Dr. Dean Kotlowski's book Nixon's Civil Rights: Policies, Principle, and Policy

SALISBURY, MD -- In December 2001, Harvard University Press released Dr. Dean Kotlowski's book Nixon's Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy.

Kotlowski, an assistant professor in Salisbury University's History Department, began the book as a Ph.D. dissertation at Indiana University during the early 1990s. The study examines the Nixon administration's initiatives in the fields of African-American, Native American and women's rights. Although not widely known, many of the civil rights policies most familiar to Americans today, such as hiring goals and minority set-asides, date to Nixon's presidency.

"Nixon was the strongest president on affirmative action-up to that point," the civil rights leader James Farmer once recalled.

"There's little doubt that Nixon was prejudiced against African Americans and women or that he wooed conservative southern whites to enhance his reelection prospects," Kotlowski said. "But his personal belief in equal opportunity combined with pressure from federal courts, a Democrat-controlled Congress, and the liberal wing of his Republican Party led him to be more active in the area of civil rights than his critics were willing to concede."

Unlike the most recent study of the Nixon presidency by the journalist Richard Reeves, Kotlowski's Nixon was hardly "alone in the White House." Rather, he was a president who received advice from myriad quarters, including liberal staff members, and pursued a moderate domestic agenda, belying his much-publicized, often-discussed "Southern Strategy."

"I didn't begin this study with a positive view of Richard Nixon," Kotlowski said, "but came to conclude that his record in this one area of public policy contained a number of accomplishments." In addition to promoting affirmative action and set-asides for minority-owned businesses, Nixon signed into law an expanded Voting Rights Act, pumped federal grants into historically black colleges, approved Title IX, and changed the direction of Native American policy to enhance self-determination for tribes (one Native American tribal leader even hailed as Nixon "the Abraham Lincoln of the Indian people"). Most surprisingly, 15 years after the Supreme Court's Brown decision, it was the Nixon administration, during 1969 and 1970, which finally desegregated the South's public schools.

Nixon's Civil Rights has already gained national attention. Kirkus Reviews praised the book as a "a capable dissection of the Nixon administration's policies," predicting that it will be "of considerable interest to students of contemporary history, race relations, and federal policy." FindLaw's Book Reviews called Kotlowski's study "encyclopedic and exhaustively researched" and a "rewarding read." Library Journal dubbed Nixon's Civil Rights an "excellent book" and a "skillful appraisal of Nixon's domestic policies." The historian Douglas Brinkley applauded it as "far and away the best book written on the topic."

In January, Kotlowski discussed Nixon's civil rights policies on "New York & Company," an interview program on WNYC, the National Public Radio station in New York City. This April, he will present a paper at Oxford University on "A Revisionist View of Nixon's Civil Rights." Interest in his book has been driven largely by its subject matter. As the author put it: "Nixon's Civil Rights studies the connection between the most controversial person in American politics and the most important reform movement in recent U.S. history."

Kotlowski, who joined SU's faculty during fall semester 2000, teaches courses on 20th century U.S. history, American politics and Latin American history. He is the author of several articles in scholarly journals and is the editor of The European Union: From Jean Monnet to the Euro (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000).