Fault Lines

by Kevin M. Kruse

  The influx of immigrants, however, did not sit well with sizable portions of the public who feared that the nation had already changed too much in the previous decade. The media began to cover the changes in immigration as a challenge to the national character, drawing special attention to new waves of undocumented arrivals, styled as “illegal aliens.” For instance, U.S. News and World Report, one of the most popular news magazines of the era, treated readers to headlines such as “How Millions of Illegal Aliens Sneak into the U.S.” and “Border Crisis: Illegal Aliens out of Control.” 26 The use of metaphors like “crisis” or “invasion” to describe Mexican immigration, barely in use when Congress passed immigration reform in 1965, steadily increased during the 1970s.27

  Diversity and Divisions

  As Americans, old and new alike, sorted themselves into disparate and distinct communities, the political and judicial system responded in kind. Most notably, the Supreme Court, which had once seemed so receptive to the arguments made by civil rights activists, increasingly set limits on how far it, and the nation, would change in the movement for racial integration. Over the course of the 1970s, a new emphasis on divisions and diversity took hold.

  The legal campaign for school desegregation, for instance, stalled as the focus shifted from central cities into the suburbs. Originally, the promise of metropolitan programs of desegregation seemed bright. In 1971, the Supreme Court had given its approval to the use of busing plans—programs which moved children in largely minority neighborhoods to largely white schools, and vice versa—in the landmark case of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. The decision proved starkly unpopular with suburban whites, many of whom had fled cities over the previous decade to avoid the growing pattern of what many derided as “forced integration.” Indeed, for the remainder of the decade, busing stood as the top political issue for white suburbanites. A Gallup Poll in October 1971, shortly after Swann, showed that whites opposed busing by a margin of 3–1. While previous stages of the civil rights movement faced opposition largely in the South, national polls showed that hostility to busing was common among whites across the country. Eighty-two percent of white southerners opposed busing, while the percentages in the Northeast, Midwest, and West were not far behind, ranging from 71 percent to 77 percent.28

  The controversy over busing, and the larger conflicts between cities and suburbs, came to a head in Detroit. In the 1960s, Detroit had emerged as a prime example of the twin processes of urban decay and suburban white flight. The city had witnessed one of the worst riots of the late 1960s, leading more than one-third of a million whites to leave the city over the course of the decade. By 1970, Detroit had become 44 percent black, while the suburbs around it were almost completely white. In Warren, only 132 people out of a total of 179,000 were black; in Dearborn, only 13 out of 104,000. The segregation of Detroit and its suburbs was even starker in its schools. Although blacks and whites lived in roughly equal numbers inside the city, Detroit’s neighborhoods were starkly segregated by race. The vast majority of census tracts were more than 90 percent black or 90 percent white, and schools in those neighborhoods followed suit. More than 70 percent of the city’s schools were either all-white or all-black.29

  Because of the obvious segregation in Detroit’s metropolitan area, the NAACP initiated what would become the Supreme Court case of Milliken v. Bradley. Local courts reviewed the overwhelming evidence provided by the NAACP and ruled in 1972 that Detroit’s schools had been intentionally segregated. The judge ordered a “multi-district” remedy that would require the busing of 310,000 students across district lines to new schools. White children would ride from the suburbs to the inner city to attend school, while black children would ride out to the suburbs to attend suburban schools that had been all-white. The ruling represented an escalation of the Swann decision. In that case, the busing in the Charlotte area had all taken place within a single district—a very large district that encompassed both the city and suburbs, but still, only one district. The lower court ruling in Milliken, however, encompassed fifty-three districts. If upheld, it would set a precedent that would mean the effective integration of countless cities and suburbs across the country. Indeed, if the Supreme Court upheld the ruling, the NAACP planned to follow up with similar challenges to integrate suburbs around Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Boston, and other areas with largely black city schools and lily-white suburbs.30

  By the time the Milliken case reached the Supreme Court, however, it had been transformed by the appointments of Richard Nixon, with the busing issue specifically in mind. What Nixon cared about most in his judicial nominations was protecting the white suburbs from “forced integration” with the cities. When Nixon outlined his requirements for court nominees with his attorney general, the president was explicit. He wanted conservatives and, he said, “within the definition of conservative, he must be against busing and against forced housing integration. Beyond that, he can do what he pleases.” Nixon soon got his wish. His four appointees, plus Potter Stewart, an Eisenhower holdover, formed a new conservative majority on the court that did everything in its power to protect the white suburbs from the people and the problems of the inner city.31

