1975 May 26

President Ford Puts Foot in Mouth on “Brown”

 

President Gerald Ford made comments to the press on this day indicating that his administration might seek a reconsideration of the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education (May 17, 1954),which declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional.

He was immediately repudiated by his own Attorney General, Edward Levi, and he backtracked from his statement. Ford’s comment was prompted by the national controversy over the busing of students to achieve racial integration of schools.

Edward Levi, former President of the University of Chicago and Dean of the university’s law school, was nominated to be Attorney General in the wake of the Watergate Scandal, which had tarnished the reputations of several pfrevious attorneys general under President Richard Nixon. At the Senate hearings over his nomination , he pledged to be a politically independent attorney general. He told the Senate committee that he would resist political pressure even if it came from the White House (see January 27, 1975).

This was only one incident during his tenure as AG where he kept his promise.

Learn more: James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy (2001)

Read: Gerald Ford, A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford (1979)

And read: Samuel Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties: From Wilson to Obama (2012)

Visit the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum

Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here

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