“...In 1955, the Supreme Court said the school desegregation had to happen with all deliberate speed, and that was meant to be an ambiguous phrase which then an awful lot of schools in the south – where the only place where Brown applied – used to delay any sort of desegregation for years and years and years. ” - Dr. Kevin Boyle
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In our previous episode, Dr. Kevin Boyle joined us to talk about the political coalition that united working Whites and northern Blacks during the FDR era. We also discussed how Richard Nixon's law and order rhetoric led to a rise in White resistance. We are picking up where we left off in this episode and will be tracing the strategy of the Nixon administration to shift the national focus toward priorities other than racial equality.
As a reminder, Dr. Boyle is a professor at Northwestern University specializing in 20th century United States history. He has a particular focus on modern American social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Boyle has a long list of publications and honors including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Carnegie Corporation. He is the highly acclaimed author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction and many others.
Join us today as we dig deeper into the events in United States history that have shaped the racial landscape of today. Dr. Boyle discusses at length how many Whites resisted school integration and how that led to long delays in integration actually being put into effect, resulting in schools actually being more segregated today than they were when forced busing was ordered by the federal government. He also begins to give us a solid understanding of how Nixon's election led to a war on drugs which caused a mass incarceration of Blacks in the United States and also caused a major shift away from civil rights legislation.
Join us next time as we dig more deeply into the issue of mass incarceration targeting Black males. We will also discuss how well we have managed to protect the voting rights of minorities. Be sure to invite your friends to listen in as well!
Questions for Clergy and Other Group Leaders
- How did school desegregation turn out in South and North? What’s the status now?
- How did segregation, the advent of the Information Age, and globalization impact Blacks young men and women in the mid-1980s?
- How the Reagan coalition impacted blacks in terms of the safety net promises of the Great Society?
- What did both parties think would happen and what actually happened in our War on Drugs? How did that impact minorities?
Show Notes
[3:25] – Dr. Uffman discusses his own experience with segregation and desegregation growing up, noting that his high school didn't integrate until he was a junior in college.
[4:23] – Dr. Uffman fast-forwards to the 1990s, illustrating the changes that had taken place since his youth.
[6:39] – Dr. Boyle further elaborates upon what happened following the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in the mid-1950s, such as how many schools found loopholes to delay desegregation.
[8:08] – Dr. Boyle explains when schools in northern states needed to, by law, start desegregating and what happened as a result.
[9:12] – The critical way to integrate schools, as Dr. Boyle emphasizes, was between cities and suburbs, which led to the Supreme Court ruling in 1974 that that didn't need to be done, resulting in integration in the north coming to a halt.
[10:27] – Dr. Uffman reiterates that re-segregation is not strictly a southern phenomenon, and Dr. Boyle agrees, emphasizing that segregation is more common nowadays in the north than it is in the south.
[11:38] – Many of the United States' industrial jobs moved to other countries, and Dr. Boyle begins to touch upon what that meant for Whites and Blacks competing for industrial jobs.
[13:45] – Dr. Boyle clarifies why the shift of industrial jobs was significant from a racial standpoint, pointing to what effect that it had on Blacks at the time.
[15:52] – Dr. Uffman offers a hypothesis of how youth was not properly equipped for the new information age, and Dr. Boyle further describes what the experience might have been like for a young Black man in a big city around that time.
[17:39] – Dr. Uffman argues that the success of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama should not serve as proof that there isn't a racial problem in the United States.
[18:49] – Dr. Boyle comments on how young men and women, especially men, got caught up in the war on drugs due to joblessness.
[21:05] – Dr. Uffman prompts Dr. Boyle to talk about Ronald Reagan's harmful rhetoric regarding welfare queens and predators, prefacing that he looked up to Reagan because of the positive things that Dr. Uffman saw from him while he served in the military.
[23:36] – Ronald Reagan, as described by Dr. Boyle, was a conservative Republican in the Goldwater tradition, which meant that he believed that welfare entitled people, making them think that they didn't have to work.
[25:32] – Dr. Boyle points out that it wasn't likely a coincidence that Reagan chose to kick off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi – the town where civil rights activists were infamously murdered only sixteen years prior.
[27:13] – Dr. Boyle makes the case that Reagan's agenda was an approach to small government that he infused with racial dog whistles that then became a large part of future conservative politics.
[29:18] – Dr. Boyle insists that Richard Nixon began the war on drugs and that one of the main problems with it is that it had a racist agenda and was creating mass incarceration for Blacks.
Links and Resources
Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:
More from Dr. Kevin Boyle:
