Desegregation with a Wink

Reacting to the furious assault on the Republican Party's alleged racism inspired by Trent Lott's foot-in-mouth disease, George Shultz, Richard Nixon's first secretary of labor, contended in a recent New York Times op-ed piece that his party has gotten a bum rap. He pointed with pride to his leadership of the Cabinet Committee on Education that helped to end, once and for all, de jure segregation in Southern schools. And he correctly highlighted Nixon's support of his activities.

In 1969, 68 percent of black children in the South attended all-black schools. By the time Nixon left office, that number had fallen to 8 percent. And it is true, that the approach his administration adopted to enforce the 1954 Brown decision, involving schmoozing with white and black leaders in state desegregation committees, did the trick with relatively little resistance from hardliners. Indeed, although the Nixon administration moved with more than "all deliberate speed" to facilitate the ending of de jure segregation in the South, his party not only held onto its gains in that region but just about completed the trend that had begun in the Eisenhower years to make the once solid Democratic South the most important Republican stronghold in the nation. According to Nixon's Southern strategist, Harry Dent, to desegregate the South and still hold on to the loyalties of Southerners was the "miracle of this age."

In 1969, the issue had reached a major crisis point with HEW, under the approach adopted by the Johnson administration, poised to deny funds to laggard southern school districts that were resisting court-ordered desegregation. Nixon, who did believe that it was time to get the issue behind him and the nation, cleverly decided to alter that approach by moving the matter of the districts that were in non-compliance from HEW to the federal judiciary.

When, in August 1969, he announced a delay in the implementation of HEW's previously announced "punishment" for thirty-three school districts in Mississippi, sixty-five of the seventy-four line officers in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department publicly protested the new approach. But now the wrath of the Southerners would be directed against the federal judiciary, not Nixon's HEW, headed by his friend, the moderate Robert Finch.

As Shultz pointed out, Nixon did meet periodically with Southern leaders to urge them to accept desegregation plans, but one reason why the former labor secretary's account may have come as something of a surprise is that the spotlight-loving president played those activities in a low key. He ordered that "our people have got to quit bragging about school desegregation. We do what the law requires-nothing more." He agreed with an advisor in 1971 who wrote that "if we can keep liberal writers convinced that we are doing what the Court requires, and our conservative Southern friends convinced that we are not doing any more than the Court requires, I think we can walk this tightrope until November 1972."

Furthermore, many Southerners took heart when Nixon tried to appoint two of their number to the Supreme Court, who, according to him, were "distinguished jurists" who "had the misfortune of being born in the South." They were pleased as well when the administration tried to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act when it came up for renewal in 1969. And they were elated when he threatened to support a constitutional amendment against cross-district busing, even though he commented privately that "I know it's not a good idea, but it'll make those bastards [in the Democratic Party] take a stand and it's a political plus for us."

If one accepts the notion that presidents can take the credit for all the progressive legislation and social and economic progress that occur during their administrations even if they were not enthusiastic about them, then Shultz has a point; the Republican Party, which ran the country when de jure segregation finally ended in the South, deserves its props. After all, Clinton Democrats proudly celebrated "their" Welfare Reform legislation.

Nonetheless, Nixon helped to desegregate the South with a wink, in effect telling his emerging new base that he sympathized with them but there was little else he could do given those expletive deleted liberal judges. He would, of course, support their concerns in other ways, as he certainly did on the way to creating the new Republican majority that won five of the next eight presidential elections, including his second run in 1972.