Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [91]
But as Johnson’s popularity nosedived, liberals just kept patting themselves on the back and saying it was because he was pushing desegregation. Except he wasn’t. It took the Nixon White House to get the schools desegregated.
In Nixon’s first inaugural address, in January 1969, he said, “No man can be fully free while his neighbor is not. To go forward at all is to go forward together. This means black and white together, as one nation, not two. The laws have caught up with our conscience. What remains is to give life to what is in the law: to ensure at last that as all are born equal in dignity before God, all are born equal in dignity before man.”
And then he started feverishly desegregating the schools, something his Democratic predecessors had refused to do. On a statistical basis, there was more desegregation of Southern schools in Nixon’s first term than in any historical period, before or after. Practically overnight, Southern schools went from being effectively segregated to being effectively integrated. To highlight the Democrats’ double-talk, Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, famously said, “Watch what we do, not what we say.”
While presiding over massive, voluntary desegregation of the schools, Nixon forbade his cabinet members to boast about it. But between his election in 1968 to the end of his second year in office in 1970, black students attending all-black schools in the South declined from 68 percent to 18.4 percent and the percentage of black students attending majority white schools went from 18.4 percent to 38.1 percent.30
Despite all this, when black agitator Julian Bond was asked about Nixon’s civil rights record, he said, “If you could call Adolf Hitler a friend of the Jews, you could call President Nixon a friend of the blacks.”31
If Nixon had planned to appeal to white racists, speeding up desegregation was not an effective strategy. But he turned around and won an even bigger landslide in 1972, running against George McGovern and the party of acid, abortion, and amnesty. Yes, racism must explain the Republicans’ sweep of the South.
Not only did Nixon desegregate the schools, but he broke the back of the discriminatory building trades in 1968 with his “Philadelphia Plan,” the first government affirmative action program. In response to aggressive racial discrimination by construction unions to keep wages high, Nixon imposed formal racial quotas and timelines in hiring on the building trades. Under Secretary George P. Shultz, Nixon’s Labor Department rode federal contractors hard, demanding results. Even back when he was Eisenhower’s vice president, Nixon had been recommending “a positive policy of nondiscrimination” for government contractors. When running for president in 1967—the zenith of his alleged “Southern Strategy”—he had said, “People in the ghetto have to have more than an equal chance. They should be given a dividend.”
Most histories drone on and on about LBJ’s beneficence in having proposed a similar Philadelphia Plan, but LBJ completely abandoned it the instant his comptroller general vetoed the idea. Nixon, by contrast, overruled the comptroller and staged a full-throttle campaign to get congressional approval for his affirmative action plan. As he said, the Democrats “are token-oriented. We are job-oriented.”
Imposing racial quotas has generally not been seen as one of Nixon’s greatest moments by modern conservatives, who oppose all race discrimination. However, it has to be understood