The civil rights struggle did not end with the last great interracial march in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 or the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. The civil rights coalition of organizations that banded together in the 1960s had disintegrated, but the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People remained active, as did local organizations in communities nationwide. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, through the election of black officials, provided a significant path for the continuation of the civil rights movement. A black candidate in South Carolina summed up electoral politics as the new form of activism. “There’s an inherent value in office holding,” he declared. “A race of people excluded from public office will always be second class.” By 1992 there were more than 7,500 black elected officials in the United States. Many of them had participated in the civil rights movement and subsequently worked to gain for their constituents the economic benefits that integration and affirmative action had not yet achieved. Black mayors were elected in Atlanta and New Orleans as well as in smaller municipal and county governments in the South where African Americans could scarcely vote a decade earlier. These mayors appointed black officials, improved public health, and filled government jobs and contracts through affirmative action programs. At the same time, the number of Latino American and Asian American elected officials increased, and as with African Americans, most held office at the state and local levels.
The issue of school busing highlighted the persistence of racial discrimination. In the fifteen years following the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in 1954 (see chapter 25), few schools had been integrated. Starting in 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that genuine racial integration of the public schools must no longer be delayed. In 1971 the Court went even further in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education by requiring school districts to bus pupils to achieve integration. Cities such as Charlotte, North Carolina; Lexington, Kentucky; and Tampa, Florida, embraced the ruling and carefully planned for it to succeed.
However, the decision was more controversial in other municipalities around the nation. The civil rights movement had primarily addressed injustices in the South, but it also exposed racism as a national problem. There were no Jim Crow laws in the North, but in many northern communities racially discriminatory housing policies created segregated neighborhoods and, thus, segregated schools. When white parents in the Detroit suburbs objected to busing their children to inner-city, predominantly black schools, the Supreme Court in 1974 departed from the Swann case and prohibited busing across distinct school district boundaries. This ruling created a serious problem for integration efforts because many whites were fleeing the cities and moving to the suburbs where few blacks lived.
As the conflict over school integration intensified, violence broke out in communities throughout the country. In Boston, Massachusetts, busing opponents tapped into the racial and class resentments of the largely white working-class population of South Boston, which was paired with the black community of Roxbury for busing, leaving mainly middle- and upper-class white communities unaffected. In the fall of 1974, battles broke out inside and outside the schools. Antibusing protesters gathered in front of the Federal Building in downtown Boston, threw eggs and tomatoes, and cursed Senator Edward Kennedy, a busing supporter who sent his children to private school. “You’re a disgrace to the Irish,” one protester shouted. “Let your daughter get bussed [to Roxbury] so she can get raped.” Despite the violence, schools stayed open, and for the next three decades Boston remained under court order to continue busing.
Along with busing, affirmative action generated fierce controversy, as the case of Allan Bakke showed. From 1970 to 1977, with the acceleration of affirmative action programs, the number of African Americans attending college doubled, constituting nearly 10 percent of the student body, a few percentage points lower than the proportion of blacks in the national population. Though blacks still earned lower incomes than the average white family, black family income as a percent of white family income had grown from 55.1 percent in 1965 to 61.5 percent ten years later. African Americans, however, still had a long way to go to catch up with whites. The situation was even worse for those who did not reach middle-class status: About 30 percent of African Americans slid deeper into poverty during the decade.
Despite the persistence of economic inequality, many whites believed that affirmative action placed them at a disadvantage with blacks in the educational and economic marketplaces. In particular, many white men condemned policies that they thought recruited blacks at their expense. “Talk about rights; we’ve got no rights,” a white Detroit policeman stated in voicing his disapproval over an affirmative action decision in favor of blacks. Polls showed that although most whites favored equal treatment of blacks, they disapproved of affirmative action as a form of “reverse discrimination.” See Document Project 27: The Affirmative Action Debate.
The furor over affirmative action did not end with the Bakke case, and over the next three decades affirmative action opponents succeeded in narrowing the use of racial considerations in employment and education. However, they did so without Bakke, who chose to live a very private life with his family and refused to take up the larger cause against affirmative action with which his name became identified.
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What issues and trends shaped the presidency of Jimmy Carter? |
How and why did the social and cultural developments of the 1960s continue to create conflict and controversy in the 1970s? |