With Jim Crow discrimination essentially eliminated through civil rights legislation and court decisions, the issue for minorities in the 1970s was how to combat inequality not rooted in laws and how the impact of past discrimination could be remedied. Desegregation efforts in public education shifted from the South to the urban North, where housing patterns resulted in all‐minority inner‐city schools. The reliance on busing to achieve racial balance in Los Angeles and Boston generated considerable controversy, and the Supreme Court ruled in 1974 that requiring the transfer of students from city to suburban schools to achieve integration was unconstitutional.
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Through affirmative action programs, employers were expected to make every effort to hire and promote minority workers, and a similar approach was taken to increase minority enrollment in higher education. Critics maintained that such programs were tantamount to reverse discrimination, or discrimination against the dominant group in the population, especially white males. In 1978, the Supreme Court limited the use of numerical quotas but recognized that race could be used as one of the factors in admissions policies of colleges and universities. The case involved a white applicant who was not accepted to a medical school that set aside a specific number of places for nonwhite candidates.
Among minorities, Mexican‐American and Native‐American groups especially achieved significant advances in the '70s. The Mexican‐American‐based United Farm Workers, for example, won an important victory in 1975 when California required growers to collectively bargain with the elected representatives from the union. Additionally, La Raza Unida (The United People) party, which was founded in Texas in 1970, promoted Mexican‐American candidates for political office in the Southwest and West. Meanwhile, in 1973, Native Americans occupied Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the site of the last confrontation between the Sioux and the Army in 1890. Although the occupation attracted headlines, the government was already making considerable changes in its Native‐American policy. Nixon rejected “termination” in favor of supporting tribal autonomy, and as a result, the Indian Self‐Determination Act (1974) gave the tribes control over federal‐aid programs that benefited them. The tribes also became more active in legal action pressing for the treaty rights to land, mineral resources, water, and fisheries.