President Richard Nixon reacted to the 1971 Court decision in Swann v. CharlotteMecklenburg School District, a school desegregation case that approved the use of race to assign students to schools by the use of busing, by instructing the U. S. Justice Department to draft a constitutional amendment to nullify the Court's decision (Kruger, 1975). In 1984, President Ronald Reagan, campaigning for reelection in Charlotte, North Carolina (the site of the 1971 Swann Court decision), criticized the Democrats for their support of "busing that takes innocent children out of the neighborhood school and makes them pawns in a social experiment that nobody wants" (Gillard, 1988, p. xv). Reagan continued the "Southern Strategy" began by President Richard Nixon in order to win White southern votes (Carter, 2000).\
...
At the national level, Richard Nixon ordered his Attorney General to draft a constitutional amendment to replace the 14th Amendment, and ordered the Attorney General and other government agencies not to enforce the Brown decree as recommended in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress reenacted all the laws passed during Reconstruction (Motley, 1988). The 1964 Civil Rights Act authorized the U.S. Attorney General to bring legal action against school systems practicing school segregation and to assume the costs of these legal cases. Nixon ordered a slow down of such cases, if not an absolute halt to such actions; and a halt to the collection of racial data on school enrollment by the U.S. Department of Education. His opposition to Brown formed the basics of his party's "Southern Strategy" to win White votes in the South.
...
The genesis of the school-choice movement or "Southern Strategy" in education was with Brown that declared state-supported school segregation unconstitutional (Levin, 1999). Brown motivated school systems, first in the southern schools and later in northern schools, which were opposed to school desegregation to experiment with school choice as opposition to the racial integration of public schools. The backlash against school desegregation increased after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Law that gave the U.S. Justice Department the authority and resources to seek through the federal courts compliance with Brown. School desegregation in the South and race riots in urban centers in the North combined to give the Republican Party a powerful weapon to attract White conservative voters using the rhetoric of school "choice."
