The Nixon Effect. Douglas E. Schoen
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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 their closed circle.”25
The Philadelphia Plan was part of a broader agenda of supporting what Nixon called “black capitalism.” It came at a time, several years after Dr. King’s death, when the traditional civil rights paradigm seemed to have broken down amid a changed legal and political climate. Some problems had actually been solved; others remained. But the old-line civil rights leadership seemed unable to grasp the new realities, and the urban violence of the late sixties had exposed the limitations of its approach—while prompting a backlash from whites. Nixon saw support for black business efforts not only as a logical next step in black advancement but as a way to defuse racial tensions.
As Nixon speechwriter Ray Price put it, the rioting and other inner-city violence posed the danger of “hardening attitudes into a simple formula of ‘it’s us against them.’” Price lambasted liberal Democrats, “who, faced with a riot, beat their breasts in a chorus of collective mea culpas,” along with white conservatives, “who don’t recognize the cultural gulf between the ghetto and suburbia.”26
Nixon’s approach sought to bring Republican values of entrepreneurialism to the black community, while also—so Nixon hoped, anyway—reaching out to blacks and demonstrating to them that Republicans also sought their advancement and wanted their support. As a result, the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE), championed by Republicans, put liberal Democrats on the defensive. Instead of a constant drumbeat for government assistance or legislation, here was a different emphasis for black advancement: free enterprise and the American way. Eventually, some liberal politicians endorsed the OMBE. Black capitalism, said Graham T. Molitor, a pollster for liberal Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, was “a stroke of political genius.”27
A good portion of the liberal establishment showed its myopia, however, in harping on the Nixon plan’s limitations. The New York Times argued that the plan ignored institutional discrimination in home sales and wages and failed to fully account for the social, economic, and political concerns of blacks. But Nixon continued, undaunted.
In 1972, after presidential candidate George Wallace once again proved strong in Southern primaries, Nixon showed his newfound confidence in exerting a civil rights agenda—without losing his majority support among whites and even most conservatives. Nixon proposed the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1972, affirming that no state or locality could discriminate in education based on race, color, or national origin, while also making it clear that busing would be regarded only as a last resort.28
Writing thirty years later, in 2002, Patrick Buchanan summarized the administration’s civil rights achievements in the following list. According to him, the administration:
* raised the civil rights enforcement budget 800 percent;
* doubled the budget for black colleges;
* appointed more blacks to federal posts and high positions than any president, including LBJ;
* adopted the Philadelphia Plan mandating