  The Milliken case proved to be the keystone to the court’s new approach. Writing for a slim 5–4 majority, Chief Justice Warren Burger claimed that only the city of Detroit had engaged in de jure discrimination and segregation, and that the suburbs were innocent of any wrongdoing. Ignoring the massive role that the federal government had played in the creation of suburbia and, more importantly, the installation and perpetuation of segregation there, Burger ruled that suburban segregation had unfolded unintentionally, by private custom, not public act. (Legal scholars would soon describe the difference as de facto segregation, as opposed to de jure.) Because the government had not created the problem, Burger said, the Supreme Court had no right to correct it. The city of Detroit could use busing within its city limits, but the white suburbs had to be excluded from any program of integration. The four dissenters had never been on the losing side of a school segregation decision. Justice Thurgood Marshall, a former NAACP attorney, wrote a scathing dissent on their behalf. In an unusual move, he read portions of his opinion from the bench, his tone both sad and scornful as he rebutted Burger’s decision point by point. “Today’s holding,” he said in conclusion, “is more a reflection of a perceived public mood that we have gone far enough in enforcing the Constitution’s guarantee of equal justice than it is the product of neutral principles of law. In the short run, it may seem to be the easier course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities—one white, the other black—but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret.” 32

  Even in the short run, tempers flared. The court’s decision only ruled out busing across district lines; within districts, it could still be used. The distinction sparked resistance and riots inside cities where busing was employed. Boston emerged as the most visible battleground. In December 1974, antibusing protesters clashed with police in South Boston and trapped 125 transferred African American students inside a local school. As they threw rocks at school buses and flipped over police cruisers, the white mob became menacing. “Bus them back to Africa” yelled one of the protesters.33 The violent confrontation forced the city to shut down the school for over a month, while the national press portrayed the events as indicative of a brewing race war. Democratic politicians soon became the focus of protesters’ attacks, with Senator Ted Kennedy chased by an angry crowd into the Federal Building downtown. Of all the shocking images of violence to come from the city’s busing crisis, none outdid a famous photograph by the Boston Herald-American photographer Stanley Forman. Titled “The Soiling of Old Glory,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning photo showed a black civil rights lawyer about to be stabbed by a white teen brandishing a pole with the American flag. As the nation watched such images in horror, the White House seemed unable or unwilling
to act. In a press conference, President Ford called the confrontations “most unfortunate” but voiced sympathy for the whites who were, in his mind, the real victims of “forced busing.” Boston’s mayor Kevin White pled with the president to send in federal marshals to keep the peace. Ford refused.34

  The growing tensions on civil rights—on the court and in the nation at large—were also seen in the debate over affirmative action. Like busing, affirmative action was an extension of civil rights strategies born in the 1960s. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had embraced the term as a necessary remedy for past injustices, and civil rights leaders readily agreed. In his last book, Where Do We Go from Here?, Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledged that “special treatment” for African Americans might seem to conflict with his previously professed ideal of opportunity based on individual merit. But, King continued, “a society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.” However, critics charged that affirmative action programs often focused on aspects of society—college admissions, employment, and promotions—where there were a finite number of beneficiaries. Opportunities given to individuals in those spaces would necessarily come at the expense of others. In their view, affirmative action thus represented a “zero sum game” in which gains for one group meant a loss for another. Affirmative action, they argued, was essentially “reverse discrimination” against whites.35

  In 1978, the Supreme Court addressed the matter directly for the first time in the landmark case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. The plaintiff Allan Bakke had graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1962 with an engineering degree, served in Vietnam from 1963 to 1967, and then got a Master’s degree in engineering from Stanford. At the age of 33, however, Bakke decided he would rather be a doctor. In 1973, he applied to a dozen medical schools, but was rejected by all of them. While Bakke had fine grades and very good MCAT scores, most of the schools pointed to his weak performance in interviews as grounds for his rejection. However, Bakke seized on the fact that one of the twelve schools that rejected him, the University of California, Davis, had a special admissions program that reserved sixteen of one hundred places in its entering class for minority students. He sued the university, charging that it had violated his rights guaranteed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. With the case before the court, a national conversation unfolded on its merits, one that took place on the pages of major newspapers and the campuses of countless colleges across the country.36

  As in Milliken, the Supreme Court split into two distinct factions, each of which was completely unwilling to compromise. Four liberal justices—Marshall, Blackmun, Brennan, and White—argued that the quota system used by the UC Davis medical school was completely acceptable. The Constitution had never been “color blind,” they pointed out, so it was perfectly fine to use group-based quotas as a remedy for past discrimination. Meanwhile, four conservatives—Burger, Rehnquist, Stewart, and Stevens—argued that not only was the quota system used by UC Davis unconstitutional, but any form of affirmative action, whether it be in the form of specific quotas or general goals, was an unconstitutional form of bias. With the court split into two camps of four men each, it was left to the ninth justice, Lewis Powell, to come up with a compromise. It took him eight months to come up with the “judgment of the court” in Regents v. Bakke. In the end, he essentially produced two decisions in one.

