Richard Nixon And The Rise Of Affirmative Action

Nixon's efforts in moving the focus of U.S. race relations from reform to indemnifying damages, Yuill argues, at least equal his contributions to the origins of affirmative action through policy innovations."--Jacket.

In a groundbreaking new book, Kotlowski offers a surprising study of an administration that redirected the course of civil rights in America. Kotlowski examines such issues as school desegregation, fair housing, voting rights, affirmative action, and minority businesses as well as Native American and women's rights. He details Nixon's role, revealing a president who favored deeds over rhetoric and who constantly weighed political expediency and principles in crafting civil rights policy.

An engaging and eclectic collection of essays from leading scholars on the subject, which looks at affirmative action past and present, analyzes its efficacy, its legacy, and its role in the future of the United States. This comprehensive, three-volume set explores the ways the United States has interpreted affirmative action and probes the effects of the policy from the perspectives of economics, law, philosophy, psychology, sociology, political science, and race relations. Expert contributors tackle a host of knotty issues, ranging from the history of affirmative action to the theories underpinning it. They show how affirmative action has been implemented over the years, discuss its legality and constitutionality, and speculate about its future. Volume one traces the origin and evolution of affirmative action. Volume two discusses modern applications and debates, and volume three delves into such areas as international practices and critical race theory. Standalone essays link cause and effect and past and present as they tackle intriguing—and important—questions. When does "affirmative action" become "reverse discrimination"? How many decades are too many for a "temporary" policy to remain in existence? Does race- or gender-based affirmative action violate the equal protection of law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment? In raising such issues, the work encourages readers to come to their own conclusions about the policy and its future application.

Between 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson defined affirmative action as a legitimate federal goal, and 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon named one of affirmative action's chief antagonists the head of the Department of Labor, government officials at all levels addressed racial economic inequality in earnest. Providing members of historically disadvantaged groups an equal chance at obtaining limited and competitive positions, affirmative action had the potential to alienate large numbers of white Americans, even those who had viewed school desegregation and voting rights in a positive light. Thus, affirmative action was -- and continues to be -- controversial. Novel in its approach and meticulously researched, David Hamilton Golland's Constructing Affirmative Action: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity bridges a sizeable gap in the literature on the history of affirmative action. Golland examines federal efforts to diversify the construction trades from the 1950s through the 1970s, offering valuable insights into the origins of affirmative action--related policy. Constructing Affirmative Action analyzes how community activism pushed the federal government to address issues of racial exclusion and marginalization in the construction industry with programs in key American cities.

This companion offers an overview of Richard M. Nixon’s life, presidency, and legacy, as well as a detailed look at the evolution and current state, of Nixon scholarship. Examines the central arguments and scholarly debates that surround his term in office Explores Nixon’s legacy and the historical significance of his years as president Covers the full range of topics, from his campaigns for Congress, to his career as Vice-President, to his presidency and Watergate Makes extensive use of the recent paper and electronic releases from the Nixon Presidential Materials Project

At the start of the 1980s no employer had heard of an "equal opportunities policy" - by the end three-quarters of all those in work were covered by one. This is the story of the "equal opportunities revolution" at work. It explains why bosses took equal opportunities on board just as they were tearing up union rights at work. It asks why greater rights led to greater inequality, and why advances in race and sex equality ran alongside social inequality. It shows how the equal opportunities revolution became the general model for workplace relations in the decades that followed, and how it did not challenge, but rather perfected the liberalisation of labour law. The right won the economic war, the left won the culture war - and this book explains how.

Skeptics might rationalize that Mitt Romney received a scant 6 percent of the black vote in 2012 only because African Americans would naturally favor one of their own. But since 1964, no Republican presidential candidate has attracted more than 15 percent of the black electorate, and few GOP candidates for other offices have fared much better. No segment of the American electorate is more reliably Democratic than African Americans. The GOP, meanwhile, remains nearly an all-white party. In this path-breaking book, historian Timothy Thurber illuminates the deep roots of this gulf by exploring the contentious, and sometimes surprising, relationship between African Americans and the Republican Party from the end of World War II through Richard Nixon’s presidency. The GOP, he shows, shaped the modern civil rights movement, but the struggle for racial equality also transformed the GOP. Thurber challenges conventional wisdom that the “party of Lincoln” disappeared in the mid-1960s. Prior to 1964, the GOP was indifferent or hostile to many of the demands from civil rights activists. During the height of the civil rights revolution, Republicans were essential to enacting federal policies that made American society more egalitarian. The GOP helped defend, and sometimes expanded, those reforms in the early 1970s. Conservatives were not as dominant after 1964 as scholars and pundits often portray. Yet throughout these three decades the rift between African Americans and the GOP remained substantial. They disagreed, often sharply, over the role of the federal government, particularly regarding economic matters and the integration of schools and neighborhoods. They had different views about race and American society. They also clashed in the political arena, where Republicans wrote off the black vote as unwinnable, irrelevant, or counterproductive to their drive to supplant the Democrats as the nation’s majority party. The GOP preferred to court whites nationwide, sometimes by appealing to their racial animosities. That strategy often yielded electoral success, but the legacy of the past looms large in the early twenty-first century. With its depth of research and insight, Republicans and Race will stand as a definitive study as the GOP ponders the composition of its base in future elections.

Affirmative action includes policies and laws meant to give equal footing to minorities after historic discrimination and oppression. Learn about the history of affirmative action from just after the Civil War through important milestones of the civil rights movement and on to today. Enhanced with accessible text and historical photographs, this guide explains affirmative action through its background, key players, and Supreme Court decisions. The debate about affirmative action is covered in a thoughtful, well-rounded, and timely manner since it remains a controversial issue.