “journey toward justice.” In 2001, the Justice Department refused to file supporting briefs in the University of Michigan cases, and last year the president’s brief to the U.S. Supreme Court opposed affirmative action. While seeming to counter the president’s brief, the Supreme Court effectively crippled the practice of affirmative action by race. Even though the Supreme Court’s decision in the Michigan Law School case upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action for diversity, the undergraduate decision hobbles institutions such as state universities that receive tens of thousands of applications per year.

The decisions also leave intact preferences for the children of alumni and poor white applicants. Students with advanced placement credit and those graduating from “high quality” schools can continue to receive extra credit. The high schools most blacks attend do not offer advanced placement courses or qualify as “high quality.”

The Bush administration also has refused to remove the obstacles black voters faced in the election in Florida in 2000. Ralph F. Boyd Jr., assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, led a severely limited investigation of 11,000 Florida complaints. He focused on only three counties (in which Democrats were strong) and on issues related to language: the provision of help to non-English-speaking voters.

Boyd neglected the hundreds of black voters who encountered ad-hoc police checkpoints or were barred from the polls because they had wrongly been identified as felons. Not only did these frustrated voters get no redress; Boyd gave a job to one of the people who had knocked them off the list of registered voters. At the same time that the Department of Justice disregarded and reassigned career lawyers who support voting rights, it replaced civil servants with political appointees. Spanish-speaking voters may receive extra help in Florida’s next election. But the Justice Department has not addressed black voters’ concerns. Such is the record of the Bush administration’s actions.

Bush’s words at Goree were good ones, and they will doubtless exert a positive influence in and of themselves. However, the best of words, even from a president, do not substitute for positive action. Compared with his administration’s behavior, Bush’s eloquence remains little more than sound.

Nell Irvin Painter teaches history at Princeton University.