  In the first half of Powell’s decision, he sided with the four who opposed all forms of affirmative action. Together, they struck down the UC Davis quota system, ruling that it established a “classification based on race and ethnic background” and was therefore unconstitutional. In the second half of Powell’s decision, however, he sided with the other four who wanted to uphold all forms of affirmative action. He claimed that “race or ethnic background may be deemed a ‘plus’ in a particular applicant’s file,” to be weighed along with grades, test scores, and interviews. The decision, in essence, sanctioned the overall policy of affirmative action while striking down the specific practice of race-based quotas. In a sign of how contentious the issue had become, though, only Powell agreed with all parts of the court’s so-called “majority” opinion. The result was an awkward truce on the issue that left all sides uneasy. “It was a landmark occasion,” a leading law professor noted, “but the court failed to produce a landmark decision.” 37

  Still, Bakke made an important mark. In his decision, Justice Powell defended race-conscious admissions programs with an assertion that diversity represented a compelling state interest. The defense of diversity would, in many ways, keep affirmative action programs alive in the coming decades, but it did so with considerable cost. “With the emergence of the diversity rationale,” sociologist John Skrentny noted, “affirmative action has become separated from discrimination.” No longer giving weight to the plight of disadvantaged racial or economic minorities, as individuals or groups, courts would think more about the advantages that the mere presence of people from different backgrounds might have on the larger polity.38

  The new directive of diversity spread across the courts’ handling of issues of race and ethnicity during the 1970s. In the 1974 case of Lau v. Nichols, for instance, the Supreme Court established important new guidelines for bilingual and bicultural education. Sweeping away immersion courses that sought to improve the skills of students with limited English proficiency (LEP) and thereby integrate them into the standard school curriculum, the court now mandated native-language instruction for younger students who spoke languages other than English at home. Instead of promoting cultural integration, these “Lau remedies” aimed to preserve the unique cultural traditions of non-English speakers. Practically speaking, the change would largely impact Hispanics, who accounted for some 80 percent of all LEP students in the late 1970s. But its importance was more widely felt. In 1979, the Department of Education considered new regulations that would have mandated massive staffing changes to support bilingual education. In response, Chicago’s public schools complained the rules would obligate them to hire certified bilingual instructors for 90,000 students who would then need to be taught in 139 different languages. The proposed federal regulations were ultimately abandoned, but the underlying emphasis on bilingual instruction and multicultural education continued to thrive.39

  The legal and political changes on busing, affirmative action, and bilingual instruction reflected a much larger transformation across American society. “The ideological shift to diversity led to a reconception of the very nature of America,” historian Bruce Schulman noted, “to see the nation not as a melting pot where many different peoples and cultures contributed to one common stew, but as discrete peoples and cultures sharing the same places—a tapestry, salad bowl, or rainbow.” While such changes did much to preserve and protect the individual cultures of different groups, they effectively eroded any sense of national community along the way and established one of the deepest of the new fault lines. Instead of a coherent and cohesive identity, Americans now had diversity and division.40

  CHAPTER 4

  A Crisis of Equality

  AS AMERICANS UNDERWENT A SIGNIFICANT TRANSFORMATION in their thinking about the fault lines of race, ethnicity, and national identity in the 1970s, they reckoned with an equally important revolution on essential notions of gender, sexuality, and the family.

  Much like the government and the corporation, the “nuclear family” stood as a fundamental pillar of American life in the decades after World War II. This new norm for American life—understood as a married couple with children—became the basic building block of postwar society, a microcosm of the larger nation. More than that, the nuclear family set expectations for the roles that individuals played within its boundaries. Men, typically, served as the breadwinner, working outside the home and providing for their dependents; women, in most cases, were confined to the homes where they focused on their roles as w
ives and mothers, responsible for raising children and creating a nurturing environment. The two came together, in this understanding, in a supposedly natural relationship, rooted in heterosexual attraction to each other, manifested in a “traditional” marriage, and devoted to having and raising children.1

  All these assumptions, which seemed so steadfast in the early years of the postwar period, steadily crumbled. For many Americans, they had been unrealistic from the start. In African American and immigrant communities, as well as in much of the white working class, the male breadwinner model had never reflected realities on the ground. But as the 1960s dawned, even more affluent whites began to cast off the old model as unrealistic. White feminists, for instance, rejected the subordinate roles to which women had long been restricted and advocated instead for an autonomous identity of their own, and of their own making. Meanwhile, as feminists questioned reigning notions of “proper” gender relations, gay and lesbian activists made similar challenges to a postwar system that had defined them as “deviants” who deserved, at best, second-class citizenship. In their public forms, the movements for feminism and gay and lesbian rights simply sought equal treatment before the law. But those invested in the old order saw these grassroots movements as an existential threat to the nuclear family and, thus, a threat to the nation itself. Conservatives, presenting themselves as the defenders of “family values,” launched a massive counterattack that prompted the “culture wars” of the coming decades.