In 1961, Will Wilson, a former conservative Democratic attorney general of Texas who switched to the Republican Party to support Nixon, was named United States Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
School segregation had been struck down as unconstitutional by a unanimous Supreme Court decision in 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education), but in 1955, the Court ruled that desegregation needs to be accomplished only with "all deliberate speed," [REF] which many Southern states interpreted as an invitation to delay.