The Nixon Effect. Douglas E. Schoen

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СКАЧАТЬ Nixon said that “no funds should be given to a district which practices segregation.”¹¹

      Some brief background: When the 1964 Civil Rights Act was drafted, Vice President Hubert Humphrey proposed amendments banning the act from ever being interpreted as one that required forced busing. Humphrey wanted to outlaw segregation, but he opposed forcing integration according to race. Republican Senator Jacob Javits expressed similar views. However, by 1966, the Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) had mandated that the success of desegregation efforts could be measured by numbers—that is, by how many children had been integrated. In certain areas, the only way to satisfy those targets was through busing.

      The integration of schools was upheld by the Supreme Court’s 1968 ruling in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, which ordered an immediate end to de jure segregation.¹² The busing views were further bolstered in the Court’s 1971 ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which ordered the school district to desegregate, allowing it to redraw districts, if necessary, and also to use busing. These two rulings effectively brought an end to de jure segregation—that is, segregation by explicit arrangement—in the South though they did not address de facto segregation, which was common in the North and West, not so much as a matter of law but as a result of residential patterns. Now several lower courts began to mandate busing as a means to eliminate de facto segregation as well.¹³ Backlash to busing grew across the country, especially in suburban districts in the North and West.

      Nixon did not see busing—forced integration—as a solution to racial inequality, let alone as a way to foster harmonious relations between whites and blacks. In addition, he objected to it on the grounds of community control. After the Swann ruling upheld the constitutionality of busing, Nixon asked Congress to pass a moratorium on new court-ordered busing rulings—which would not affect those already in place. The moratorium made it through the House but not the Senate. Throughout the first half of the 1970s, busing continued to be a hugely divisive issue socially and politically, sparking parent protests, sporadic violence, and even the firebombing of school buses in Pontiac, Michigan. By 1974, reflecting the new public mood, the court had ruled, in Milliken v. Bradley, that federal courts could not bus between school districts unless they could prove that these districts were deliberately drawn up so as to create segregation.¹⁴

      Liberals at the New York Times and elsewhere blamed Nixon for his resistance to busing, but they somehow missed the astounding success he was having desegregating American schools, which was busing’s main goal. When Nixon entered the White House, the desegregation of Southern schools was proceeding at a snail’s pace. The fact that he had reduced the percentage of black children attending all-black schools from 70 percent to 8 percent by the time he left office in 1974¹⁵ makes the record crystal clear: Richard Nixon desegregated more schools than all other presidents combined.

      He accomplished this historic feat in no small part by applying Republican, conservative principles of governance, especially federalism—the philosophy that grants maximum autonomy to the states. Where desegregation was concerned, Nixon deferred to federalist principles as long as the states’ efforts were consistent with federal mandates on civil rights. As the speechwriter and author Ray Price put it: “Nixon’s aim was to use the minimum coercion necessary to achieve the essential national goal, to encourage local initiative, to respect diversity, and, to the extent possible, to treat the entire nation equally—blacks equally with whites, the South equally with the North.”¹⁶

      George Shultz, who served as Nixon’s secretary of labor before heading up the Office of Management and Budget and later working as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, told the story of how Nixon worked to enforce the mandate of Brown v. Board of Ed in a powerful New York Times op-ed in 2003. In the article, Shultz described how Nixon supported this legislation—which had been flouted for nearly twenty years—by asking him and Vice President Agnew to form biracial committees in the seven affected Southern states. The idea was that white and black representatives would work together to manage the process of desegregation with minimal interference from Washington—as long as the committees understood that they had to reach some kind of workable solution, or risk federal intervention. In many instances, the whites and blacks who served together got to know and respect one another to an extent few had foreseen. As the committees got closer to bringing their plans to fruition, Shultz knew that it was time to bring the president in. As Shultz told the story:

      When the time was right, I let President Nixon know that we were ready for him. We walked across the hall into the Oval Office, where the president gathered his guests around his desk. “We live in a great democracy where authority and responsibility are shared,” I remember him saying. “Just as decisions are made here in this office, decisions are made throughout the states and communities of our country. You are the leaders in those communities and you have to step up to your responsibilities.” They left the Oval Office inspired.¹⁷

      Reflecting on the gathering, Nixon said, “One of the most encouraging experiences that I have had since taking office was to hear each one of these leaders from the Southern states speak honestly about the problems, not glossing over the fact that there were very grave problems. As a result of these advisory committees being set up, we are going to find that in many districts the transition will be orderly and peaceful, whereas otherwise it could have been the other way.”¹⁸

      One of the black members of the fifteen-member Mississippi State Advisory Committee who sat in the president’s office that day was so encouraged by the meeting that he told the president: “The day before yesterday I was in jail for going to the wrong beach. Today, Mr. President, I am meeting you. If that’s possible anything can happen.”¹⁹ His optimism proved warranted. “In the end, the school openings were peaceful,” Shultz wrote. “To the amazement of almost everyone.”²⁰

      “There has been more change in the structure of American public school education in the last month than in the past 100 years,” Moynihan wrote when he was Nixon’s counselor. His verdict on Nixon’s civil rights record remains true: “How little the administration seems to be credited with what it has achieved.”²¹

      Writing many years later, the New York Times’s Tom Wicker, hardly a champion of the president, stated: “There’s no doubt about it—the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years, or probably since. There’s no doubt either that it was Richard Nixon personally who conceived, orchestrated and led the administration’s desegregation effort. Halting and uncertain before he finally asserted strong control, that effort resulted in probably the outstanding domestic achievement of his administration.”²²

      And desegregation was not the only area in which Nixon worked for the advancement of African Americans. How many remember today that Nixon was a champion of affirmative action? “Incredible but true,” is how Fortune magazine described it in 1994 when Nixon died, “it was the Nixonites that gave us employment quotas.”²³ Though many credit John F. Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson with initiating affirmative action, it was Nixon who first sanctioned formal goals and time frames to break barriers to minority employment (to be sure, the merits of these policies depend on one’s political views).

      Nixon’s administration also put together the Philadelphia Plan, a forceful federal-level initiative to guarantee fair hiring practices in construction jobs, with definitive “goals and timetables” for minority inclusion. The administration would not impose quotas, Nixon himself said, “but would require federal contractors to show ‘affirmative action’ to meet the goals of increasing minority employment.”²⁴ The plan took its name from the city in which the first test case was run. Secretary of Labor Arthur Fletcher said: “The craft unions and the construction industry are among the most egregious offenders against equal opportunity laws . . . openly hostile toward letting blacks into СКАЧАТЬ