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Nixon’s 1968 campaign had appealed to southern Democrats and white workers by exploiting hostility to black protest and new civil rights policies, but his administration had to answer to the courts and to Congress. In 1968, fourteen years after the Brown decision, school desegregation had barely touched the South. Like Eisenhower, Nixon was reluctant to use federal power to compel integration, but the Supreme Court overruled the administration’s efforts to delay court-ordered desegregation. By 1974, fewer than one in ten southern black children attended totally segregated schools.

Nixon also began to implement affirmative action among federal contractors and unions, and his administration awarded more government contracts and loans to minority businesses. Congress took the initiative in other areas. In 1970, it extended the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and in 1972 it strengthened the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by enlarging the powers of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In 1971, Congress also responded to the massive youth movement with the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the Constitution, reducing the voting age to eighteen. And in 1973, Nixon signed legislation outlawing discrimination against people with disabilities in all programs receiving federal funds.

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Several measures of the Nixon administration also specifically attacked sex discrimination, as the president confronted a growing feminist movement that included Republican women. Nixon vetoed a comprehensive child care bill and publicly opposed abortion, but he signed the landmark Title IX, guaranteeing equality in all aspects of education, and allowed his Labor Department to push affirmative action.

President Nixon advocated for Native Americans more than for any other protest group. He told Congress that Indians were “the most deprived and most isolated minority group . . . the heritage of centuries of injustice.” While not bowing to radical demands, his administration dealt cautiously with extreme protests such as the occupations of Alcatraz and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Nixon signed measures recognizing claims of Alaskan and New Mexican Indians, returned tribal status to groups that had undergone termination, and set in motion legislation restoring tribal lands and granting Indians more control over their schools and other service institutions.