Black Power 135banished its Johnny Reb mascot from football games, and the Supreme Court
upheld the principle of affirmative action.
Increasingly, however, the tide has run against the civil rights movement.
When the federal government undertook affirmative action and anti-poverty
programs for minorities, white America blanched, especially blue-collar
workers who had recently moved out of poverty. Many whites saw such
efforts to redress a long history of racial discrimination as unfair reverse dis-
crimination against the majority. Since the milestone Bakkecase of 1978, the
Supreme Court has walked a fine line between allowing schools, businesses,
and government bodies to set recruitment goals and forbidding them to
establish minority quotas. Upon becoming president in 1981, Ronald Reagan
and the Republicans took dead aim against the movement. Reagan used a
meat cleaver on Johnson’s Great Society, neutralized EEOC and the Civil
Rights Commission, restored tax exemptions for segregated private schools,
challenged court-ordered school busing, and proposed diluting the Voting
Rights Act. By reducing federal assistance to the poor and using tax policies
to favor the wealthy, Reaganomics contributed to a black poverty rate of 34
per cent, a rate triple that of whites. Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush,
replaced Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, a civil rights hero, with
Clarence Thomas, a black conservative who condemned liberal reforms that
had benefited him. Reading the political tea leaves, president Bill Clinton
agreed to cap welfare benefits. In the same vein, black nationalist leader
Louis Farrakhan organized a Million Man March on Washington in 1995 to
refocus attention away from government solutions to personal responsibility,
but little of consequence resulted. The civil rights movement has been dead
in the water for years now.
University of California
Regentsv.Bakke(1978):
A landmark case in which
the Supreme Court struck
down the use of quotas
for college admission as
reverse discrimination.