Kamala Harris' recent attack on his
antibusing stance from that same era, the pivotal issue at this juncture seems to be race.
Justice Powell famously had been chairman of the segregationist Richmond, Virginia, school board when Brown was decided, (270) and he had submitted an
antibusing amicus brief in the Swann case.
White women leading the Home and School Association (a Boston PTA-like organization) also gave a "feminist bent" to the
antibusing movement.
In this new study, the author explores the history of five social movements in the United States from the 1960s through the 1980s: gay rights, women's rights,
antibusing, antitax, and antiabortion.
One day he came upon the assault of Theodore Landsmark, a black, Yale-educated lawyer, who got caught in an
antibusing rally on his way to an affirmative action meeting at Boston's City Hall.
With support from the Nixon administration, these efforts served dual purposes: stateside, they furthered the building of GOP support, as witnessed by the 1972 congressional election of Trent Lott, who effectively transmuted his former segregationist rhetoric into that of
antibusing; nationally, the
antibusing sentiment thus inspired helped deflect attention from racial imbalances to "activist" federal courts.
By March, a King-brokered settlement agreement with the school board had gained momentum, particularly among the white,
antibusing public and in the white-owned media.
Although vehemently
antibusing, the President made it clear that he would not appoint a racist to the Court, (51) and probably not just because the nominee would lose in the Senate.
Bryant grew up in the black community of Dorchester in the 1970s, during the height of the
antibusing hysteria that paralyzed the city.
radical movements of the past fifty years, ranging from civil fights to the Ku Klux Klan, from the Boston
antibusing movement to union organizing in Appalachia.
He "instructed the Attorney General and Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare that they [were] to work with individual school districts to hold busing to the minimum required by law."(80) When the Emergency School Aid Bill reached the floor of the House, it was placed on the consent calendar, by Democratic House leadership, in an attempt to push the legislation through without giving the administration the opportunity to add the
antibusing amendment.
These
antibusing efforts, particularly outside the South, escalated in 1972 when the district court ordered the metropolitan Detroit desegregation plan into effect.(52) It was in this explosive political environment that the Supreme Court rendered its Milliken decision.