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4 J.L. & Educ. 203 (1975)
An Anti-Black Strategy and the Supreme Court

handle is hein.journals/jle4 and id is 219 raw text is: An Anti-Black Strategy and the Supreme Court NATHANIEL R. JONES* The Supreme Court's majority decision in the Milliken v. Bradley' is the sad but inevitable culmination of a national anti-black strategy. Examination of that decision must not be limited to the majority's severely flawed construction of the record evidence, but should be also viewed in light of the political climate created by the former national administration, the head of which stands igno- miniously repudiated by the nation. That climate became so polluted with hypocrisy, racism, and cynicism that the once sturdy leaves of constitutional precedent wilted. The architects of that strategy, with the Detroit Dred Scott-type decision under their belts, have frankly gotten what they wanted, namely, a slow-down of black advance.2 Bishop Stephen Gill Spottswood, Chairman of the National Board of Direc- tors of the NAACP, in his famous keynote address at the 1970 Cincinnati con- vention, called the roll on the governmental anti-black actions. That litany of wrongs included the incessant search for strict constructionists for Supreme Court seats, scuttling Leon Panetta and the enforcement of effective HEW school desegregation guidelines, seeking delays of school desegregation orders of federal courts,3 attacks on forced integration of the suburbs, the persistent assailing of busing as a legitimate desegregation-education instrument in the face of a unanimous favorable holding by the Supreme Court in the Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg case; adopting positions that were aimed at weakening the Voting Rights Act; the legitimizing of the benign neglect rubbish; and opposing efforts to invest the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with cease and desist powers in cases of job discrimination. On all fronts blacks were under siege. More recent examples of the national anti-black strategy were manifested in the refusal of the government to support the position of the University of Washington in the De Funis case;4 and Secretary of Labor Peter Brennan's efforts to bar local communities from injecting blood into anemic home town * General Counsel, NAACP. 1Milliken v. Bradley, 42 U.S.L.W. 5249 (U.S. July 25, 1974). 2Justice Marshall in his dissenting opinion in Milliken v. Bradley noted: After 20 years of small often difficult steps toward that great end (school desegregation), the Court today takes a giant step backward. Id. at page 2. 3 Alexander v. Holmes, 596 US. 19 (1969). 4 DeFunis v. Odegaard, 42 U.S.L.W. 4578 (US. 1974). 203

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