1972 August 5

Lawyers Group Accuses Nixon Justice Department of Failing to Enforce Equal Protection Clause

 

A group of lawyers representing several civil rights and civil liberties organizations on this day issued an 80-page report accusing President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department of failing to enforce the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and federal statutes designed to provide equal protection.

The Lawyers Review Committee had been formed in 1969 to monitor the Justice Department, and the report covered the period from January 1969 through the spring of 1971.

A leader of the group accused the Justice Department of undermining equal protection enforcement by “delay, diminution, and nonenforcement.” Lawyers with the group included Marian Wright Edelman, of Harvard University, Joseph L. Rauh, Jr, of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), Dan Pollitt, of the University of North Carolina Law School, and Lawrence Speiser, former director of the ACLU Washington, DC, office.

The report was released by the Americans for Democratic Action.

As a member of the House and then the Senate from 1948 through 1953, Richard Nixon had a decent record in support of civil rights and also of women’s rights. That changed after he became president in 1969, as he ran for the presidency in 1968 on a “Southern Strategy” of appealing to white voters in the southeast. His main civil rights policy involved “Black Capitalism,” which was intended to promote African-American-owned businesses. It did not succeed, however, and as president he was generally in conflict with civil rights leaders.

Learn more about President Nixon’s civil rights and civil liberties record: Samuel Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties from Wilson to Obama (2012)

Read the Richard Nixon Foundation’s view of Nixon’s civil rights record

Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here

Read historian Joan Hoff’s revisionist view of Nixon: Joan Hoff, Nixon Reconsidered (1994)

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