Word: hewed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...federal civil rights legislation. Those guiding welfare bills through the House watched helplessly as the inevitable budget cuts took alarmingly large chunks out of their appropriations. Then, in June, the bomb fell. Guided by Congressman Jamie Whitten of Mississippi, the House came within inches of saddling an $18 billion HEW bill with a rider that threatened to return school desegregation efforts to the medieval...
...When the HEW bill came to the House, Whitten led more than his usual constituency of Southern Democrats. Pulling Northerners guarding against the Wallace threat into his alliance, Whitten rammed the rider through. None of the money voted in the bill, Whitten's amendment said, could be used or withheld to make local school districts integrate their schools...
...reaction was immediate. The rider, as HEW officials moaned at a news conference two days later, would "paralyze all school desegregation." While the laws and the court decisions requiring desegregation would stay on the books, the provision would strip the federal government of its most potent weapon: the use of federal funds as a lever to force integration...
...more important, the HEW men said, was the deterrent effect. These 115 districts served as examples to their possibly-recalcitant neighbors. "For each one of the cut-offs we make," a Justice Department worker remarked, "we convince ten others to give in. They know they're going to lose if they hold...
WITHOUT the fund power, the government knew its efforts would be confined to the Courts. Recent Supreme Court and Circuit Court decisions have explicitly ordered school districts to scrap any systems that aren't working. The problem, as both the school districts and HEW realized, is that the decisions don't mean anything until they are formally enforced by federal courts. Court efforts have complemented the fund cut-offs for the last four years, but at an agonizingly slow rate...