Now you're just being a partisan idiot.
Desegregation and civil rights[edit]
Dean J. Kotlowski states that:
recent scholars have concluded that the president was neither a segregationist nor a conservative on the race question. These writers have shown that Nixon desegregated more schools than previous presidents, approved a strengthened Voting Rights Act, developed policies to aid minority businesses, and supported affirmative action.
[88]
The Nixon years witnessed the first large-scale efforts to
desegregate the nation's public schools.
[89] Seeking to avoid alienating Southern whites, whom Nixon hoped would form part of a durable Republican coalition, the president adopted a "low profile" on school desegregation. He pursued this policy by allowing the courts to receive the criticism for desegregation orders, which Nixon's Justice Department would then enforce.
[90] By September 1970, less than ten percent of black children were attending segregated schools.
[91] After the Supreme Court's handed down its decision in the 1971 case of
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education,
cross-district school busing emerged as a major issue in both the North and the South.
Swann permitted lower federal courts to mandate busing in order to remedy racial imbalance in schools. Though he enforced the court orders, Nixon believed that "forced integration of housing or education" was just as improper as legal segregation, and he took a strong public stance against its continuation. The issue of cross-district busing faded from the fore of national politics after the Supreme Court placed limits on the use of cross-district busing with its decision in the 1974 case of
Milliken v. Bradley.
[92]
Nixon established the
Office of Minority Business Enterprise to promote the encourage the establishment of minority-owned businesses.
[93] The administration also worked to increase the number of racial minorities hired across the nation in various construction trades, implementing the first
affirmative action plan in the United States. The
Philadelphia Plan required
government contractors in
Philadelphia to hire a minimum number of minority workers.
[94] In 1970, Nixon extended the Philadelphia Plan to encompass all federal contracts worth more than $50,000, and in 1971 he expanded the plan to encompass women as well as racial minorities.
[95] Nixon and Attorney General Mitchell also helped enact an extension of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 that expanded federal supervision of voting rights to all jurisdictions in which less than 50 percent of the minority population was registered to vote.
[96]
