2 African American–Latino Relations in the 21st Century
was designed to aid low-income preschool children with social, nutritional,
and psychological supports as they entered the educational world. The
Johnson administration also established the Department of Housing and
Urban Development, a cabinet-level branch that coordinated “slum clear-
ance” and created public housing programs at a time when blacks and La-
tinos predominated the nation’s inner cities and were generally redlined
out of being able to acquire mortgages in more stable neighborhoods. Even
President Johnson’s most ambitious legislation, the Voting Rights Act of
1965, was directly aimed at ending racial discrimination against blacks as
they tried to vote in heavily segregated areas of the U.S. South. Johnson put
these legislative acts in place in response to the virulence of the African
American–led civil rights movement that had taken over the nation. After
having suffered through enslavement, Reconstruction, black codes, and
Jim Crow segregation, blacks in the early 1950s would no longer accept
anything less than equality under the law. The Voting Rights Act was ex-
tended in 1975 to also include assistance to voters who were of an ethnic
minority and faced discrimination because of language barriers. The inclu-
sion of voting rights protections for Hispanics was added, because legisla-
tors understood that Hispanics often faced intimidation and literacy tests
in areas like Arizona, Texas, and certain counties in California and Florida
where their population numbers were strong. (The 1975 extension was also
a boon to Native Americans, Asian Americans, Alaskans, Hawaiians, Puer-
to Ricans, and Mexican Americans who had remained unable to utilize
the vote a decade after the Voting Rights Act became law because voting
registration materials were not printed in a language they could easily
understand.)
Many of the most blatant discriminations used against African Ameri-
cans to keep them from advancing in society were enforced against Latinos
in one way or another as well; at most, there was usually a difference in the
degree of implementation, based on the Hispanic community in question
and based on how they were being received in the larger, white society.
Because these discriminations had become custom for such a long time,
the civil rights organizations that became so vocal in fighting against them
were able to push for—and often received—many new advances beginning
in the 1960s and continuing for the next few decades. Following into office
after Johnson, President Richard M. Nixon was openly hostile to Johnson’s
antipoverty programs; his administration had dismantled Johnson’s Office
of Economic Opportunity by 1973. Nixon contended that encouraging an
expansion of capitalism would be more fitting than creating welfare pro-
grams. His administration created the Office of Minority Business Enter-
prise (subsequently renamed the Minority Business Development Agency,
