Reviews in American History

For students and scholars accustomed to thinking of the years following the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act as a period of conservative reaction and white backlash, John David Skrentny's The Minority Rights Revolution offers an arresting counter-narrative. In Skrentny's account, the same decade (1965–1975) that witnessed the election and re-election of Ronald Reagan as governor of California and Richard Nixon as president; the urban violence of Watts, Detroit, and Newark; and the stiff resistance to school desegregation in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles also witnessed "a remarkable flowering of minority rights" (p. 133).

Swiftly and without substantial lobbying or heated controversy, a bipartisan group of federal actors—members of Congress, presidential staffers, agency bureaucrats, and judges— passed laws, promulgated executive orders, issued bureaucratic rulings, and rendered court decisions that "established nondiscrimination rights" and the policies and programs to implement them for "groups of Americans understood as disadvantaged" (p. 4). Asian immigrants and their Asian American advocates won the elimination of the national origins quota system as a result of the 1965 Immigration Act. Latinos (and other English-language learners) secured the right to language accommodation in schools as a result of the 1968 Bilingual Education Act and Lau v. Nichols, the 1974 Supreme Court case best described as the Brown v. Board of Education for language minority students. Women received educational equality as a result of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The disabled achieved equal access rights as a result of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Most significantly, Latinos, Asian Americans, women, and American Indians all benefited, in varying degrees, from "the most important policy in the minority rights revolution": affirmative action in federal employment, federally supported small business development, and higher education (p. 85). Collectively, these policies and programs, which emanated from deep inside the D.C. beltway and redounded to the favor of some 60 percent of the population, [End Page 278] formed the core of what Skrentny calls the "fantastic decade" that was the minority rights revolution (p. 328).

How did it happen? Skrentny advances two basic arguments over the course of his two-part book on the "government's role in the recognition and protection of minorities" (p. 165). He emphasizes the first—the "perceived needs of national security"—in chapters two and three and the second—the "legacies of the black civil rights movement"—in chapters four through nine (p. 7). In the process, he discounts a third, and perhaps the most commonly held, explanation: that social movements originating beyond the nation's capital generated waves that crashed upon D.C.'s shores and forced a recalcitrant government to take action. The Minority Rights Revolution is not a book about the southern, African American civil rights movement—a revolution from the outside in—but rather a book about what that movement wrought for groups of Americans perceived by policy makers to be "analogous to blacks"—a revolution from the inside out (p. 328).

With respect to the book's first part and first argument, Skrentny presents the years 1941 to 1965 as "the prehistory of the minority rights revolution" (p. 16). World War II and the Cold War, he contends, served to catalyze (and, in some respects, constrain) the pursuit of "nondiscrimination rights" (p. 21). Beginning with President Roosevelt's 1941 creation of the federal Committee on Fair Employment Practices, and continuing with, among other things, President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights and its To Secure These Rights report in 1947, and the Department of Justice's contributions to Supreme Court cases that successfully challenged racially restrictive housing covenants (Shelley v. Kraemer [1948]), segregation in interstate train dining cars (Henderson v. United States [1950]), and segregation in public K...